What We See 04: Sonnenallee Onwards

WHAT WE SEE is a new series of feuilletons to be published on Elsewhere, born out of a new project inspired by the work of the Austrian-Jewish writer Joseph Roth. On 11 March 2023, the first WHAT WE SEE event was held in Berlin, and the first four essays to be published were read by their writers at Lettretage, along with a discussion around Joseph Roth and his life and work.

Project Editors: Sanders Isaac Bernstein, Julia Bosson, Paul Scraton & Alexander Wells

By Tom Rollins:

“It’s a grotesque contradiction, a spring evening in this part of town whose grime and greasepaint don’t so much conceal its Levantine-working-class nature as emphasize it”––only it’s winter now, late cretaceous tail-end of it at least, never ends until it does, sudden and too late. 

And anyway, here and now, the contradictions are grotesque but related to different things, different people. 

*

Passing the old petrol station and the Damaskus Konditorei, a newspaperman trying to interview someone on the street about the ethno-political significance of fireworks and who exactly is it that actually runs these shawarma restaurants, I am distracted momentarily by a man in a tarboush, red-velvet and tassel-topped, who is pushing a trolley full of cardboard boxes along the pavement. It is distracting—an orientalist cartoon for the feuilleton emplotted onto a street named after the sun that somehow always feels cold as concrete. 

But despite others’ best attempts, nothing here takes precedence. This is a mid-morning corso of faces, snatches of conversation, wholesale delivery men forever moving boxes into shopfronts. 

As I keep walking, someone is shouting the prices of vegetables, first in Arabic and then in German. Two young lads, arms interlinked, greet an older man, surprised, with a familiarity that is years old, from another place. “Peace be upon you, uncle, how are your things? When did you arrive?” Theirs are warm, knowing smiles that acknowledge the distances required for this conversation to be happening here. 

*

A Syrian storyteller said recently that, here, “even a plate of hummus isn’t like the plate of hummus [one] knows from back home…a bag of za’atar isn’t either.” 

It is, at the same time that it isn’t. Community that is not quite community, common access. Tied together by a loose thread, a street. 

*

Oh by the way, the other day I was reading my copy of Roth while waiting for the M41 opposite Pannierstr. Roth was either in the middle of describing the city as framed by an apartment window-frame or the other way round. I forget. 

I was holding the book in my left hand, my peripheral vision looking down framed by dragon-skin cobblestones and a smashed bottle of Pilsner Urquell. I couldn’t concentrate. 

And then I heard an Irish guy on a date, waiting at the bus stop, saying, “Well yeah…so the reason it’s called Kreuzkölln is because it’s more like Kreuzberg than Neukölln, the restaurants are nicer, even though it’s still in Neukölln.” 

*

Off the bus, further south, the city’s dinosaur bones start to bear themselves, vertebrae-bumps of cast-iron and brickwork still traceable by hand and foot. 

Two bricks thick, the cobbled trace of the Berlin Wall darts off, crosses a road past a Lidl then takes in a really big breath. Shape-shifting through a 19th-century railway arch, it reappears on the other side, and casually walks off down the pavement. 

The Ringbahn passes overhead, and a new addition to the dual carriageway ringroad is being built underneath it. Somehow in between, an A-road leads south toward forgetful commuter towns. The canal is never far away.

Dumper trucks are shipping the sandy, loamy earth away from a construction site for the new road—how many more of them would it take to uncover all that has happened here?—digging beyond the wasteground shrubs, plastic bottles and crisp packets, past the concrete foundations of the Wall and through the underlying strata of abandoned wire-frame spectacles, rotting leather boots and saxophones, Prussian moustaches, novels about aristocratic romances frustrated in corsets and drawing-rooms.

This is what the graves of dinosaurs look like, the evidence of mass dying, bones on bones. 

***

Tom Rollins is a researcher and writer from the north of England, based in Berlin after several years in the Middle East. He's interested in place and displacement, political geography, walking, and Syria. 

