When Berlin Got Scary

I’m not sure exactly how I first picked up on the idea that Berlin was getting more violent. Maybe I read it in the paper, or maybe my mother called early one morning to tell me someone had been stabbed again—this time at Alexanderplatz. Probably the latter.

According to the tabloids, the city is a pressure cooker full of danger. Thugs on the U-Bahn, far-right attacks, burned-out cars, violent kids, brutal football fans, muggings at night, drunk assaults, hustlers and scammers on every corner. If you believed the headlines, Berlin was a madhouse where people die for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I used to brush past these stories pretty easily. But the weight of them starts to accumulate, and the excuses get harder to make.

The longer you stay here, the more stories you hear. In the beginning you take them as local color. But then friends start telling you about being mugged at Hermannplatz, or nearly assaulted at Friedrichstrasse, or getting pulled into something darker in Kreuzberg. Eventually you’re asking yourself: What am I doing here?

Sure, everywhere is dangerous in some way. But what gets to me isn’t that it’s dangerous—it’s why. When some random person opens fire on strangers with no warning, or slips knockout drops into someone’s drink, or starts beating the shit out of drunk people at a party, I can’t help thinking: What the fuck is wrong with you?

Is it the size of the city, the sprawl of it making you more likely to cross paths with someone unraveling? The drugs, the alcohol, the freedom, the emotional coldness of the place? Or is it just that the tabloids make money off fear, and that fear slowly gets into your head anyway, no matter how cynical you think you are?

You feel safe until something happens to you or someone close to you. Then the whole thing crumbles—the art, the music, the possibility of it all. And I realize that’s exactly what I’ve been afraid of all along. Not the violence itself, but the moment when the city stops being what it promised.