Dispatches from Berlin V

The last few Berlin snippets from my iPhone notes folder, accompanied by photos shot on Kodak Gold 400 with my Olympus OM-10. I press send on these memories in Tier 4 London, banned from leaving the UK for potentially months, with a No Deal Brexit possible in just over a week and a catastrophic government deciding our fate for a potential 4 more years. I wish for nothing more than German winter sunlight and localised, expert-led female leadership. Sadly, these requests are not ones that Father Christmas can fulfil in this most cursed of European outposts.

3/12
I emerge unusually early in the morning and the smell of sizzling donor seems to expand and fill the air even faster now that temperatures are below freezing. It’s my final fortnight in this neighbourhood of west Berlin, in a flat that has been a haven (and sometimes a prison). I feel full of melancholy and reminiscences, as though I’ve already left, as though everything I do now is in line to become a fond memory.

4/12
I love taking the U1 on a sunny morning. It soars above the city splashing sunlight into every carriage through Brandenburger Tor speckled windows. I buy a cookie in a cafe in Alexanderplatz and the barista tells me that it is the first biscuit product she has sold today - she smiles with her eyes over her mask, as though this is a secret and important piece of information she’s sharing with me alone. It makes my heart ache for Germany in its many forms.

6/12
I notice small brass plaques on the pavement while walking to the post office. They are engraved with the names of Jewish people deported from the buildings above, and most of them also bear a date of their subsequent murder. I suddenly see these underfoot memorials wherever I am in the city.

7/12
I meet a friend to go and peer at one of Berlin’s stranger monuments to the folly of the third reich: the Heavy Load-Bearing Body (Schwerbelastungskörper), the only pillar standing of what Hitler intended to be the heaviest building in the world. It was abandoned not because of the physically impossible acoustics, the swamp ground Berlin sits on, the possibility of an internal weather system due to its unrealistically huge proportions, but by the fact that it was 1941 and the country had some other stuff going on. It’s surrounded by a strange network of gardens, originally built as allotments to feed the city during WWII but now just a set of privately-owned backyards detached from their owners’ homes, with sheds of all varieties (and several trampolines).

9/12
We find the one Christmas market in Berlin that seems to be open, towards the end of an U-Bahn line in Steglitz. We have too many mulled wines with amaretto shots; I have a bratwurst from a man who coughs a great deal while preparing it, before reassuring me that neither him nor his colleague have Corona (which is somehow even less reassuring). We stand beneath the Bierpinsel, a 47 metre high futuristic tower built in the 70s and listed in 2017, a strange dystopian tree overlooking a main road of high street shops and McDonalds.

10/12
I finish the vitamin D pills that were recommended to me as an utter necessity in a Berlin winter, alongside a hardier coat and a pair of proper snow boots and the recommendation I followed through on. I am escaping the city before the dial swings to -4 - I won’t be back before the temperature climbs again.

11/12
There’s an interchange at Möckernbrücke that I often make while heading east. On the way down to the platform you pass a very old school bakery and a very old school florist stood next to each other. It’s a scene that strikes joy into the heart of any tipsy person on the way to a dinner party/see a friend/back home to their partner. No one has ever frowned at a bunch of flowers and a croissant.

12/12
It’s very cold. Dogs in jumpers trot along wreathed in tiny clouds of their own breath.

13/12
A friend and I go for a walk in the crisp darkness of Mitte, crossing the river with glimpses towards museum island and the Fernsehturm hidden in cloud. We pass a contemporary gallery with a long queue of hipsters outside; it is a Coronavirus testing station. 

15/12
The sunrise follows me onto the U-Bahn and presses itself against the glass of the Hauptbahnhof as I wait for my train towards Amsterdam and then London. Goodbye Berlin, bis bald.