What We See 03: Three Journeys

WHAT WE SEE is a new series of feuilletons to be published on Elsewhere, born out of a new project inspired by the work of the Austrian-Jewish writer Joseph Roth. On 11 March 2023, the first WHAT WE SEE event was held in Berlin, and the first four essays to be published were read by their writers at Lettretage, along with a discussion around Joseph Roth and his life and work.

Project Editors: Sanders Isaac Bernstein, Julia Bosson, Paul Scraton & Alexander Wells

By Kate McNaughton:

They are at once the arteries, the nerves, the bowels of a city: rumbling intestinally under streets and buildings, singing with electricity from their overhead lines, ferrying weary commuters and be-suitcased tourists, like so many nutrients, from one organ to another. Métro, tube, U-Bahn, subway, RER, underground, overground, S-Bahn: they have different names, different characters layered over their commonalities of wheels, tracks, sliding doors and beeps announcing departure. The hypertension of the Metropolitan and City line at rush hour, suits crushing in at Waterloo from their leafy suburbs, politely ignoring their unnatural proximity on their long one-stop journey to Bank; a more variegated crowding on the ligne quatre as it rattles through Barbès, the wretched of the Earth from the northern banlieue joining up with clean-cut cross-Channel commuters at Gare du Nord on their way to the centre of Paris.

And Berlin? Berlin is a city with low blood pressure, carriages half-empty most of the time, except on the U8 at 2 am, when its pulse is raised by the party moving between Wedding and Neukölln. Berlin is, perhaps, this:

Senefelder Platz to Leinestraße

I walk down the steps to the U2 at Senefelder Platz; just descended from the train that is now pulling out, a man is walking towards me. He is in his 60s, longish grey hair, sports a maroon velvet suit – and on his shoulder sits a magnificent parrot, its feathers an almost fluorescent pink. They are both proud, flamboyant – Prenzlauerberg is theirs, however many Bioläden and Montessori Kitas may have sprouted here over the past twenty years. I imagine them in the 1990s, the dash of their colour against crumbling grey walls, breaking open doors to empty flats, living free and extravagant in the newly-reunified city, as my train trundles off towards Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz – the U2 being a slow, digestive sort of a line.

Then the finicky change at Alexanderplatz, leaving the wine-red shades of the U2 platform for the pale turquoise of the rest of the station, up and down countless short flights of stairs, along endless corridors cloyed with the scent of industrially-produced sandwiches – until I am on the grubby, nervy U8.

By the time I get off at Leinstraße, I am almost alone on the train, alone on the platform. There is one other person here, though, I realise as I walk towards the Okerstraße exit: a young man is defecating between two of the pillars that line the centre of the platform. I only catch a glimpse: an image in perfect profile of him crouching, his heroin thinness, the paleness of his exposed thighs and buttocks, the dark shape of the turd coming out of him at that very moment, silhouetted against the white tiles of the station. Then my eyes, having registered what they are seeing, avert.

Ringbahn

The Ringbahn, somewhere near Ostkreuz. It is over two years into the pandemic, and we are all well-versed in the requisite measures: FFP2 masks, ventilate wherever possible. Late August, and the weather is deranged: a fat-dropped rainstorm that belongs in the tropics, not here on the continental plain. A young man sits, unmasked, at the end of a long line of seats; the narrow window above him is tilted open, letting in a heavy spray of water which arcs above his head leaving him mostly untouched, but drenching the man – equally maskless – standing in front of him. The standing man reaches over the sitting one’s head, closes the window; the sitting man stands up, opens it again with aggressive finality. The standing man, who is dark-skinned – perhaps Indian, perhaps Pakistani – complains in English about how wet he is getting, closes the window again.

‘I don’t want your fucking Corona breath on me, man.’ The young man, who is white, reopens the window.

But the young man isn’t even wearing a mask?

‘I don’t want to wear a fucking mask. I don’t want your Covid.’

A handful of other passengers get involved: quite a few of them are also getting soaked. ‘Better to get wet than to get Covid,’ points out a woman in a perfectly-fitted FFP2 mask. The young man glowers. The air is sticky, quite possibly with Covid, also with humidity and resentment – it has been a difficult couple of years.

