Then, in the distance, what looked like the dismembered skeleton of a mammoth extraterrestrial robot-dinosaur came into view against the sunset.

“Was ist das?” I whispered.

“Das sind Kräne,” said Gertrud. “Cranes. The biggest continuous construction site in all of Europe.”

It was Potsdamer Platz, whose endless panorama of just-started building sites would be the defining silhouette of Berlin’s skyline for years. The prewar Platz, or square, was once the nightlife and traffic epicenter of the German capital, its spirit immortalized in a jubilant expressionist painting by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner—two chic women, one in black and the other teal, whoosh along in a blur of grand hotels and foot traffic. Potsdamer Platz was blown to kingdom come during the war, but its real demise came when it was split in two, with much of its former glory paved over in favor of the “death strip” between the Berlin Walls. For the Berlin Wall was actually two parallel walls, the western one covered in graffiti, the eastern one pristine; between them was a wide expanse pocked with gentle methods of interloper discouragement (trenches, beds of nails)—and, lest those not be discouraging enough, patrolled by armed East German guards in towers. But now, with the Wall and the death strip gone, workers at the largest construction site in Europe were busily erecting a sleek, supermodernen corporate park, whose defining decorative features would be the mammoth logos of Sony and Daimler.

“Come on,” said Gertrud. “We get off here.”

Somehow a full working S-Bahn station was in place amid the endless scaffolding and no doubt heavily managed chaos, so we dragged my suitcase a frigid kilometer through the rubble until we got to a bus stop. Gertrud looked at her watch. “Should be here in three minutes,” she said. And it was. Exactly.

As the cranes of Potsdamer Platz faded, I noticed yet another bizarre silhouette. This time it looked like the Death Star impaled on a chopstick. It was the Fernsehturm, the Alexanderplatz TV tower, unofficial symbol of East Berlin. I craned my neck as we grew closer. It was immense. “Riesig,” said Gertrud. “Huge, right? Some people say it was supposed to look like an eye that could see you everywhere.”

“It looks like an evil disco ball.”

“A little bit, yes.”

The bus turned a corner and two fearsome apartment high-rises greeted us. They looked like wedding cakes made out of cinder blocks and bombs. (The technical name for their style, pride and joy of the German Democratic Republic, was “Socialist Classicism.”) The street was different, too—wider, starker, not a tall tree or cobblestone in sight. “What’s this street called?”

“Karl-Marx-Allee,” said Gertrud.

“Nein.”

“Doch. And that’s the name they changed it to after the Reunification.”

“What was it before?”

“Stalinallee.”

“Nein.”

“Komm schon. We’re getting out here.”

“You live on Stalinallee?”

“Don’t be silly. This is where we walk to get the tram. We still have twenty minutes to go.” Jesus H. Christ, Berlin was huge.

Finally, after a near-two-hour tour through architectural and political history, I reached my new home, and I learned what Gertrud meant about “far Prenzlauer Berg.” Our street, Rudi-Arndt-Straße (named in honor of a Nazi-turned-Social Democrat), was a good twenty-five-minute walk from the sprawling cool-kids’ fort I’d fallen in love with a few years before. The sole establishments on our corner were a bakery that only seemed to be open from six to eight in the morning and a store that sold back braces and orthotics.

As I took in my new neighborhood, the biting February wind bounced off the expansive, treeless Soviet boulevard that served as our cross street, ricocheted off our block’s row of squat, mean-looking, cinder-block apartment buildings, and careened directly down the back of the vintage faux-fur jacket that I’d chosen, with severe incompetence, as my winter coat. I camouflaged my chill by taking a lengthy pull on my Gauloise before stomping on it, as Gertrud led me into our building’s unheated, unpainted, dank concrete foyer.

“This door never locks; nobody ever commits any robbery in this neighborhood.”

She punched a button on the wall, which illuminated the staircase for thirty-five seconds—which was, I would soon learn, exactly enough time to get two-thirds of the way up the stairs to our apartment. The building clearly hadn’t been renovated since its days as assigned housing in the very early GDR (or perhaps since the First World War), and thus, as a selectively eager German Studies student, I could not be more thrilled to be living the melding of the two Germanies. (Who needs reading when you have living? Suck it, reading.) My compatriots in their well-appointed family abodes in the stately Western districts of Charlottenburg, Schöneberg, and Wilmersdorf were going to be so jealous.

