My street in Berlin, Fehrbelliner Straße, runs for the best part of a kilometer between Anklamer Straße at the top and Schönhauser Allee at the bottom. It is pronounced Fairbulleener Straw-suh, as if it was the street of fair Berliners, but alas this is not an accurate literal translation. There are some fine buildings, their windows adorned with columns and the various plaster accoutrements of old Europe — curlicues, bearded or wreathed heads, flowers — but there are more plain facades, although often in cheery sherbert shades. A few of the dun-colored, pebble dash boxes that scream East Berlin also remain, as does graffiti. I love the doors the most, especially the enormous double ones that open onto interior courtyards and close with a solid thunk.
Every weekday I walk the length of it twice, from home on one end to work on the other and back again. I also eat, drink, and shop on it. It is a far cry from the Cotswolds, but Fehrbelliner Straße is a village in its own way.
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At the top end, half a block from our apartment and the on part of the street we frequent least, there is always an armed policeman standing guard outside one of the buildings. When we first moved in I approached him and asked in my most polite inquisitive voice if this was a police station.
“No,” the policeman answered and looked away, making it clear that no explanation for his presence would be offered.
Later at work a German colleague who lives nearby explained to me that the building was a Jewish school. I was taken aback that a school would have an armed police presence, but he explained that this was standard practice for Jewish schools and synagogues. I asked if there were specific threats, to which he replied, “No, but given our history it would just be really bad if something happened.”
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As far away from our flat as the Jewish school but in the opposite direction is Remshardt. It is the atelier of a wedding dressmaker, a man who sometimes sits at his desk drawing with his African Grey parrot perched on his shoulder. Each week he changes the dress featured in the window, lately favoring flowing Grecian things that remind me of Grace Kelly’s poolside cover-up in High Society. My favorite, though, was a bulbous heap of ivory taffeta adorned with an outsize beetle brooch.
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On the corner, at the busy intersection with Veteranstraße, is Weinerei Forum, known around my house simply as Corner Wine Bar. (Due to husband’s limited memory, most things around our house have a different, generic sounding shorthand, like “Frenchie” for Café Fleury.) I’ve written about Corner Wine Bar before here; suffice to say it continues to be an extension of our living room, as does the pizzeria, La Foccaceria, across the street.
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A little further down is ZweiTrad, a trio of bicycling boutiques that dominate the block. Berlin is a bicycle-crazy city, and this place is often as busy as a bustling bistro on a Saturday. This is where I bought my beloved Pashley from the elegant owner. He wears wire-rimmed specs and always has a scarf knotted around his throat, a Frenchman trapped in a German’s body. There is some small irony in my acquisition of the Pashley in Berlin given it was made in Stratford-upon-Avon, about forty miles north of our Cotswold town. But the Germans favor Dutch bikes with annoying pedal brakes, and so I reckon I had no choice but to go for the British-built beauty.
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Just beyond the cycle shop is Schwarze Pumpe (the black pump). It is one of the first places we ate dinner in our neighborhood and we continue to be regular guests for the käsespätzle and lack of pretension.~
This is our grocery store, Kaiser’s. I imagine I will leave Berlin without ever understanding why their logo looks like a genie’s lantern.
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Beyond the playground, two of the best coffee shops in Berlin have clustered together. Kristiania Espressobar, owned by a Norwegian, and Antipodes, owned by a couple from Wellington. The inside of Kristiania looks a little like a mid-century doctor’s waiting room, but on balance I favor Antipodes because of the passion fruit yo yos, an Oreo for grown-ups.
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Almost opposite the coffee cluster is the site of a former Jewish school. I’ve written about it before too, a reminder of a very sad chapter in Germany’s history. It is marked out by a subtle plexiglass plaque rather than a policeman; the only thing left to guard is the memory of the children and their teachers.
Golden Lizzie. She overlooks a roundabout in the Tiergarten in Berlin and is possibly the only thing husband loves about this city. She also features in the opening scene of Wings of Desire, an angel resting on her shoulder eavesdropping on the humans below.