S75

How wonderfully it slices through the heart of the city: Ostbahnhof, Alex, Museumsinsel, over there, the Reichstag, down there, the Spree, and now the glass cathedral of Hauptbahnhof. It is Christmas Eve, and my travelling companions and I are off to have lunch in the Tiergarten, full of cheer and goodwill on this crisp, sunny day.

A trio of young men bursts into our carriage, one carrying a speaker, another a trumpet, all three wearing Father Christmas hats. They greet us all heartily, and launch into an upbeat jazz piece; the trumpetist is amazing, his body twisting, fingers flying over a perfect solo. We are charmed, filled with joy that this pleasant day has been given appropriate musical accompaniment; we donate generously.

When we get off at Tiergarten, the musician lads do too, emerging from further up the train. As we walk along the platform, towards them, one of my group says to me: ‘I’m pretty sure that was just playback.’ No longer performing, the young men’s bodies have slumped, lost their wiry exuberance; they slink past us like foxes. I think of the improbable perfection of the trumpet solo. ‘Yeah, it was definitely playback,’ my companion decides.

I notice, now, how waxy their skin is, how sunken their eyes – how grim and devoid of Yuletide spirit their expressions. I am dismayed not so much by our gullibility and the cheapness of their trick as by our naive assumption that they were sharing in our festive joy. I consider whether to let the moment be ruined, but decide, somewhat guiltily, not to.

The young men, a handful of our coins still jangling in their pockets, get onto another train, as we continue our journey on foot.

***

Kate McNaughton was born and raised in Paris by British parents, which left her culturally confused but usefully multilingual. She now lives in Berlin. Her debut novel HOW I LOSE YOU was published by Doubleday (UK) and Les Escales (France) in 2018. Her next novel will be coming out with Doubleday next year if she manages to get the manuscript to her editor on time.

What We See 02: A Meadow, A Park

Photo Vincent Mosch © ZLB

WHAT WE SEE is a new series of feuilletons to be published on Elsewhere, born out of a new project inspired by the work of the Austrian-Jewish writer Joseph Roth. On 11 March 2023, the first WHAT WE SEE event was held in Berlin, and the first four essays to be published were read by their writers at Lettretage, along with a discussion around Joseph Roth and his life and work.

Project Editors: Sanders Isaac Bernstein, Julia Bosson, Paul Scraton & Alexander Wells

By Daniel Perlman:

The Amerika-Gedenkbibliothek is open on Sundays. SoAGB the program is officially called. There are no librarians, they are forbidden to work on the sabbath, but as long as the library hosts events and activities the doors may remain open to the public.

—

The meadow in front of the library is a pleasant place to sit on Sundays and weekdays alike. Staff set up lawn chairs when the weather is fine, hauling them out of a blue storage container. The Frischluftbibliothek it is officially called. In the late afternoon, if you look up from your book, you might see a gray heron flying past Halleches Tor, over the Landwehrkanal.

—

There is a feather-filled stairwell in Hallesches Tor that leads to the U1/U3. The windows confuse the pigeons and they get trapped and some of them die.

—

A lanky, long-faced fellow in stiff dungarees visits the AGB nearly every summer’s day. He sits on the low stone wall that rings the meadow and releases his pets on the grass, two box turtles, then turns his back and smokes cigarettes. The turtles take off as soon as they touch ground, making a beeline for the east. Most are delighted by the reptiles, but some simply snort and get back to work, as if to reassure themselves that they have better things to do than look at turtles. By dint of some internal turtle timer the man always knows when they’ve strayed too far. He strides forth, snatches them up, and rubs their wagging heads on the way back to his seat. Then he puts them down again; the scene repeats. 

—

Sometimes the man trades out his turtles for a remote controlled car which he crashes at top speed into Doc Martens on the sidewalk. 

—

One Sunday at the Frischluftbibliothek a man with a ponytail and cut off sleeves crawls on the ground beside me. He wears a plastic bag over his hand and scours the earth with a diligence I find disquieting. For over thirty minutes he’s at it, picking up debris. At last he rises. He ties a belt around his waist, a red band around his head. Kung-fu masters are permitted to work on the sabbath, apparently. Two children appear, pushed forward by their parents. Punch! Kick! Roll!  One of the pupils promptly quits. The remaining child wavers. Now, kung-fu master, bring your training to bear! Your dignity hangs in the balance! He adjusts his headband, draws a deep breath. . .but his little apprentice defects. Berlin Berlin/Du heiße Braut, how can you be so cruel?

