The City That Already Died
Five years in Berlin. I’ve done everything this city had to offer without quite destroying myself in the process. I drifted through the Mauerpark flea market on Sunday mornings in bright autumn light, irritated by the tourists while feeling exactly like one myself. I moved through clubs and strangers’ beds on drugs we’d all shared in someone’s living room beforehand, and watched the sun come up from a swing somewhere, which felt profound at the time and embarrassing in memory. I met extraordinary people, kissed them, lost them.
None of it—not the stories, not the encounters, not the sheer accumulated texture of five years in this enormous city—quite cancels the feeling I get now when I walk down a packed Kastanienallee, or brush past the blank-faced dancers at the Chalet deep in an alcohol haze, or breathe in the particular smell of the U-Bahn at midnight. The feeling that Berlin hasn’t changed at all in five years. That the city and its people have been standing perfectly still all along, possibly already dead and simply not informed of it yet.
It doesn’t matter how much construction goes up along the Spree, how many clubs close and reopen somewhere else under a different name, how many art exhibitions and pop-up stores and vegan restaurants and startup clones and graffiti walls and MacBook cafés get visited, photographed, and forgotten. Berlin is suffering from a frozen creativity, kept in deep sleep by the very people who are supposed to generate it. Freedom redefined as permanence. Society redefined as elite. Nothing moves.
Everywhere I go I see the same faces, the same characters distributed across different bodies, hear the same stories recycled through different mouths. I’m trapped in a universe that preaches transformation while thirsting for stagnation—populated by people who once arrived as bold individuals, drawn to what was supposed to be a boiling metropolis, and couldn’t resist the leveling pressure. I watched it happen to person after person and couldn’t stop it. I shouted at them and they stared back in silence.
It’s not the coke or the beer or the sex or the music that drains you here. It’s the breathless ruins of a place that has had so much done to it, for so long, that it’s simply tired now. Sluggish. Quiet. Through the tall Altbau apartments, past the painted rubble, down the long avenues and into the trembling night bunkers—your footsteps echo, your words echo, your shouts echo, and die at the next corner, unheard by a collective that has been rotting into copies of itself for years.
Not a day passed when I didn’t defend this city to someone, praise it for its tolerance and its possibilities, love it for what it gave my mind and body that nowhere else could have. But I’ve long since seen through it. I watch its attempts to pull me back into its warm depths and smile tiredly and wave them off. Five years in Berlin. And I can feel that it’s time to start saying goodbye. Possibly for good.