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A New Yorker's Berlin (1984)

There is no secret about myself that I am more ready to admit than this: I am New Yorker--a confirmed New Yorker, a profound New Yorker, who was born there and plans to die there. My sense of the world has been visually represented by a classic Saul Steinberg drawing in which the Hudson River is portrayed as halfway across the visible world and everything west of the Hudson recedes into the distant horizon. The truest test of my New Yorkerness is that I do not like to leave New York, and rarely do so in fact, even in the hot summertime. Indeed, as a young man I resolved, after too many disagreeable experiences elsewhere, never to leave New York--the rest of the world was unsafe, I used to joke; and for many years I left only on rare occasions, and then usually to give lectures around America (customarily getting home as quickly as I could), or sometimes to visit on my own initiative one of only two places: San Juan, Puerto Rico, which everyone knows is really a distant suburb of New York, and Jerusalem, which can also be experienced as an extension of New York. Not unlike other over-educated Americans, I do not speak languages other than English, and have neither talent nor inclination to learn.

However, a few years ago the I was invited to spend a year in Berlin, as a guest of the DAAD Kunstler(Artists)programm, which made me the sort of offer few unaffiliated artists could refuse--not only a modest stipend but a comfortable apartment. However, in my case, this invitation caused not unqualified joy but neurotic anxiety. Oh my God, I thought, how the hell was I, a provincial New Yorker, going to leave my home, with my typewriter, my library, my bed and my toilet seat, to spend more than a week, let alone whole months or even a full year, in some godforsaken place well off Saul Steinberg's map. One friend who knows me very well was prepared to bet me--to bet me against me, to be precise--that I wouldn't stay more than two weeks in Berlin, and in truth I did not have enough confidence in myself to bet on myself. I picked my departure date as April a year ahead, and then postponed it for a month. Even when I actually left, I did not dare sublet my SoHo loft, even though it could fetch me many pretty pennies in rent, because I feared I might at any moment fall into a panic and want to hurry back into my own familiar lair. In fact, I came back home to New York once, for a month in the summer, and then again in the fall, my year divided in two as I returned the following spring to spend six more months in Berlin.

But do not misunderstand my confessions about going home so much. I love Berlin. I love Berlin much like I love my New York, which it resembles in so many ways. Indeed, I love Berlin so much that whenever I am there I do not like to leave it, very much as I don't like to leave New York, and in fact scarcely do, except to go home of course. Whereas many of my colleagues on the Kunstlerprogramm were flying here and there around Europe, while my German friends were always going off to Italy--this habit being, incidentally, the most visible sign of the continuing influence of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe--I did most of my traveling to East Berlin, which is geographically comparable to visiting Brooklyn from New York or Cambridge from Boston. You perceive it as a radically different world, but it is close enough to allow you to get back home at night.

Indeed, what distinguishes East Berlin from Brooklyn or Cambridge is that in East Berlin the volkspolizei have parietal rules reminiscent of those we had in my residential American college twenty-five years ago. Precisely like the housemothers who then supervised the girls' dormitories, these vopos want your butt out of their place by midnight. This nightly housecleaning has advantages as well as obvious disadvantages. Let's say you meet an attractive woman in East Berlin and she takes you home. Or an attractive man and he takes you home. And you are enjoying each other, but you really don't want to spend the night with her or him. You can be sure as sure can be that she or he won't object when at 11 o'clock you leap up and say, "Gotta go home." You can't always do this in Brooklyn or Cambridge.

Why do I like Berlin? First of all, I am a city boy, and Berlin is a real city, as Boston is a real city, while Providence and San Diego, say, are not. (Nor are those prosperous towns of the industrial Ruhrgebiet, no matter how hard they try to pose as cities.) Better yet, Berlin is a civilized city, first of all in the abundance of stylish architecture, or buildings that reveal imaginative thinking about design, and then in its pervasive greenery: trees on nearly every street, the little gardens at the fronts and in the backs of houses, numerous little parks in addition to the expansive fields and woods of the Tiergarten and the Grunewald. In the past three decades West Berlin was rebuilt, not just to clear the place of the rubble of war, but, it seems, to realize two illusions for its inhabitants--that there has been no war and that there is no wall; and the city's ability to make you forget those two harsh truths is, to my senses, the clearest measure of its current civility. Indeed, precisely because Berlin is such a comprehensive and self-sufficient island in a foreign sea, its examples persuades me that Westerners such as myself could live successfully on a colony in space, as long as, like Berlin, it had an abundance of all the trademarks of home.