—

When the wind is right, as are the time and the day of the week, smoke wafts over the meadow. Its source is the park next door. Hundreds of people, friends and family, claim their spots and set up their grill kits. Chairs and fold-out tables, footballs and paddles, charcoal semaver, fleisch and sides. Not a kartoffel in sight. An unkempt man ambles from camp to camp, piling his plate high with kebabs and cutlets, gladly given. He is not partial to vegetables or rice and accepts them, if he must, with a look of undisguised disgust. 

—

I sit in this park on a bench and inch from one end to the other to keep in the oak tree’s shade. A panorama of joy around me. I fill up on it greedily.

—

One evening at Grillfläche Blücherplatz (for so it is officially called, after the Prussian General who sent Napoleon back to Paris from Waterloo) I see a woman walk down the path that bisects the park. Sinewy, tanned, wearing faded Camp David, she pauses to admire a plastic pink scooter and even takes a picture of it. I return to my book. Entschuldigung! Entschuldigung! A girl, no older than nine, runs down the woman who is absconding with scooter in hand. I settle in for a session of that favorite local pastime. Bystanding, it is officially called. 

The girl is slight, patient and polite, but it soon dawns on her that this is no innocent encounter. She puffs out her chest, pluck undaunted, and holds her ground against the stranger until, baby on hip, her mother arrives. Surely, now, the woman will relinquish her ill-gotten prize. But no. She takes out her phone. She displays the picture as evidence that the scooter is her’s by right. So brazen is the claim that mother and daughter are rendered momentarily speechless. But only momentarily. Two aunties arrive, crowding the would-be thief. Her plan was to sell the scooter, I think, but who’s to say there’s not a little one in her life in dire need of a gift? She releases the toy and flees.

—

The aggrieved return to their grillplatz, I to my reading. Not really of course. I continue to spy. I hear them tell their comrades what happened. The little girl chimes in from time to time, emphasizing certain details with wild gesticulations. But an even grander gesture is in order. The entire clan rises as one. Young and old, men and women, they take off marching through the smoke, hot on the trail of their antagonist. Somewhere, the ghost of General Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher tips them an approving nod.

—

Will they call the police if they catch her? Demand an apology? Cuss her out? It is a moot point of course, she is long gone. Sure enough, a minute later the group returns, foiled, triumphant. 

***

Daniel was born and raised in the USA. He earned his MFA in Fiction from New York University. Currently he lives in Reinickendorf where you'll find him shopping at Penny.

What We See 01: Tentstation

Photo: Joerg Heidemann

WHAT WE SEE is a new series of feuilletons to be published on Elsewhere, born out of a new project inspired by the work of the Austrian-Jewish writer Joseph Roth. On 11 March 2023, the first WHAT WE SEE event was held in Berlin, and the first four essays to be published were read by their writers at Lettretage, along with a discussion around Joseph Roth and his life and work.

Project Editors: Sanders Isaac Bernstein, Julia Bosson, Paul Scraton & Alexander Wells

By Jen Metcalf:

Berlin was once a city of empty spaces. Many were voids created by bombed-out buildings from the war, and a wide scar left by the death strip that sliced the city in half for 28 cruel years. I didn’t move to Berlin, didn’t start “building my Berlin” like a Colson-Whitehead New Yorker, until 2006. But even then – decades after the bombs had stopped falling, the Wall had been chipped away, and the city had stitched itself back together – even then, Berlin was a city of vacancies.

The year I arrived, one of them, a former lido, had become a campsite. Tentstation. It occupied a leafy, paused space smack-bang in the centre of Berlin, right by the shiny new main station. Prime real estate given over to four young Germans on a temporary contract that should have ended after one year, but went on for six. 

