to do the same.
I have now been drinking slowly but steadily for eight hours. Some things simply are not possible at that point, at least for me, and one of them is calling up any of my poems to memory (a real poet’s memory, of course, would only be turned on by drinking ... Will there ever be a time, I think, when you won’t feel like a poser). Cami pats me on the head and looks me in the eye. I see a lot of white, she says. I’m being told my age. At some point the two of them disappear down a staircase. My offer of shelter no doubt having looked like a proposition, they have properly ditched me. I sit and study the bartender as he tries with some difficulty to light short candles set in glass that he then haphazardly slides along the bar. Berliners love candles, a fetching impulse in a dark city. A sign on corrugated cardboard cut from a box is sloppily taped to the wall. “How to Survive Kreuzberg,” it reads. Clocking in at 3 am, one suggestion stands out, “Don’t open a map.”
Eric of the bright eyes and broad smile has walked in, but I can’t bear another political entanglement, I’m fried. I go to say goodbye. You going? He gives me an enormous bear hug. I will look you up on Facebook, he shouts across the two-inch chasm between us. A taxi and a bike ride later, I walk into my Scheunenviertel flat and stand at the window for a while, staring blankly at the shadowed bulk of the new CIA in Berlin.
WHERE WERE THE REFUGEES?
Sunday, October 4, 2015
Severe hangover. Head throb pushes me out of bed. I move through the morning routine and get out the door to find a strong Schwarzer Kaffee at Karaca, my local joint on Chauseestrasse. The guys who own and run the place, four or five of them, are always hanging out and kibitzing. The café is like a business-cum-frat house for them; it draws people in. I get my coffee zum Mitnehmen (to go), and welcome the fresh air. Beautiful fall morning in Berlin to look for a shop that can remove my head and replace it with a pumpkin. Passing the Brecht Hause, I duck into the adjacent park to find a bench and mentally lick my brain.
Within about 30 seconds I realize I’ve wandered into a cemetery. Empty of pedestrians, the only ones here are prone. The sound of my feet on the small gravel paths is a kind of acoustic cereal for my ears, oddly soothing. I find Brecht’s grave, then the stones for Hegel, Fichte, Heinrich Mann, Elisabeth Hauptmann, Paul Dessau, Hans Eiler, Ruth Berlau ... I’ve unwittingly dropped into the Friedhof of the Dorotheenstädtischen Gemeinde on Chauseestrasse, probably the most celebrated cemetery in Berlin. I find a stone bench.
Where were the refugees; who are they; what stories do they have to tell, what songs and poems do they carry with them in memory; what nightmares; what dreams, what hopes, what sorrows. To capture the force of their movement, I only ever hear one metaphor used, that of water—a flowing, a stream, a wave, a tide, a torrent; water moving so fast and hard it’s impossible to stop and difficult to control. And new moving water has no name; it is merely the sum of its parts, anonymous, ahistorical, and once in motion inexorable. My companions here in this plot devoted themselves to thinking about the force of history and the emblematic lives that expressed it, added to it. What was there to add? God, my head hurt. So I sit there a while, very still, in the sun, with the famous German dead.
I WAS BORN IN A REFUGEE CAMP
Monday, October 5, 2015
A typical Berlin night, my friend Susanne says with a short laugh when I tell her about my escapade. But we don’t do it anymore—we are too much in our routines, we make arrangements now to meet each other at precise times. So, she adds, nothing ever happens. We are on our way down to the Landesamt für Gesundheit und Soziales (Lageso), the first place of registration in Berlin for all the refugees; in a way we are retracing the route I had taken from Tegel International through Moabit the previous week. It’s another beautiful fall day in Berlin, leaves starting to turn, quite warm in the sun, a little cool in the shade. As we walk up Kirchstrasse, just a few blocks from the Lageso complex of buildings, midday diners sit at sidewalk tables eating Vietnamese, Italian, or traditional German fare, such as Maultaschen (a kind of filled dumpling, like ravioli, a specialty of the south). Cafés are full, people are buying books in a local store. It’s difficult to imagine what we will find at Lageso given the happy promenade here. We try cutting through a construction site and are promptly scolded by a hardhat perched on cinder, drinking from a thermos. As we turn round a fenced-off corner, Susanne says, you know, I was born in a refugee camp. What? Ja, she say, (the vowel sound floats away like a bubble), I was born in a refugee camp.
