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.”
