Berlin, Go Fuck Yourself
I had every intention of writing something epic. Comprehensive, devastatingly reflective, critically precise—the definitive final word on the city, the piece that would make every song about Berlin sound like a grocery list and every poem look like a rough draft. I was going to end Berlin in print.
Instead I’m lying sick in a friend’s bed, casting around for the right words, and the only thought that arrives with any clarity is this: if I have to read one more epic, comprehensive, devastatingly reflective piece about Berlin, I will walk to the TV Tower and vomit directly on it. So let me just say it plainly—Berlin, go fuck yourself.
Anyone who’s been reading this journal for longer than two weeks has already watched the last five years in real time. The wrecked relationships, the 4am walks through rain-soaked streets that somehow ended in rainbows, the recognitions that only come at the worst possible hours. I wrung this city out completely and I’m grateful for all of it—the people, the hours, the particular quality of light at dawn on Warschauer Brücke when you haven’t slept and don’t mind.
What I understood too late was that none of us ever found the real Berlin. We didn’t want to. We lived inside a bubble—hipster flea markets, fashion weeks, after-parties bleeding into mornings, agency people, coke toilets. A world kept alive entirely by transplants who arrived from somewhere else and built their own private vision of the city: something curated and gleaming, constructed in the middle of the dog shit and the construction sites and the currywurst stands. MacBook owners on Tuesday afternoons on the terrace at Sankt Oberholz, assembling social networks that would be dead in three years, calling it building something.
Nothing any of us did there meant anything to the city itself. None of it touched the actual history of the place—the divided city, the Wall, the long strange decades of being Europe’s open wound. We will enter Berlin’s annals as locusts: people who colonized minimalist loft offices with their iPhones, declared Club Mate a tap-water replacement, and poured their best hours into projects that had neither lasting value nor any honest claim to originality. Social media ate our ideals. We let it happen cheerfully.
Most of the people I started the Berlin adventure with are already gone. Disappeared to other cities, burned out, never found themselves in "poor but sexy." Others dissolved into the Kreuzberg bubble and became locals—found their happiness in Altbau apartments and Spätis, let the city win. I stood there having seen all of it and understood all of it and found myself bored by all of it.
I fucked redheaded Berliners into the new year and blond music bloggers through Plattenbau corridors. I learned to navigate the city’s döner and köfte spots by the precise calibration of my gag reflex. I got into a fight with drunk Nazis at Ostbahnhof. Nobody can take away the praying and the pulling and the shouting and the smiling and the sunrises. But the party ended before I noticed, and the city has felt hollow ever since.
I’m jealous sometimes of the ones who found their perfect thing here—who arrived and fought the city and eventually let it take them, who got swallowed and liked what they became. I tried. This dirty, unholy place never managed to own me. The fascination faded into something dull and ordinary. It’s done between us.
So I walked out of my apartment laughing, didn’t look back. I’ll miss the people who kept their heads—who’ll find their own way wherever they end up. And I know this goodbye isn’t permanent. Maybe I come back with different eyes. Stranger things have happened.
My thoughts cut off when an email lands. An airline reminder: four days until departure. Have I thought of everything? For my flight from Berlin to Tokyo. And I sit there, free, and I’m smiling—because I didn’t write the epic, comprehensive, devastatingly reflective piece about Berlin after all.