What My Mother Reads in the Morning Paper
I’m not sure exactly when I first started feeling unsafe in Berlin. Whether I read something in the paper or whether my mother called early one morning to tell me someone had been stabbed again—this time at Alexanderplatz. I think it was the phone call.
The city’s tabloids have been running the same greatest hits of urban menace for years: a subway busker who knocked out a passenger’s teeth, neo-Nazi arson attacks, cars burning in residential streets, teenagers stabbing pensioners, football fans nearly strangling each other, cops shooting civilians, hustlers robbing tourists at knifepoint, strangers punching strangers for no observable reason, a woman pepper-spraying a six-year-old child. Rats, obviously. And apparently a rabid bat that bit a man somewhere in the eastern districts.
If you believe the tabloids—and they make it hard not to, eventually—this city is a pressure cooker with the valve welded shut. For a long time I could absorb all of it without any of it really landing. You build tolerance to bad news when you live somewhere long enough. But the sheer volume has started wearing that tolerance down, and the excuses I make for Berlin are becoming harder to hold together.
The longer you stay, the more personal the stories get. In the beginning they’re just headlines. Then a friend mentions he was mugged near Hermannplatz. A colleague tells me someone cornered her near Friedrichstraße late at night. Another friend ends up peripherally caught up in something that becomes a murder investigation in Kreuzberg. And at some point the abstract city-of-chaos narrative stops being abstract.
Everywhere is dangerous in some way—every city of this size. But what unsettles me isn’t the statistical fact of danger, it’s the specific quality of it. Someone opening fire on strangers for no reason anyone can reconstruct. Someone spiking drinks and handing them out at a party. Someone laying into people outside a club because the night didn’t go the way they wanted. It’s the randomness. The absence of any motive you could protect yourself against. What the hell is wrong with you people?
Maybe it’s Berlin’s size—nine hundred square kilometers of city, which statistically multiplies everything. Maybe it’s the drugs, the alcohol, the peculiar emotional flatness that Berliners wear like a badge of honor. Or maybe it’s nothing more than tabloid physics: fear-mongering sells, and even the people who know better absorb enough of it that it starts to feel like lived reality. Bild-Zeitung and its imitators have been dripping this stuff into the water supply for years.
What I’m most afraid of isn’t being mugged myself. It’s the moment when it stops being something that happens to other people—when something touches someone close enough to me that the city’s face changes permanently, and I can no longer get back to seeing it the way I do now. Berlin’s whole appeal, everything that makes it worth the grey winters and the broken infrastructure and the poverty wages, rests on a feeling: that you’re free here, that the city is open and strange and creative and alive in a way that nowhere else quite manages. One bad night, one phone call, and that could calcify into something else forever. I live here partly because I still believe in that feeling. I’m not sure what I’d do if I stopped.