“Los, Rebecca!” Leonie said. “Heute ist Christopher Street Day!”

“But I’m wearing my Schlafanzug!” I said, pointing to my green-and-black oversized flannel pajamas from the Gap.

“I know!” she said. “You’re dressed perfectly.”

I ended up going out dressed like that to a fairly snobby restaurant for lunch.

It was my official rule never to turn down an invitation by a Loftschlosser, because each one took me to a weirder place than the last, deeper into the Berlin that my Time Out guidebook had never seen. One night, it was a tire-fire party in the backyard of a squat, whose residents performed their toilette in a full-sized bathtub placed on top of two adjacent stoves. At some point I told some of them that I could play “Wonderwall,” so, in between excoriating my country’s imperialist foreign policy and correcting my grammar, the “occupiers” (the literal German for squat is besetztes Haus, or “occupied house”) thrust an out-of-tune acoustic guitar into my hands.

“Oasis spielen!” they cried. “Oasis! Oasis! Oasis!” They pronounced it Oh-AH-sis.

The next week, it was onto the handlebars of Johannes’s bicycle with me, as he careened through the deserted streets of Mitte at four in the morning, en route to a bar called Dienstagsbar because it wasn’t a bar so much as a random gathering of people with cool hair in a gravel-covered vacant lot, and it only happened on Tuesdays. As we rode, we screamed the lyrics to a Jürgen von der Lippe song, whose comedic nuances I did not understand but whose spirit nevertheless seemed right:

Feet in the fire, nose in the wind

Men will be men, men will be men

The next week, it was a pop-up art show by one of Leonie’s friends, comprised entirely of stuffed-panty-hose sculptures, that took place inside a filthy abandoned bunker. Sometimes I felt like my roommates just woke up, combined a bunch of random nouns and verbs, and then decided to go do whatever that was.

In the late spring, we threw what was supposed to be a rent party, but on which, I am fairly certain, we lost money. At a series of increasingly heated planning meetings, Leonie and Paul almost came to fisticuffs over whether or not we should serve homemade fries, which she insisted could be prepared in bulk on our fifth-hand stove and the rest of us viewed as a mild-to-moderate grease-fire hazard that paired especially unsavorily with the fact that technically our building was always locked from the outside. The party was almost called off entirely due to these creative differences, until Johannes came through the door one day wielding a contraption from the mid-1970s that looked like a Barbie Dream West German Nuclear Fallout Shelter.

“Ach du Scheiße!” said Leonie. “Where did you find that?”

“Zweite Hand,” said Johannes. “The party snacks are solved!”

Everyone let out a cheer except for me, who had no idea what the fuck the thing was.

“What’s wrong, Rebecca?” asked Leonie. “Haven’t you ever seen a sandwich maker before?”

“Not one like that,” I said, believing, rube that I was, that a sandwich maker was a pair of hands and a knife.

It was essential that this party be perfect for me, because I’d invited all of my study-abroad classmates and it was imperative they see firsthand exactly how cool my life was. And I think that when the magical day arrived—sturdy milk-crates full of Hefeweizen procured, peculiar elder-flower punch mixed, sandwich menu curated (Nutella DM 2,50; Cheese DM 3)—they had a good time. But it was hard for me to tell, because for most of the party I was stuck on “key duty,” which meant I was responsible for using my giant Disney Schlüssel to let some partygoers in and others out, at random and somewhat indeterminate intervals made ever more complicated by the fact that nobody had a mobile phone yet.

Our guests stayed so late into the wee hours—dancing; swinging from the ceiling; staring at each other wordlessly and then pairing off into life partners; eating sandwiches—that Paul had to blow his saxophone directly into their drunken ears to get them to stumble out into the Hinterhof. When I finally trod into my corner of the living room at eleven the next morning, I found a strange guy sleeping in my bed.

“Hallo,” I said. “I live here.”

“Huh,” he said, and puffed languidly on the cigarette whose ashes were falling onto my sheets. “Is this yours?” He held up a haunting-looking children’s book, The Three Golden Keys, by Peter Sís. “It’s wonderful. Just wonderful. I can’t believe these illustrations.”

I’d never seen the book before and didn’t know how it got into my room, but it looked like the guy needed some more time alone with it, so I slunk back into the kitchen and grabbed one of the few remaining bottles of beer. I popped off the cap using one of the four cigarette lighters that lived permanently on the kitchen table, then used the same lighter to ignite a Lucky Strike from one of Johannes’s half-open packs.

As I took a slug, Paul shuffled in with his hair sticking straight up and his shirt on backward. He nodded, grabbed a bottle for himself, and handed it to me to open, since I already had a lighter in my hand.

After about fifteen minutes of sipping and staring out the window through a smoke cloud, he said: “You’re up early.”

I nodded.

After about five more minutes, he said: “It might be cold today.”

I looked vaguely in the direction of the living room, ashed my cigarette, yawned. We were, after all, there to drink, not to talk.

7.

Liebeskummer

n. heartbreak, from love and grief.

ex. On account of your Liebeskummer, I will forgive you that supper of Jägermeister.

For the next eight years, the closest I would get to Berlin would be my unpaid, uncredited (and correspondingly untrained and unqualified) work as a dramaturge, dialect coach, and prop master for an off-off-off-off-off-Broadway play called Berlin, which went up at the Tribeca Playhouse in the fall of 2001, in the shadow of the World Trade Center wreckage. Despite being an “equity showcase” put on by a bunch of then-amateurs, Berlin had a sold-out run. It was an awful, somber, unmoored time to be in New York, and people related to the beautifully written story, which itself took place amid rubble.