Yesterday I was minding my own business, reading the paper and eating a chicken schwarma at a falafel joint on Torstraße when in walked an angel of sorts. He was young and looked tired, like an overworked angel might. He was dressed in a leopard print Addidas jacket with what appeared to be three carefully hand-cut vertical vents in the back, a pair of gray, abstract patterned, mock-camoflauge trousers, and white leather high tops…with wings: big, chunky, leather wings protruding off his ankles. I had just worked up the courage to ask him if I could take his photo when he slipped out the door, presumably to attend to his angelic duties.
Say cheese! This cheery Checkpoint Charlie family portrait was the crowning glory of my entry—a slideshow on the Berlin Wall—in the 1982 Lee County Media Show. Despite the unfair advantage of my on-location shots of the Wall, some kid who was actually talented and had created a claymation Super 8 film won.
The Checkpoint Charlie snap comes courtesy of a disk of images my dad just mailed me. They are all from our Berlin trip in the summer of ’82, and there are some interesting comparisons with how things look now. The Wall is of course gone—in fact it’s pretty hard to find any sign of it except for a few pieces still on display at Potsdamer Platz and the double-row of cobblestones that traces its route in some parts of the city (Berliners, understandably, wanted it this way).
The Reichstag looks shockingly drab pre-Norman Foster’s glass dome.
And the Wall and watchtower-lined Spree gives new meaning to Berliners’ current fondness for pop-up riverside beach clubs. Then…
and now…
But if I’m honest, my favorite part of looking at these pictures is admiring the fashions my family was wearing at the time. My mom is rocking a pair of oversized transluscent-framed sunglasses, my dad has a whiff of Burt Reynolds about him, and my sister and I are perpetually dressed in Izod shirts with high-waisted jeans. My sister also favors a lavender satin bomber jacket with ice cream cone pin that I remember coveting. It was much cooler than the stupid cardigans my mother bought for me. Here are the best of those pics.
The Summer 2011 issue of ExBerliner features “Berlin’s most original tours.” While the Trabi Safari sounds fun—an hour behind the wheel of a Trabant, East Germany’s very inadequate answer to the Volkswagen—I’m pretty sure husband and I have this tour guide thing down pat after two consecutive weekends of hosting guests here in Berlin. The weather was abominable for the first—coldest day in July on record and wet to boot—and blazing sunshine for the second. Neither stopped us from dragging our visitors out on bicycles, the transportation method of choice here in Berlin. By now my Pashley has traversed every square inch of path in the Tiergarten and can practically lock itself up outside Der Schleusenkrug biergarten (also, coincidentally, a stop on the Fat Tire Bike Tour). It also knows to slow down when it passes a spot favored by Berlin’s band of nude sunbathers. My prudish gawking over the weekend prompted one FKKer—yep, they have an acronym which comes from a name that translates into Free Body Culture—to wave at my guests and me from his spot on the lawn. I wish I would have waved back, but instead I just bashfully pedaled away.
I have also been hungover in the Bauhaus Archive (not, as one guest pointed out with some disappointment, the Bauhaus, which is in nearby Dessau), climbed the Norman Foster dome atop the Reichstag, cruised the Spree, forced currywurst on our unsuspecting guests, and visited the DDR Museum and inhaled its whiff of Ostalgia, i.e., snapped a tasteless picture of husband posing in situ on the loo in the authentic recreation of a DDR-era flat. For eating and drinking we mostly stuck to our little enclave on the border of Mitte and Prenzlauerberg, but there was one new discovery along the way. Clärchens Ballhaus is on Auguststraße, a street filled with art galleries, which along with its squatter-chic looking courtyard is why I assumed it was some sort of epicenter of boho. As the name would imply it turned out to be a ballroom, dating all the way back to 1913 and hosting a tea dance that very afternoon. We watched the dancers for awhile and admired the lost-in-time interior, which looked something like the lovechild of the Kibbitz Room and the Derby, then enjoyed a drink in the garden.