The lido’s 50-metre pool remained, drained of water, but still blue-painted and with graffiti splashed over the walls. A basketball net had been fixed up in the deep end. The diving blocks and diving boards stood motionless at the edge, waiting for the swimmers to return. Instead, they got young backpackers, local clubbers, and fashion shows. Then the dancers came.

That was us. A patchwork community of lindy hoppers. We were scientists, teachers, office workers, freelancers. We were in our 20s and still new to the city, or in our 70s and part of the fabric since the days of the Wall. Most evenings we could find each other in spaces all over the city and dance the day out of ourselves to Count Basie, Cab Calloway, and all that jazz. A world away from the techno thudding in Berghain or Weekend.

Photo: Joerg Heidemann

Sometime around 2009, we began gathering by the pool on summer Sundays, surrounded by trees heavy with leaves, the needled disco ball of the TV Tower just visible over the top. As we walked down the path from the campsite entrance, the rumble of the city faded, replaced by the DJ’s music weaving through the bushes to meet us. At first just the suggestion of that familiar eight-count beat, the rise and fall of a song. Then hooting trumpets, rolling drums, and Ella singing louder until we were there, at the edge of the pool, its blue floor already part-filled with couples connected in an easy embrace, bouncing and twisting their steps to the beat. One, two, triple-step, one, two, triple-step. On and on in a hundred different variations as the sun set, the fairy lights clicked on, and the night air began to cool our sweat-soaked skin. 

After those evenings I would cycle home, breathless and in flight. Soaring past the Reichstag, through the Brandenburg Gate, and down Unter den Linden. All of Berlin’s proudest buildings and boulevards lit up against the ink-black sky, carrying their centuries of history forward in steadfast, unforgettable bricks and mortar that are familiar even to those who have never visited. 

Tentstation was never going to join those ranks. They are out of its league. And anyway, it was never meant to survive. After six summers, the actual owners of the land were finally ready to send in the diggers. I never saw the construction site, never watched the heavy machinery in action, but I recently found a photograph online. A still life of a death. A white digger is parked by the pool. Its steel teeth have ripped up the grass where the tents once stood, turned it into mounds of dirt and excavated a mess of cables that might be electricity, or maybe they have been brought there by construction workers – ready to tie around a diving board and rip it out of the ground. The pool’s blue, graffitied walls are torn at regular, blocky intervals that suggest the teeth of the digger’s bucket have been gnawing at it. 

When the ground was level and the diggers had retreated, the architects and their team moved in. They built a new, shallower pool, surrounded it with timbered patios, sun loungers, and low-roofed buildings. This is Vabali Spa. It offers Eastern-themed wellness and overnight stays to white-robed, well-off customers. I hear it’s very popular, though I haven’t seen it for myself. This description is entirely thanks to Google Images. A few Christmases ago a client of mine gave me a voucher for a day’s pampering there. It occurs to me now that I must have mislaid it. 

And so the void disappeared. Of course it wasn’t the first, and it was small fry by comparison. This is Berlin. The city is laden with places that were once hollow ghosts of the past, now restored to their former grandeur, or filled with bustling office districts, tourist sites, and shopping zones. Potsdamer Platz, Checkpoint Charlie, Alexanderplatz, and all the buildings we dancers flew past as we cycled home beneath the sky over Berlin. Chances are good that you’ve heard of them all. But I doubt you’ve heard of Tentstation.

Photo: Joerg Heidemann

So many parts of a city are never visible to those who don’t live here – never even visible to all those who do live here. My boyfriend has been a Berliner since the 1990s. He is an honest-to-goodness German, not just a card-carrying one like me. And still he had never heard of Tentstation. Why would he have? He has built a different Berlin to mine, one constructed of people I will never know, places I will never remember. 

And yet all of Berlin’s small, secret places like the pool live on, even once they are gone. Not because they are so solid a war can’t crumble them, or so important that they will be rebuilt. But because we were there, danced among their graffiti, took care not to step backwards into the deep end, found friends and a skill we never knew we had. They survive because – to borrow again from the great Colson Whitehead – “what was there before is more real and solid to us than what is there now”.