Susanne Gerber, a Berlin-based artist, was born in 1949. Her mother was German, her father Czech; but his German family roots made him one of a minority in Czechoslavakia. It was therefore not a stretch, with the advent of World War II, for him to join Germany’s mobilization. He made his way into the SS. After the war, many Germans outside of Germany were being sentenced to prison; Susanne’s parents were forced to flee Czechoslovakia. They reentered Germany as refugees and settled into a camp in Kornwestheim, near Stuttgart. Susanne was too young to develop many memories stronger than impressions; but she remembers the men who, with no work, whittled away the time talking, smoking, and playing chess. The idle talking was an important influence on her, as the men, confronted with the vast emptiness of idle hours, often talked to little Susanne on the way to losing themselves in the wandering exchanges of those with too much time on their hands. She thereby learned to speak early. The general feeling she had in the camp was of not being quite properly looked after; she was often left on her own. Remarkably, she says, in Stuttgart she never felt marginalized as a refugee; she never internalized that perspective herself. But being a refugee is a strong part of my identity, she says, being a stranger in the world is completely clear to me. When later I saw Büchner’s Woyzeck, or the first production of Peter Weiss’ Marat/Sade, she continues, I found myself in there, the origins of my story. I still feel that I am never a local person, but someone from everywhere, from somewhere else.
Once we hit Turmstrasse, the Lageso street, the scene changes. Bourgeois diners and shoppers disappear, replaced by bands of four to six single men, clearly refugees by their worn dress and stressed postures, walking down the street talking to each other with urgency, or on their phones. Refugee families with small children in strollers pass by. Everyone’s eyes are focused somewhere in the distance, everyone’s gait has an urban quickness and conveys a 360-degree alertness. There is nothing but immediate purpose, immediate need. We know we are getting closer. Soon low-price stores disappear, and set back from the street, behind a set of fences, two very large white convention type tents, with separate free-standing toilet facilities between them, provide shelter in bad weather. They stand with the same proximity to the sidewalk as any storefront and abut the first set of official buildings. These buildings along the street mark the beginning of the Lageso complex; soon we enter its mouth with dozens of others. Buildings shadow us on both sides of a small avenue into the opening of the courtyard belly. In this Lageso courtyard, we pass a food tent in which volunteers are ladling hot minestrone soup and handing out Brötchen. Nearby, an elderly volunteer wearing plastic gloves spryly fills plastic cups with water from from the taps on a cooler cabinet. Boys climb on top of a flat-roofed shed next to a Röntgenmobil (for x-rays) and a truck from the Zentrum für Tuberkulosekranke parked beneath chestnut trees. The food tent and trucks stand opposite a set of official buildings, further defining the waiting area. At one end, hundreds of people, mostly men, stand in a mass that grows denser towards the front, where a digital console on a tall pole displays a set of nine brightly lit amber numbers. Women and children sit on blankets to the side, eating, sleeping. Children draw or play a game their parents grabbed for them in quick preparation to flee. A boy with a cane makes his painstaking way along the perimeter. Another passes in the opposite direction in a wheelchair. A jacketed man in his thirties sits sleeping in a bassinet stroller, his legs splayed on either side, heels digging in to keep him propped up—even in a dead sleep his body bound in effort. Some wear hospital face masks. A few guys in their twenties stand around an iPad, laughing and knocking each other’s shoulders. Boys chase each other through a slalom course of standing adults, kick soccer