In the end we deposited our guests into the charmless arms of Schönefeld Airport in various states—suffering from a cold, hungover, saddle sore, and/or satiated. At least we can say none left Berlin unchanged.
When we first moved to Berlin I remember another ex-pat telling us he liked living here because it was “living history.” He was referring to the relatively recent history of the fall of the Berlin Wall and German reunification, and indeed in our former East Berlin neighborhood there is plenty of interest. Mauerpark, a public park that is formerly part of the Berlin Wall and its Death Strip, is only a kilometer away. But even closer there are reminders of an earlier tragic chapter in Germany’s history.
Today I noticed the sign in the top picture on the outside of the building shown in the bottom picture. It is at the south end of my street, about three blocks from where I live, and I walk by it every day on my way to work. Roughly translated it says that between 1910-42 this building housed a Jewish nursery, kindergarten and children’s home. And between 1941-44, at least forty-nine of those children and staff were killed in concentration camps. That led me to this website, which tells the story: http://www.inge-franken.de/fehrbelliner92/introduction. The author, Inge Franken, is indeed ensuring all parts of this neighborhood’s history stay alive.
So we finally took our first roadtrip. Considering the Mercedes that husband deemed to be so essential to our German experience wasn’t driven for the entire month of May, it was about time. We chose Hamburg, only about two-hundred and fifty kilometers from Berlin and more or less a straight shot along the autobahn. It’s also a place we know well; husband used to take frequent work trips there and we’ve been there for the Christmas markets the last three years in a row. This includes last December when it was a tack-on to our Berlin “decision trip” and therefore the site of much agonizing, prolonged unexpectedly for three days while Heathrow tried to figure out how to clear six inches of snow from its runways. In other words, we needed to redeem Hamburg.
The journey there was a snap: all blue skies and clear roads along a mostly flat expanse of agricultural land. (The only industry I saw was a Dr. Oetker factory, a company that makes things like frozen pizzas and cake mix. It reminded me of another German brand named after a doctor, Dr. Loosen Riesling. I like how having “Dr.” in the label somehow makes eating pizza and drinking wine seem marginally healthy, like how the British call some cookies “digestives.”) We soon arrived at the Nippon hotel, our normal crash pad and only a few blocks away from the lake, the Aussenalster. We continued as creatures of habit, making our way to our first lakeside beer stop on hotel-lent beach cruiser Schwinns. For our next beer stop we broke ways with the past and explored the River Elbe-adjacent neighborhood of Altona. There’s an historic fish market here, but that starts to wind down at around 7AM so we had to settle for an Irish bar. Doubling back on ourselves we turned into what seemed like a parking lot along the river to investigate the thatched roofs we could see peaking out from behind concrete buildings. Jackpot: StrandPauli beach club, complete with sand, lounge chairs, and piña coladas. It was a little bit of Key West on the docks.
So far this roadtrip thing was working out. I spent the rest of the afternoon and evening dropping suggestions for future outings on the autobahn — Saxony Switzerland, Dresden, Prague, Copehagen via Rostock, Bavaria! — into casual conversation without so much as a hint of pushback from husband. Maybe it was just the loveliness of our waterside dinner at Harms & Schacht, a favorite of ours and, I am glad to say, successfully “redeemed” with new good memories after being the official agonizing site over Berlin back in December.
The next morning we took a jog around the Aussenlaster followed by bagels and orange juice at elbgold (home of the best veggie cream cheese ever, E. coli be damned), then headed back to Berlin. Traffic was, well, as you would expect for a Sunday afternoon on the last day of a long holiday weekend. What took us two and a half hours on the way out took four on the way back. Somewhere on a self-styled detour around Neuruppin husband snapped and insisted Germany was “one of the worst countries on the planet.” When I suggested this may be veering towards hyperbole and that I could think of a few other war-torn examples that may give Germany a run for its money in achieving this title, husband accused me of unreasonably defending Germany, like I was “born here or something.” Back in Berlin he blew off steam yelling at Roger Federer in the French Open final and posting things on Facebook about the “lie” of German efficiency. So much for my dreams of a life auf der Autobahn.
