The Tumblr That Had Berlin’s Number
There’s a specific kind of exhaustion that comes from living in Berlin and watching another wave of wide-eyed transplants arrive, each one convinced the city has been saving something just for them. The Tumblr blog When You Really Live In Berlin was, for a few weeks in early 2013, the most accurate document of that dynamic I’d ever seen—and I couldn’t get through more than three posts without laughing so hard I had to close the laptop.
The format was almost insultingly simple: a phrase describing a recognizable expat scenario, paired with a reaction GIF from somewhere in internet memory. The combination landed like a precision instrument. "When an American who failed in town thinks he is leaving the city with style." "What tourists expect when they go to Berghain." "When your roommate tells you he’s going to stop raving for a while." Each one a small surgical strike against the mythology of the city and everyone performing their version of it.
What made it work was the specificity. You had to have been there—or at least adjacent to there—to feel it land correctly. Bread & Butter, Berlin’s twice-yearly streetwear trade show, simultaneously glamorous and completely self-important. Fusion Festival, the annual countercultural campout out in Brandenburg after which everyone returns looking approximately destroyed. Berghain, the techno club so legendary that the queue outside has become its own cultural genre. The blog knew these things and used them like knives.
A friend named Sara found it and sent it around, which meant it went through roughly ninety billion other transplants on Twitter and Facebook within about forty-eight hours. By that point whoever was running it seemed to be in some kind of creative fever, posting multiple times a day. The one that finished me: "When someone starts a Tumblr blog about Berlin." The GIF was exactly right. I won’t describe it. The point was the recursion—a blog about the phenomenon of people starting blogs about Berlin. The city as ouroboros, eating its own tail with complete self-satisfaction.
Berlin gets hate-loved constantly. Everyone who lives there complains; everyone who leaves misses it in ways that are embarrassing to admit. What this blog understood was that the city’s most ridiculous quality is how seriously everyone takes their own version of it—the techno crowd, the fashion people, the artists, the startup contingent, each convinced their Berlin is the real one. A perfectly chosen reaction GIF cuts through that faster than any essay. And then the GIF loops, and loops, and loops.