It was an improbable but redemptive romance between Heike, an aging ex-Nazi screen idol, and Bill, an American GI. And despite my substantial failure to coach the lead actress, Renata (whom you may recognize as different characters on about ninety-four episodes of Law & Order), to sound less like Madeline Kahn in Blazing Saddles, and despite my lackluster attention to replenishing the fake stage-whiskey, and despite the fact that it didn’t get me anywhere near actual Berlin, Berlin was also a rousing success for me personally. This was not just because I got the script changed when the playwright wanted the two leads to travel to a hotel “a couple hundred miles east” of Berlin, which is Poland. It was also due to the improbable and redemptive romance between the hot twenty-two-year-old prodigy who played the American GI and yours motherfucking truly.

In addition to being the unpaid and uncredited dramaturge, dialect coach, and prop-master, I was also the play’s sign-in manager on the day we auditioned for the male lead, Bill, a wide-eyed teenager who loves The Great Gatsby and is several measures out of his depth in the occupied, decimated German capital. We had Renata already, Madeline Kahn accent dialed all the way up, and I watched as Bill after Bill—all comely, overeager waiter-actors in their mid-to-late twenties—ambled onto the stage in the rented rehearsal space to read with her. They were all fine—you know, for actors. They read their lines with commitment; they made “choices” about the character (as they say in showbiz). But they were all still clearly acting, trapped in a mimetic performance (as they say in the academic biz).

“All right,” said Mark, the director, when yet another earnest but mediocre Bill left the stage. “That was great. We’ll call you.” He turned to me. “Anyone else?”

There was one more person on my list, but he was nowhere to be found. Maybe he’d heard Renata’s accent and skedaddled? I sprang up from my folding chair in the back and did my best self-important theatrical scamper out into the hall, where, sure enough, there was a guy with giant blue eyes, filthy blond hair, and almost impossibly delicate cheekbones, slumped down in one chair while his propped-up feet rested on another, headphones turned so high I could hear every word of what he was listening to, which was “Heart-Shaped Box” by Nirvana. From the looks of him, when that record came out he was in utero himself. He wasn’t handsome in the tanned, muscled, hairless, simultaneously-oversexed-and-sexless She’s All That teenybopper manner that was currently the rage in Hollywood—but he was arresting to look at. I touched him gently on the shoulder and he jumped. “Oh, sorry!” he said. “Am I up?”

I led him into the theater and he loped onto the stage. He sat down next to Renata and before he said a single word, everyone in the room could feel a palpable, yearning, profound sexual tension between them. In that moment I wanted nothing more than for someone to want me in the way this guy wanted that woman. What he did wasn’t acting. He just was.

Goethe’s most trusted colleague was a fellow named Friedrich Schiller, whom he admired so much that after Schiller's death in 1805, Goethe tracked down his skull and kept it on his desk for inspiration, or perhaps accountability. (Or, at any rate, what he believed was Schiler's skull; most Germans were buried in mass graves back then, and Goethe simply asked for the largest of the skulls in Schiller's cohort, because obviously Schiller had been the smartest of whatever lot he was interred with.) Schiller was a wonderful writer in his own right, of tumultuous Sturm und Drang plays and the lofty works of “Weimar Classicism” (basically, he and Goethe imitating the ancient Greeks and Romans). But one of his most famous writings is an essay called “On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry.”

Schiller’s theory was that most poets are what he called “sentimental”—he didn’t use that word in the way we use it now, but rather to denote the clear act of labor present in most writing. Sentimental poets might be technically perfect, and even great—but they were always clearly trying, often really hard. Naïve poets, on the other hand—by which he meant his buddy Goethe—didn’t have to imitate nature, because they just were nature. They were possessed by beauty, by the creative Dämon, who took hold of them and guided their hands. Their work could be messy (although Goethe’s wasn’t); it could be rough, but it was, in Schiller’s conception, genius. Genius was hard to describe—although Schiller certainly did his best, and had a helpful exemplar in his friend—but you knew it when you were in its presence. And that October 2001 day in fake-Berlin, in real New York, with the smoldering World Trade Center leaking noxious smoke into every corner of Manhattan, there was genius on that stage.

“Great,” said Mark when the scene was finished, and I realized I’d been gripping the sides of my chair so tightly they made my knuckles white. “We’ll call you.”

The play had its second lead—and, more important, Rebecca Schuman was interested, despite the fact that he was three and a half years her junior and seemed to have a shaky relationship with shampoo.

During production, as I futzed with the genius’s props and gave him a crash course on the grisly and desolate occupation of Germany (itself the result of my own crash course at the New York Public Library), I teased some personal details out. He was from Connecticut, had gotten his first TV role as a high-school senior, then acquired an agent and a manager and skipped college to move straight to the city and book jobs.

“So is this what you do all the time?” he asked before tech rehearsal, as I rushed in with some dubious bodega vegetables so that Mark, the goddamned visionary auteur, could have real fucking food onstage during a meal scene.

“No,” I said. “I work as a Web editor at a nonprofit, down in, you know, the financial district.” I pointed in what I thought was the general direction of my day-job’s office on Broad Street, which was a twenty-minute walk away. “But now I’m just part-time there, because…”

“Got it.”

“I started out as an editorial assistant for a book publisher.”

“Cool,” he said. “I love to read.”

“Mostly I got coffee and made Xeroxes,” I said. “But every once in a while I got to do something interesting. Like, once my boss was trying to woo P. Diddy to write an autobiography, and I got to shuttle him up a freight elevator. He was called Puff Daddy then.”

The genius didn’t look as impressed as he should have.

“It was just him and me and his son and this giant bodyguard. He drives a completely silver Mercedes.”