When I moved to Berlin in February it was not my first extended stay in the city. That was back in the summer of 1981. I was nine years old and visiting my father, who at the time was flying shuttles back and forth to Frankfurt for Pan Am. He had an apartment in West Berlin that I remember well, mostly because I spent a lot of time stretched out on the living room floor watching Bjorn Borg play in Wimbledon (and thankfully not because, as my mother recently told me, the previous tenant had committed suicide, which is why my father had gotten such a big apartment so cheap).
Actually, I remember a lot of things really well from that trip. It’s not that it was my first big trip—by then I was a seasoned traveller, with regular trips to California to visit my grandparents and a previous European vacation under my belt. Maybe it was my age or Berlin or the combination of the two, but I think I remember a lot of things from that trip because it was the first time I realized there were a lot of people out there in the world living a life a whole lot different than mine. I learned from the squat down the street that not everyone lived in a suburban subdivision with a name, Whiskey Creek, that was much more interesting sounding than the tract houses in it. (I also learned what a squat was and that the residents were called punk rockers, at least by my father.) I learned that there were more ice cream flavors than the 31 Baskin Robbins would have you believe, and subsequently ate a kirsch eis every day I was there. And of course I learned about the Wall, developing a mild obsession with the Checkpoint Charlie Museum along the way, and that just behind it there were people willing to risk death for their freedom while I watched Wimbledon and ate cherry ice cream. I’m not sure what good any of that experience did me, but I like to think it made me a more open or tolerant or at least curious person than I otherwise would have been.
Twenty-nine years later I moved back for another stint in Berlin. Husband is still baffled about why I wanted to do it, and I have undoubtedly made our lives an order of magnitude more complex in logistics alone. But I think there are some answers lurking in my very first visit to the city. Husband has been pushing to move back to California for a few years now, and I promised him I would go quietly if he would give me this, a last hurrah in Europe. Sooner than we know it we will be back in Los Angeles, a lovely, lovely place to live, but one where you might easily forget there are places in the world where the sun doesn’t perpetually shine and the waiters aren’t actors. I guess I figured we needed to stock up on a dose of the-world-is-bigger-than-you-think perspective before we head back, hopefully more open or tolerant or at least curious people than we were when we left.
I give up. It seems like for the duration of my stay in Berlin this blog is destined to be a food blog. And why not? Food played a central role in getting me here in the first place. Despite a foot of dirty snow, I was wooed by a perfect pastrami sandwich on our apartment hunting visit back in December; husband fell for the spatzle with gravy at Schwarzwaldstuben. And now even though husband reminds me on an hourly basis that I’ve ruined his life by dragging him to Berlin, he will readily admit that the restaurant meals in between the complaining are some of the best he’s ever had.
The problem is there are so many good places in Berlin that it is impossible to remain faithful to any one. (I am convinced Berlin has the highest volume of value-for-money eateries of any European capital city.) Just when you thought you had found the best flammkuchen, the one with the pear and goats cheese and walnuts on top, you taste Gorki Park’s (pictured) speck and zweibelen (onion) version. (To say nothing of their Peasantry Platter—slice boiled potato topped with pickles is really very good—that comes with an optional shot of vodka.) I was sure we had found our pizza place, La Foccaceria, early on too. Then I tried the “goatie”—spinach, goats cheese, red onion, and toasted sesame seeds—naan version of pizza at W-Der Imbiss (der Imbiss is German for fast food), a dish to which I think I might now be addicted.
The other night I was enjoying a goatie at W-Der Imbiss and feeling only a little bit guilty about my lack of recent patronage of La Foccaeria. The ambiance reminds me a lot of Los Feliz / Silverlake, what with the mixture of the Tiki Ti’s interior design (totems mounted on framed leopard print) and the American guy in the corner with the lambchop sideburns and just-stepped-out-of-the-Derby-circa-1995-outfit holding court with a story of how he kicked his Xanax dependency. Everything would have been perfect had the restaurant not run out of white wine.