Another measure of Berlin is its creature comforts, which include not only streets that are largely safe at night, taverns that stay open well past midnight and sidewalks wide enough to accommodate both cafes and crowds, but lakes right in town that are suitable for swimming. There is only one other city known to me where one can spend a warm June day at a good beach and still get to the country's best opera, the best theater, and the best orchestra at night, and that other city is, of course, New York. That is also the only other city where you can spend a hot August day swimming and then chose among a hundred movies at night. One truth of Berlin is that you don't need to "go to the country" (which is in fact, another country) when so much of the country is already in the city.

One quality shared by New York and Berlin is this feeling that they inhabit a place apart from the rest of the country. Berliners customarily say they are taking "a trip to West Germany," as though it were another place, not just geographically but physically. I find that we New Yorkers are on the verge of referring to the rest of America with the same sense of distance. Indeed, both Berliners and New Yorkers feel their apartness through physical separation, in Berlin's case by a hundred miles of East Germany to the west and south, in our case by a river so much broader than any in Europe, the lordly Hudson, that is similarly beyond the control of the countries on both sides of its banks. In Berlin's two fortnightly magazines, named Tip and Zitty, which are very much like our own New York or Village Voice in listing local cultural events; but while those Berlin magazines publish articles about happenings in Berlin and perhaps East Germany, it scarcely mentions West Germany. One refugee writer from East Germany told me that his principal reason for living in West Berlin is that he doesn't feel part of West Germany; no New Yorker in his right mind ever felt he was part of middle America. And just as middle Americans are always questioning whether New York is part of them, so any Munich taxi-driver will tell you that West Berlin, which costs West Germany so much more than the city earns, should be sold, or even given, to the East Germans.

Berlin, like New York, has always been a promised land, a magnet for adventurers seeking experiences unavailable at home, whether bohemians or homosexuals, and always been a metropolis of opportunity for industrious people from somewhere else, whether Eastern Europe or the Eastern Mediterranean. Even in hard times, like now, this promise of possibility is a spiritual quality you can feel in Berlin, as in New York. So it distresses me double to hear some Berliners speak of wanting not just to restrict the immigration of Turks but to send them home. Such talk reminds me of the fact that Spain in 1492 brought its subsequent decline upon itself by expelling both the Jews and the Moors, leaving nobody to pay the Spanish taxes, because the Spanish nobles did not pay taxes, and no laborers to do the dirty work. Berliners should know better than to usher their own demise; we've never been so stupid in New York, thankfully.

My own principal difficulties in living there, aside from the language problem that I will discuss later, reflects my New Yorkness: I cannot accept the fact that all Berlin stores, including grocery stores, close in the early evening. That makes me angry. Though tight restrictions on commercial hours might seem credible in the provinces, they seem nothing but provincial in the city. They also make basic shopping difficult for working people, and make it harder for students to get part-time jobs. Secondly, I was always getting lost, or arriving late at strange addresses, because I could never master the problem of efficiently getting around a city whose streets and avenues have proper names, rather than sequential numbers!

Berlin has not the uniformity of rural life but the stark contrasts typical of great cities. Back home one is struck by the discrepancy between rich and poor, especially where the offices and housing of the very rich are in close proximity to the very poor. (To experience this quickly in New York, just walk two kilometers directly north from 86th Street and Park Avenue.) In Jerusalem, the stark contrast is not between the territories of Arab and Jew--a difference more evident in the Galilee--but between the religious and the secular. In Berlin the most striking difference is between West and East. Berlin remains the only place in the world where you can not only peek into the Other (Second) World with your own eyes--just go to any tall building near the famous Wall--but you can actually visit it the Other World any time with your own feet, without the forbidding nuisance of needing to obtain a tourist visa (that is required everywhere else in the East). In Berlin you can literally take a subway under the Iron Curtain and come out on the other side, right at Freddy's Street, as I call it--Friedrichstrasse, they say--in the heart of East Berlin, which does not look like a Western city, because it isn't a Western city. Where West Berlin is colorful, with neon signs and people in all sorts of contemporary costume, East Berlin's drab anonymity reminds the Western visitor of not just another world, but another time, in this case decades past. To rewrite H.G. Wells, this is not the future but the past, and you wonder how well it works. For an especially vivid sense of this Berlin difference, just go on a summer Friday evening, as I did, from the main streets of East Berlin, which become barren after sundown, to the Kurfürstendamm, the main drag of West Berlin, where the weekend party goes well into the night; and you will observe a contrast as great as that between 86th Street and l25th Street, albeit different. Especially if you have read, as I have, some wise guys explaining how West and East are coming to resemble each other, you will be hit, as you cross from one Berlin to the other, with a contrast that to be believed must likewise be not only seen with one's eyes but experienced in the body.

