
Some days have passed and I’ve been pondering the rather informal formality of the Berlin’s cultural life. For those not familiar with the Berlin scene, there are currently three different species of bars here: legal, illegal, and semi-legal. As the post-Wall dust has settled, the number of illegal bars has shrunk dramatically from their early nineties ubiquity. Once a cultural frontier town with its own logic of unfolding, the chaos of the post-Wall Berlin scene has precipitated out into an established network of bars which are various shades of these three types: first, legal bars, of course, are the ones we’re most familiar with and escape the watchful eye of the polizei; second, illegal bars are those that happen off the radar, usually in some space left abandoned, neglected, forgotten, or just run-down enough to give off the right kind of aura; and semi-legal bars, which are the more interesting kind, for they remain a sort of netherworld of in-between-ness which provides the social and aesthetic context for so much of what happens in the city’s current scene. Think of the semi-legal bar as a place much like a social club: all one has to do is become a member, either by signing a guest book (like at the Hotel Arkonia on Arkonaplatz) or by gaining a special pass or key (such as those found at Bassy Bar - pictured above - or White Trash). In each case, what this means is that if the police come, for whatever reason (typically a place is too noisy - which is not unexpected as many of these places are in residential areas), the owner of said bar can simply claim that these people are members (who themselves might be asked to provide proof that they’re members). The police retreat on their merry way.
What strikes me about these places, or rather, what is so unremarkable about them, is that the city tolerates them. City administrators understand what these bars and clubs do for Berlin’s cultural economy: creating and maintaining a circulatory system which keeps it alive (pardon the body metaphor; it’s the only one I had, ahem, at hand). The result is that for the most part they’re left alone, allowed to furtively do their work in the city’s underground (and this can be meant literally). It remains an irrepressible, vibrant infrastructure that keeps things relatively fresh here in Berlin.
Socially, these semi-legal bars have the air of exclusivity about them, but as Maffesoli reminds us, “exclusivity does not mean exclusion.” Instead, this is the stylized response salvaged out of the wreckage that was Berlin’s past and present, and as such, various mechanisms of social inclusivity/exclusivity have become the norm here, not out of some desire to create social divisiveness, but as a way to reconstitute a city out of fragments, through a piecemeal web of networks and nodes made up of bars, galleries, clubs, etc., in order to make the city matter and matter city again. Berlin remains an open city in this sense, playful and hardly serious. Simmel’s comments on turn-of-the-last-century Berlin are worth recalling again, but their ring carries a different tone today: “A terrible seriousness will… replace this gleaming intoxication.” He said this just prior to WWI, seeing in pre-War Berlin a kind of irreverence that anticipated what would happen fifteen years hence. The city is serious business he suggests, and we should treat it as such. But then the ur-moment of quashing frivolity in Berlin would soon enough assert itself.
So where does that leave us? Where is the soothsayer now? We’re on the other side of that historical moment and so much has happened which is burdened with its own inexorable weight. In the city of fragments, the fragmented city (newly reconstituted as a city of bits, one might say), there is a sense of levity which does and doesn’t contend with these problems, let alone allow their easy resolution. In part, that has to do with the fact that so many people have descended on Berlin from elsewhere, so their image of the city and their lived experience often don’t jive with the past, or jive in ways which make life in Berlin a complex series of symbolic and existential encounters which are often marked by a kind of lightness by virtue of they’re not being “from here.” They deal with the contradiction as part of what makes Berlin meaningful. Stephen Barber:
The European city has never possessed unity, and now the multiplicity of voices passing between the transforming city and the transforming individual creates an utter fragmentation. This aggravated sense of dissolution in upheaval is a source of anxiety, an upending of visual identity: but it also incites the exhilaration that is integral to a moment of reconstitution from zero, to a new way of working a sensation into the matter of the city.
But the ways of reviving the hulking, moribund mass which was post-War/Wand/Wende Berlin have been complex, arcane and terribly fraught. A city economically depressed, socially and ideologically divided, its uneven halves yoked together even more unevenly, it has become the locus of some of the most exciting music and culture in Europe at the moment. It is a artistic Weldtstadt for a number of creative and entrepreneurial types. They’ve made the most of pallid Berlin over the past fifteen years and it is almost giddy with activity, musical and otherwise, the city sensate.
Shift your sensory register for a moment, from the image of a city full of fun and exhilaration to something which exudes a bit more menace, a reminder that Berlin has no “zero,” the awareness that nullifying the past remains an impossible project. A brief story: The other night I paused as I heard laughter echoing off the walls of Prenzlauerberg’s pastel-hued façades. I thought briefly of R. Murray Schafer and his anti-urban take on the city’s soundscape: we’ve become alienated from our own bodies now, he said, where we hardly hear our one own footsteps in the city. On the contrary: I would argue that this is far from being the case. Besides being an obvious cinematic trope, the sound of a single pair of footsteps remains one of the most evocative sounds of the city for me. I heard it many times, late at night, on some of Helsinki’s streets, where you might be the only person on a dark street (the streets of Helsinki, and more so Berlin, seem so much darker than those in North America), or someone else may be telegraphing their approach a hundred metres down the road. In either case, the sound remains forever urban for me, both haunting and deeply comforting. It puts the scale of the city, the ratio of body to building, into (audible) perspective. By contrast, this echoing laughter caught me off guard and called to mind another kind of scale and perspective. There was something particularly creepy about its tone, a hint of mania that rose above and beyond the sidewalk, and for a moment I was transported back to another time and reminded that this same sort of sound was part of another, more horrific, soundscape in Berlin’s past.
It was only a moment, but one hardly forgets that Berlin remains a city of ghosts and angels.
I should note that I’m writing this during Bread and Butter, Berlin’s premier fashion week, when areas like Mitte (and the newly hot Wedding) are overrun with pretty boys and girls. What sounds would best suit this mood? Well, I’ve found yet another trashy bit of Berlin-flavoured music, this time in the form of a somewhat tepid number by R&D (from Birmingham, England, from what I can tell). “Berlin,” from 1984, is an utterly frivolous take on East/West relations and with lyrics like “In Berlin/Only the birds fly free” and “But if only I could reach/Over this wall and shake hands” had as little to do with the coming down of the wall as that Americanische Engel, Herr Hasselhof. It’s got a bit of a low-fi ELO feel, which is somewhat disarming and manages to almost salvage the song’s sentiment. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. Listen and then delete.
And for a taste of Helsinki’s mean streets, I also give you Helena Siltala and “Ranskalaiset Korot,” a nice light jazzy number, which conjures up images of a slinky Finnish city. I saw a moving karaoke version of this while en route to Stockholm from Finland last year. Moving because it was a cruise ship; the original stands, or rather, walks alone.
Iso G
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