When You Really Live in Berlin

I wasted an afternoon on this Tumblr account because every single post is perfectly calibrated. It’s one of those blogs where someone pairs a Berlin stereotype with a reaction GIF, and the combination is so exact that you can’t look away. I was making these horrible wheezing sounds and everyone around me was genuinely concerned.

This Tumblr, called When You Really Live In Berlin, is basically a catalog of everyone who moved to the city and thought they were about to become a different person. Someone showed it to me, though I’m pretty sure it was everywhere on Facebook and Twitter at some point—one of those things that makes the rounds because it’s too specific not to. The format is stupid simple: a sentence about a very particular Berlin scenario, then a GIF that captures exactly how that moment feels.

Most of it is about transplants and the gap between who you think you’re going to be when you move there and who you actually turn out to be. There’s one about Americans who fucked up in their home country and are trying to leave Berlin with at least some dignity intact. Another about people who won’t stop talking about Bread & Butter like it fundamentally changed them. Your roommate announcing he’s done with raving, which will last until next weekend. The chasm between what tourists imagine Berghain will be and what they actually find. That feeling when you come home from Fusion completely destroyed. Your girlfriend starting a fashion blog. The incoherent things people say to each other at six in the morning in some basement bar when they’ve been awake for two days.

The reason it works is because Berlin is so fertile ground for this kind of thing. The city operates on a pretty thin myth—reinvention, freedom, being an artist or a raver or a photographer or whatever. People show up thinking they’re going to become someone, and the city has a way of making that fantasy very visible, very quickly. This blog just documents that without being cruel about it. It’s just observing what’s actually there.

I can still feel myself wanting to go back and read the whole thing again.