This proximity to the Other World is something that West Berliners take for granted; but the more you think about it, the more extraordinary it is that here, as nowhere else, everyone can take the public subway over to the other side, for the regular fare, on a ride no longer in time than that between Manhattan and Brooklyn or Boston and Cambridge. (East Berliners, by contrast, are forbidden to visit the West, which is known to them mostly through images on their television screens.) This stark contrast that I mentioned before--the stark contrast between West and East--is, we know, largely the creation of a capitalist conspiracy, whereby the West pays millions upon millions to keep West Berlin looking so good, and then yet millions more--sub rosa, unter der Mauer, under the Wall, you might say--to keep East Berlin looking so grim ("an interesting place to visit, but you wouldn't want to live there"). This last secret, which I thought twice about sharing, came to me from a very authoritative local source: A nude mermaid, a woman with nothing to hide, so to speak, swimming next to me in the Wannsee.

Seriously though, Berlin has something else that is very special, something I take to be the ultimate mark of a civilized city: public transportation so abundant, cheap and comprehensive that you can live there comfortably without ever owning an automobile. By that criterion, it is clear, New York is civilized as Los Angeles is not; Boston is civilized as Chicago is not. Never, but never, will I voluntarily live where a car is necessary, and I know from personal experience that you do not really need one in West Berlin, in part because you cannot go very far in a walled venue. In a city of just over two million people, a million rides are taken each day on the subway alone; buses are even more popular. One sign of the popularity of Berlin's public transportation is the abundance of snack-stands, places where you can buy wurst and soda or beer for a little more than a dollar. Simply wherever routes of public transportation intersect in Berlin, you will see a sign reading Imbiss, or snack; and though I am scarcely well-traveled, I have never seen so many snack-stands anywhere else. Since beer in these stands is no more expensive than soda pop, it is no wonder we Americans can call people who patronize them excessively imbeciles.

My problem with cars, incidentally, is not my ignorance of driving--I do know how--but that in my gut I regard passenger cars as essentially unsafe. They break down at inopportune moments, leaving you stranded. They kill more people in a day around the world than airplanes kill in a year. They also drown out the sound of bicycles that, at least in Berlin, are even more likely than cars to crash into you. We are coming to realize that cars are now more dangerous to life and limb than dark streets or even contemporary wars. When you saw a body smashed apart in l946, you were rightly reminded of the War; if you see a body similarly broken now, we all know that nine times out of ten a car did it. If you go to the East Berlin radio tower in the summertime, you can see handing over West Berlin a haze that is absent from the East. Much of this haze comes, of course, from private cars that are far more plentiful in the West. With all these truths in mind, let me suggest that since Berlin is a great town for bicycling, with few hills, well-paved roads and abundant bicycle paths, and since it has also been a hothouse for avant-garde social experiments, it should be the first great city of the world to take the radical initiative of abolishing private cars.

There are several more unobvious things to be said in favor for Berlin. The first is that since no one has country homes, you need not turn down invitations for bucolic weekends that are likely to boring. (Escaping from these gilded lilies is my principal pain in summertime New York.) The second is that in Berlin, as in New York, the week has seven full days, which means that you can expect to do private business, as well as plan a revolution, on Saturday and Sunday; elsewhere, in both countries, all purposeful activity comes to a halt on Friday afternoons. Beyond that, Berliners are outgoing--they make jokes for strangers; rural people, here as in Germany, are more reserved. Similarly, Berlin is the only German city where you need not know German, just as New York is probably the only American city in which people live quite well without ever really learning English. Berliners, like New Yorkers, are accustomed to the abundant presence of people who scarcely know the official language. Berliners do not think twice about speaking slowly or finding an intermediary who speaks your language; they know how to mime and to do all the other sensitive things that people do to communicate without words. I speak again from personal experience, because, when it comes to learning foreign languages, I am an utterly hopeless American. I may have a large personal library, but every European who visits me notices instantly a fact that escapes my American colleagues: nearly all the books are in English. Though the DAAD program offers its guests a gift of tutoring in German, I never got it, because my hosts decided that I did not known enough rudimentary German even to begin the free lessons.