But then it was perfect.
The chef offered to go get a bottle from the restaurant next door, and before I knew it a wine waiter appeared bearing a bottle of Robert Weil Rheingau Riseling. It cost about three times as much as the pizza, but Rheingau and goatie are an awfully nice match.
Schwarzwaldstuben
Tucholskystraße 48
10117 Berlin, Germany
+49 30 2809-8084
Gorki Park
Weinbergsweg 25
10119 Berlin, Germany
+49 30 4487286
gorki-park.de
W-Der Imbiss
Kastanienalle 49
10119 Berlin
http://www.w-derimbiss.de/
Late this afternoon husband and I went out for a jog. Instead we ended up eating käsespaetzle—German macaroni cheese—washed down with a half-liter of gruner veltliner at a tiny diner called Roberta kocht (Roberta cooks). And how could we not? When we passed by the chef herself was standing outside wearing an apron and knitted cap, smoking a cigarette, drinking a glass of champagne and beaming from ear to ear. She noticed us checking out the place and explained she didn’t usually drink champagne on the job. It’s just that today she and her neighbors were celebrating the historic victory of the Green party in Baden-Württemberg, the southern German state from which she and the food she cooks hail. I am more or less ignorant of German politics, but even a die hard conservative would have been won over by the ebullient mood. And so we went inside to let the woman we assumed was Roberta cook for us.
Inside there was music playing on a record player and a thimble-sized, gold-rimmed glass of champagne to greet us (I assume the complimentary champagne is reserved for historical political moments). A German doppelganger for kd lang brought us a plate of homemade bread and some olive oil as a precursor for the main carbohydratic event: käsespaetzle topped with fried brown onions. In my three months in Berlin I have become something of a käsespaetzle connoisseur, and though it pains me to play favorites, this was the best—looser and creamier than the others I’ve tried, not to mention those onions.
As we heaped compliments on the chef, she told us more about the restaurant. It is only open Thursdays through Sundays because, as she explained, she only has that much love to give. And most importantly no, her name is not Roberta. (It turns out Roberta was an Italian singer, but that’s a whole other story.) I don’t care what her name is, the lady can cook.
ROBERTA kocht
Zionskirchstr. 5, 10119 Berlin
+49 157 73346020
The other night I went to see David Sedaris at a venue here in Berlin. He was signing books in the lobby before the reading started, so I lined up hoping to get a photograph with him. When it was my turn I apologized for not having a book for him to sign but swore I was a big fan, gushed about how many hours of reading pleasure he had brought me, and asked for a pic. “Oh, I never do photographs,” he replied before being whisked into the auditorium by a stern German frau.
As I took my seat I was sore at his refusal. After experiencing a few years of obliging authors at the Cheltenham Literature Festival, I had come to think I was entitled to posting pictures of myself with authors I admire on Facebook. I felt like yelling out to David, only three rows away, that Alain de Botton didn’t mind having his picture taken! Who did he think he was? Instead, I sat quietly while Mr. Sedaris explained that the book he was there to promote, Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk, had been titled Life is Not a Petting Zoo in Germany. OK, I thought, I am being unreasonable. Maybe having his picture taken makes him feel like he is in a petting zoo.
Mr. Sedaris then proceeded to strap on a pair of bunny ears he had bought in a shop next door to his hotel in Berlin. How could he resist, he explained, when they were so perfect for the story he was about to read: a fable about an aggressive bunny who kills a bunch of innocent creatures in a misguided effort to protect his woodland community, failing to notice the real predators until it’s too late. In the end the wolves get the bunny, and the bunny gets what he deserves.
As Mr. Sedaris spoke, I noticed a man in the row in front of me surreptitiously videotaping him on his mobile phone. Others snapped the bunny ear-bedecked author from their seats. And in the end, I couldn’t help thinking the author got what he deserved.