I was awed at getting to live in total independence in an apartment that cost less than three hundred dollars a month (Germany was in its final years of the deutsche mark, which was currently getting creamed by the U.S. dollar). I would have my own room, tiny and stark, outfitted with a twin mattress and limp little polyester duvet, both of which I suspected had been stolen outright from a youth hostel by Callie, the girl who was subletting out the room while she and her boyfriend traveled through Turkey for a month. The only piece of furniture other than the bed—and a coffee can filled with cigarette butts labeled ICH BIN DER ASCHENBECHER DER REVOLUTION (I Am the Ashtray of the Revolution!)—was a massive coal-burning oven, which served as the room’s sole source of heat.

“Here’s how you work it,” said Gertrud, as she listened to the messages on her answering machine, all of which were from suitors, each of whom sounded very angry but wasn’t. “You take a lump of paraffin, then ball up some newspaper around it, and then light it on fire and throw it in with the coals, like so.”

That seemed easy enough.

“But make sure this little door is shut exactly right.”

“Why?”

“Because otherwise you’ll get carbon monoxide poisoning and die.”

The kitchen was the apartment’s only communal space, and so small it barely fit a tiny, wobbly table and two mismatched chairs. “Here’s the Kaffeemaschine,” she said, pointing me to a three-part coffee gizmo, whose three parts were clearly different sizes, brands, and vintages. “I basically just put together things people give me so that I don’t have to spend any money.” Why hadn’t I thought of that? Gertrud was so cool. Maybe if I put together my own coffee maker and smoked cheaper cigarettes, I’d have multiple suitors, too.

The “bathroom,” meanwhile, was two-part: in the tiny kitchen, directly next to the sink that doubled as a vanity (by virtue of having a five-inch shard of broken mirror glass affixed to the wall above it), was a much larger sink, ringed by a curtain and connected to a small contraption that looked like R2-D2 in his larval state.

“This is the Wasserheizer,” Gertrud explained, a teeny-tiny hot water heater, which, when turned up to its maximum for the better part of an hour, would then and only then produce exactly ten minutes of hot water.

“But try not to use the whole tank, it’s expensive.”

Bathing required either a supreme comfort with in-apartment nudity (which most Germans have) or being the only one home, as the sole possible way into this shower was to saunter across the unheated kitchen naked, then climb, limberly and quite immodestly, into the basin, before assuming a trembling sit-squat that served both to tone the thighs while I bathed and force me—through inability to hold the position—not to use the whole tank of hot water.

“Please tell me the toilet’s not in the kitchen, too.”

“It’s on the landing a flight of stairs down,” said Gertrud, as she weighed which of her three boyfriends to call back first. “Now feel free to unpack and get settled. I have to go to the doctor to find out why I’m getting so fat.”

“But you’re not fat!” I said. This was true. Gertrud was athletic and healthy-looking, rosy-cheeked and outdoorsy, and probably an American size eight on a bloated day, which was two sizes smaller than me. I wonder how fat she thought I was?

“You Americans,” she said, “always telling each other you’re not fat. I was at my cousin’s yesterday and she said, ‘Mensch, du bist wirklich dick geworden! Was ist los?’” (“Man, you’ve gotten really fat! What’s up with that?”)

“That’s awful!”

“No, it isn’t,” she said. “It’s true. She’s right. And now I’m going to go find out why. Maybe it’s a thyroid condition.”

“Well, I think you look nice.” I excused myself to mountaineer down to the commode.

Unlike the building, the door to the toilet-room—moist, pitch-dark, unpainted, with a greased-over window and a scratchy roll of Klopapier—absolutely did lock. This last fact was impressed upon me particularly acutely at seven thirty-five on my third morning in the place, when, tampon groggily placed into the hand where the double-ended key usually was (one for the toilet, the other for the apartment, which locked automatically behind me), I arrived at the decrepit water-closet only to realize that while tampons are indeed miracles of modernity, they do not open doors.