***

Jen Metcalf is a copywriter, translator, and editor who arrived in Berlin in 2006 and accidentally made it her home. Having spent most of her adult life working on other people’s texts, she recently decided to start creating her own. Berlin is a recurring feature in her essays, which she uses to try and understand her place in a city that now feels like a partner in a long-term relationship -- with all the joy, disappointment and compromises that entails. 

Photos by Joerg Heidemann, who organised the swing dance evenings at Tentstation (and DJ'd and danced at them, too).

What We See: Joseph Roth and Our Berlin – A call for submissions

On the 11 March 2023 at Lettretage in Berlin, Elsewhere: A Journal of Place is co-hosting an evening of discussion about the writer Joseph Roth and a series of readings inspired by his writing. We are looking for writers in Berlin to join us at the event…

"What I see, what I see. What I see is the day in all its absurdity and triviality. A horse, harnessed to a cab, staring with lowered head into its nose bag, not knowing that horses originally came into the world without cabs; a small boy playing with marbles on the sidewalk. He watches the purposeful bustle of the grownups all around him, and, himself full of the delights of idleness, has no idea that he represents the acme of creation, but instead yearns to be grown up; a policeman who fancies himself as the still point at the center of a whirlpool of activity, and the pillar of authority—enemy to the street, and placed there to supervise it and accepts its tribute in the form of good order."
—"What I See," Joseph Roth

Joseph Roth keenly observed the Berlin of the 1920s in his now-classic feuilletons, short reports on the city scene. How might he have seen Berlin today? We're looking for work that – like Roth – explores life in Berlin today, from the playful to the political. So whether you have read Roth’s pieces on Berlin or not, we are looking for contemporary short nonfiction pieces, scenes and sketches, mini-reportages and place-based essays about Berlin.

Together we will create a portrait of a city.

Need some inspiration? How about writing about one of Berlin’s underexplored curiosities, or unusual approaches to familiar places? Eavesdropping in one of the city’s many watering holes, at the barbershop or in a hotel lobby? A late-night visit to the train station or moving through the city by public transport? A profile of Berlin’s outsiders or newcomers? An early beer as the corner pub opens its doors to the morning sun?

All of these are the starting point for one of Roth’s Berlin stories, and he would certainly find plenty to write about if he were to use them again today.

Your submissions can be previously published or unpublished, but we would need you to be able to read at our event on the 11 March. We would also love to showcase the selected unpublished pieces here on Elsewhere as part of a Joseph Roth / Berlin series.

The details:

Language – English
Word Length – 500-1000 words
Send to – JosephRothToday@gmail.com 
Deadline – 24 February 2023
Eligibility – Must be available to read at Lettretage in Berlin at 7 PM on 11 March 2023

Who are we:

Sanders Isaac Bernstein, born in London, grew up in New Jersey (USA). His writing has appeared, among other places, in newyorker.com, Hypocrite Reader, and The Bad Version, which he founded and edited from 2011-2014. He has written on Joseph Roth for both Majuscule and Slow Travel Berlin. He holds a PhD in Literature from the University of Southern California.   

Julia Bosson is a writer originally from Ojai, California. Her work has appeared in publications such as BOMB, VICE, Guernica, and the Believer, among others. The recipient of grants from the Fulbright Program, DAAD, and the MFJC, she has been awarded fellowships and residencies from LABA Berlin, the Wassaic Project, Vermont Studio Center, Monson Arts, Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild, and the Catwalk Institute. She currently teaches writing at the Cooper Union and resides in Berlin, Germany, where she is at work on a novel about the life and journalism of Joseph Roth.

Paul Scraton was born in the north of England and has lived in Berlin since 2002. He is the editor in chief of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place and the author of a number of books for Influx Press including Ghosts on the Shore: Travels along Germany's Baltic coast (2017) and the novella of the forest In the Pines (2021). He has written for New Statesman on the life and work of Joseph Roth and his next book explores the place of the forest in German cultural identity via a long walk in the Harz mountains, following in the footsteps of Heinrich Heine.

Alexander Wells is a freelance writer and critic from Australia. His reviews and essays—including one on Joseph Roth's urban miniatures—have been published by The Guardian, The Baffler and the European Review of Books among others. He is currently Books Editor for the print monthly Exberliner.