So I speak English to everyone in Berlin, regardless of whether or not they claim to understand it. When I telephone strangers, for instance, my opening words are not the customary cheery German salutation of "Tag, Kostelanetz," but an apprehensive "Speak English?" The only people to criticize my incapacity to my face are competitive Berlin intellectuals who wanted to believe that fluency in other tongues is the surest sign of superior culture and intelligence and, then, my first apartment house superintendent who was endlessly annoyed that I could not be moved by her suggestions, her criticisms, and her threats. (Thus does strange bedfellows a monolingual make.) My incapacity should not be considered a total loss, however, because I discovered methods of communication, as well as pleasures, that would be unavailable to me in New York. One of my favorite Berliners is my publisher Peter Gente, whose English is just about as insufficient as my German; and we have spent lots of time together, simply enjoying each other's company, while saving our serious conversations for the presence of an interpreter. Secondly, no single male should forget that in Berlin, if an attractive woman sits next to you on the bus, you can say, "Speak English?" If you try that same line in New York, ....

Before I got to Berlin, I was often told that everyone there speaks English, good English, because they learn it in school. This, in my experience, is not quite true. The many folks from elsewhere--mostly gastarbeiters, or guest workers--speak no English at all. As for Teutonic Berliners, it is more accurate to say that they understand English, not only because of several years study of it in school, but because of American pop culture; yet unless these Germans have spent considerable time in an English-speaking country, they are, in my observation, usually reluctant to speak English. My first experience of this last truth came at the meat counter of the neighborhood grocery store. The first time I went there, perhaps my first week in Berlin, I heard the familiar sound of American radio, on the local station of the Armed Forces Network, which every hour plays choice U.S. rock music for fifty-five minutes, followed by a zippy five-minute newscast direct from the States. Since everyone behind the meat counter appeared to be listening to this familiar American news, I felt comfortable enough to say, "Hi. How much is...?" There was a pause during which the clerks suddenly looked at each other anxiously. It quickly became clear that none of them spoke English, or perhaps none wanted to speak English!

What art did I make as a guest of Berlin? Essentially, I tried to do what I do not do at home. Since I tend to spend most days in New York at my typewriter, I did not bring it with me; and when I needed to rent one in Berlin, the German keyboard, with its crossed up letters and, worse, its misplaced semi-colon, so infuriated me that I gave up typing for the duration. (Even at the typewriter, I remained a hopelessly culture-bound New Yorker.) My mail from home was not forwarded, because I did not want to spend as much time dealing with it as I do at home. With neither a typewriter nor mail, I figured, my life in Berlin would necessarily be different from what it has been in New York. Fortunately, I was able, soon after I arrived, to work on a radio piece, a hörspiel, as they say, that exploited a particular quality that Berlin shares with New York. Both are international towns in which many languages are spoken. Having for years wanted to compose a radio piece about the sound of the language of prayer--an ambitious piece that combined my love for Johann Sebastian Bach with my respect for Finnegans Wake--I recorded sixty ministers in over two dozen languages and then mixed their spoken words on a twenty-four-track audiotape machine. By this process I made Invocations, as it is called--a 61-minute hörspiel that was first aired on Sender Freies Berlin and later played on radio stations in Canada, Australia, Holland and the U.S., and recently released on Folkways Records as my first solo disc. Given such rich linguistic variety, the number of cities in which a polylingual Invocations can be made are equal to the fingers of one hand: New York, of course, Paris, Jerusalem, Singapore perhaps, and Berlin.

Until I got to Berlin I made only short radio pieces--five to seven-minute works at best, instead of 62-minute extravagances--because we in America have neither the resources for making nor the taste for broadcasting (and paying for) such sophisticated radio. We didn't before I left for Berlin, and we still don't now, and are not likely to do so for many, many years. So, when I returned to Germany on my own in 1983, it is scarcely surprising that my principal mission was the production of another long radio piece--this one composed of sounds peculiar to, you guessed it, New York City. In other words, I produced in Europe, initially for Europe, and especially for Berliners, an audio New York City I could not do at home, or anywhere else in America for that matter. Incredible, but true. And need I say that all this high-class radio art would not have happened, had not the Berliner Kunstlerprogramm made me this gilded offer that not even a meshuganah New Yorker could refuse.