I hot-footed it back upstairs—in my plaid flannel pajamas, my unmet biological needs now transitioning from pressing to emergency—and buzzed the apartment’s doorbell for five straight minutes, until a severely perturbed-looking Gertrud answered, roused as she was from either slumber or intimacy with Sebastian, the hunky ponytailed thirty-five-year-old who was the current favorite of her three suitors. As soon as I told her what happened, however, she burst out laughing.

“Ein Tampax statt ’nes Schlüssels!” she yelled. “A tampon instead of a key!” “Who does that?”

Because, of course, forgetting a key is just the kind of thing that Germans simply do not do. It would be like an exchange student in the United States setting his bed on fire and then explaining, chagrined, that that sort of thing happens back home all the time.

While Gertrud definitely possessed her genetic allotment of efficiency—she was punctual everywhere she went; she never ran out of or misplaced anything; she traveled everywhere by bicycle, even in the dead of winter, and knew how to maneuver through traffic with a deft mixture of caution and aggression—her four-week tenure as my mentor, cultural ambassador, and only German friend led me to the greatest epiphany about the Germans of my short life: It wasn’t that Germans didn’t like me. It was that West Germans didn’t like me. East Germans (Ossis) like her were patiently curious about the way I did certain things—walked around barefoot, answered the phone “Hello?” instead of barking my last name into it, failed to stand up and move toward the train door a full stop before I was due to exit the U-Bahn—whereas West Germans (what we would now consider “Germans”) could be mortally offended if I kissed them on the cheek hello the wrong number of times, or changed from my outdoor-shoes to my indoor-shoes (Hausschuhe) five minutes too late for their liking. According to Gertrud, this was not because, as I had assumed before, I was a patently offensive person—it was because Wessis were spoiled pains in the ass, who outright assumed they were better and more cultured than their Eastern counterparts just because they’d had uninterrupted access to Coca-Cola for the last half-century.

Gertrud, born in 1972, was part of the second generation of native Ossis who actually grew up in the GDR, with the Berlin Wall falling only in their late adolescence or early adulthood. They’d grown up in the Pioniere, the East German scout troops, singing chipper Socialist anthems and staying for weekends in their state-allotted cabins. They’d played games in apartments provided by the state and ridden to school on Soviet-installed streetcars. Sometimes they’d been enlisted by the Stasi, the secret police, to spy on their parents—and sometimes their parents had been enlisted to spy on them.

These snippets of GDR culture have, along with the state-appointed vacation cabin, disappeared, and are available today only in ironic form via Ostalgie-themed hotels, stores, and parties—and that’s kind of a shame. Look, I’ve seen Good-Bye Lenin! and The Lives of Others more times than I can count. I’ve taken a tour of the Hohenschönhausen Stasi prison led by a former inmate, who described in excruciating detail the time she was made to sit in the water-torture machine for seventeen straight hours. I am fully aware that the division of Berlin ripped families apart and sometimes even killed people. I know the Stasi were among the most brutal surveillance forces ever to exist (and they did it through the admirably low-tech methods of medieval torture and coercing one out of every two people to spy on each other). But I’m just saying: there were things about the Ossi mentality that I very much preferred—and in 2009, 57 percent of former East Germans agreed with me, answering in the affirmative a survey in Der Spiegel about whether the GDR had “more good sides than bad.” Of course, for me it had less to do with guaranteed employment and lack of toxic late-capitalist morality than people being way less uptight about all of the things I did wrong, such as eat Nutella after 11:00 A.M. or drink water from the tap.

I was, however, also a huge hypocrite. Because of the threat of carbon monoxide poisoning, I never made a concerted effort to light my bedroom’s coal oven, so I was miserable and freezing all the time and dreamt only of cozy quarters with modern radiators and scalding showers. Gertrud worked her own Kohlenofen spectacularly, but the mile-thick cinder-block walls in the apartment meant that I could not leech off her ambient warmth, and so I lived the end of that biting winter sleeping on the floor of an unheated concrete room. Once, when I caught a cold, in order to stop shivering for long enough to fall asleep, I had to put on every article of clothing I owned.

There was also the matter of the shower.