Berlin

Thursday evening brought Amber and I back to Paris from four days in Berlin. She has left now for Italy, and I am back to working with the kids. I remembered what Kaissa had said about her fellow students helping her to see the city through their eyes, and I was excited to reshape it from the previous visits, with a friend to accompany me.

Our first sight was mum’s new apartment, which is a wonderful thing in itself. Berlin is all yellow and orange-peel coloured, so much more so than Paris, and by the deck a great linden tree shakes down leaves in the wind like confetti. The river running behind the house sloshes and laps idly at the boats, and the view on the opposite bank is of low modern houses and small private motorboats. We spent one morning drinking coffee in the perfect sunlight of this wholesome autumn; it is a season of pleasant chilliness, of hot outdoor drinks and thick jackets, scarves, the true bloom of the trees. I cannot wait to spend Christmas in mum’s beautiful open-plan home, to sit in the warm enclosing kitchen gossiping with Kaissa and Ileeya over food and hot chocolate, to spend comfortable evenings on the deep white couches opening presents and watching movies. And to have the winter all around us, because from top to bottom of the whole apartment, one wall is completely made of windows.

The city startled us. It is almost blank, cool, so quiet that one feels it to be dead. I could imagine Orwell’s 1984 happening there, or Rand’s Atlas Shrugged – there is a great sweeping numbness to it all. The streets seem empty at night, the city centre is silent and austere. The architecture is a crazy wonder – we are in the future, so Amber tells me – one cannot stop finding it at every turn, at every corner. The city was blasted down, and it has been thrust up again by a plethora of modern ideas. Passing on the train a glass-fronted office building is opened out so bare that the cubicles look like experimental cages; I can see the books on the shelves, and people sitting at computers in 30 identical boxes. The city’s bold, symbolic art is everywhere – every day we passed a giant-size metal cut-out of two men fighting, or embracing, walking on the thick river.

Berlin’s modern architecture towers above – always immense, looming, curving in shape and yet cutting in immaculately clean glass and metal. The forms are slick, new, strange, conceptual; and in the city centre great swathes of wasteland embrace nothing but weeds; crumbling buildings black with age and bombings still stand tonelessly bearing their graffiti tattoos. The graffiti is like a culture unto itself, it is so prevalent, holds so many small artistic explosions, that it loses its obscenity – and it is like a constant message of compact underground chaos opposing the new-world sheer giants. I felt that Berlin spoke to me of the conflict of man against something I could not quite distinguish or express; the city described a silent battle that had nothing to do with losing or winning. It is stealthy, silent, austere – and yet undeniably real, undeniably solid and concrete and almost more present than I ever conceived buildings could be. The structures are super-real, unquestionably present, declaring out to the silence – ‘immortal man’.

And the shoulders of the dying, crumbling structures, the bosoms of the grassy wastelands, the warm rust lying in the deep earth, and indeed even the rainbow blooms of graffiti, send a return to the steel magnificence – ‘immortal destruction’. And somehow, it does not depress me as most cities’ oppressions of nature do. Berlin, omitting to slick over the wasted amongst such modernity, omits to feign its victory. Man will never win over destruction, Berlin says to me – blind, speechless, coldly real and defiant – but destruction will never win over the cry, the burn, the mark of man.