I discovered my other major Berlin project in an extraordinary place that remarkably few Berliners have seen or visited, let alone know about: The Great Jewish Cemetery in Weissensee, a northeast section of East Berlin. With 115,000 graves, this is, first of all, the largest Jewish cemetery between Warsaw and New York; but aside from its size, it has a cultural coherence that makes it quite unlike any other cemetery, Jewish or otherwise, known to me. This is not an historic Jewish graveyard, with ancient stones, like the ones in Worms or Prague; it is a modern graveyard, founded in l880, that stands as an utterly exemplary artifact of visual history. Most of its stones were laid in Berlin's greatest years, when Jews, though less than five percent of the city's population, made such a strong impression that Berlin was known throughout Germany as a Jewish city; and these graves from the high modern period establish within the cemetery itself a contrasting standard for the stones laid after 1935. Thus, the stones of the Great Jewish Cemetery tell not only of individual lives but of a Berlin lost--a Berlin of style, wealth, confidence and culture, as Berlin that was as great as New York was at that time (and perhaps could have remained, had things not gone wrong). To get a sense of the unique evocativeness of this particular graveyard, consider this testimony from as the American biologist Gunther S. Stent, in a recent letter to me: "In its decaying splendor and gradual return to a state of nature, the huge Weissensee cemetery is, as you say, the principal surviving relic of the 'Lost Berlin'; the only comparable relic of a lost civilization that I myself have seen is Angkor Wat."

As this cemetery reminds me of New York (and stands as a warning to it), as well as illustrating principles of visual history that have long interested me, my initial plan was to make a book mostly of black and white photographs, a small-format paperback with two photographs to a page, for over two hundred pages, because my theme of the cemetery's historical resonance is best evoked through abundant detail. Though this original component of the project has yet to appear, other parts of it have acquired auspicious backers. In cooperation with my Berlin film colleague, Martin Koerber, and the Literarisches Colloquium, I produced a 20-minute documentary about the Cemetery, in which the screen in filled only with scenes from the cemetery, while the soundtrack has the off-screen recollections, in German, of the cemetery and the world represented there. It was recently screened at the Berlin Film Festival, and been invited to other European festivals. We hope to redo the technically separate soundtrack with Berliners speaking in English and Hebrew, if not Swedish, Spanish and French as well. There may also be, in Berlin, if not elsewhere, an exhibition, or installation, with thousands of slides and accompanying sound tracks.

The work I want to do next in Berlin likewise reflects New York, or that hörspiel about the sound of my hometown that I mentioned before. I would like to do a composition of, and about, sounds unique to Berlin; but rather than beginning this work from scratch, as I did with my New York City, I plan to base this Berlin piece upon one of the greatest silent films, Walter Ruttmann's Berlin Symphony of a City, where skillful montage evokes the special, unprecedented quality of modern urban life. As Ruttmann sees the city as not only a protagonist stronger than any individuals in it but as a kind of Second Nature that is as encompassing and sustaining as primary nature, his film resembles my New York City and, needless to say, my sense of a true city. What I should like to do now is compose from the sounds of Berlin today a contemporary soundtrack that, while not quite synchronous, would continually complement the imagery of the film. As the film opens, we remember, with the image of trains entering the city, so my soundtrack would have the aggressive voices of the East German volkspolitzei screaming "passcontrolle," and then the sounds of them stamping visas and passports, thereby announcing acoustically a contemporary context to an earlier image. That initial updating, with cops who were not around in Ruttmann's time, would, I hope, establish a perceptual frame for the remainder of the film. Needless to say perhaps, I could not do this Berlin, had I not already done New York City, just as I probably could not have come to love Berlin, had I not already loved New York.

You can understand by now that I like Berlin as a city rich in culture, in activity, in variety, in tolerance, in surprises, and in friends--a city abundant in all the things and qualities that make true urban living more attractive than rural life. Ich bin Berliner, which I know is not the same as "ein Berliner," which is what John F. Kennedy called himself. (Ein Berliner, everyone should know, is local argot for a certain kind of pancake.) Ich bin Berliner, not only because it resembles New York but it is still, to my senses, a Jewish city, just as New York is a Jewish city and Jerusalem is a Jewish city, but now with only a few Jews, alas--five to seven thousand, instead of 200,000 that were in Berlin fifty years ago--which is a tragedy about which some things can still be done. Tell your Jewish friends, as I tell mine, that Berlin is not West Germany, and indeed it isn't, especially to Berliners, who customarily speak of taking a "trip to West Germany" as though it were a distant country. I tell them about the Cemetery and all that it reveals about the traditions of Berlin. I mention the absence of anti-Semitism, which a Jewish friend of mine who grew up in post-War Berlin attributes to the city's geographical isolation. German anti-Semitism, she once explained to me, tends to come into the cities from the surrounding countryside; but Berlin's countryside, she elaborated, is another country, whose peasants are forbidden to come in.

And now that Berlin has persuaded me to leave home, not once or twice but six times--count 'em, six times; that's a new record for me--why don't I propose redrawing Saul Steinberg's map, placing Berlin in New York's East River, on the western edge of Queens, very much in need of a connecting subway.