Built Close to the Concrete
She took the call from a beach—sun, palm trees, turquoise water, a personal sunscreen experiment in progress. Palina Rojinski is a German-Russian presenter and DJ who grew up in Berlin and has since made the city her professional subject: its chaos filtered through her travel show Offline, its nightlife through the late-night program Circus HalliGalli, her own look doing something effortless that’s impossible to explain to anyone who hasn’t seen it. Born in St. Petersburg, moved to Berlin as a child, and she’ll tell you that growing up there made her immune to it.
If you grow up in Berlin, the risk of being overwhelmed by what’s on offer isn’t so great,
she said. I always had an inner compass that told me how much of what was good for me—and what wasn’t.
She calls it being nah am Beton—built close to the concrete—which is the Berliner way of saying tough without saying tough. Whether that’s genuine wisdom or just the benefit of retrospect, it has the texture of something hard-won.
For Offline, the show deposited her in places remote enough that cab availability after 9pm was a serious open question. She knows what snake soup tastes like. She cuddled a two-meter iguana last week and counted it as recent evidence of courage. She swam with a dolphin in Mexico—not scheduled, just there in the water with her. The version of travel she wants is the kind where you genuinely don’t know how you’re getting home, where you eat something accidentally brutal, where getting comfortable means you’ve already failed.
When she’s not traveling she’s still in Berlin—walking the neighborhood, dinner with friends, the odd game of pinball. She watches a lot of TV; her current recommendation was Modern Family, specifically that Manny is the best character on the show. She’s not wrong. At the latest when her fingers start twitching from not having DJed in too long, she said, that finally drives her out the door again.
On Pegida—the anti-immigrant marching movement that was dominating German headlines that winter—she was clear without performing it. She’s a migrant’s daughter, grew up in one of Europe’s most genuinely diverse cities, and found it baffling and depressing that people were letting vague unnamed anxiety override actual knowledge. I find it terrible that many people who march with Pegida let themselves be guided by a diffuse fear instead of knowing the facts,
she said. Not a controversial position. But said without hedging, which in that climate was its own thing.
I asked what kept her going. My motor is love,
she said, no irony. I love what I do, and as long as that’s the case, I have no fear of the future.
It should sound like an Instagram caption. Somehow it doesn’t.