Eventually the conversation turned to something that didn’t make me want to hurtle myself face-first into a river of my own tears: die Mauer, the Wall, as in, nostalgia for. The veritable ease of life for the beautiful, and whether or not I belonged to that demographic, and the anguish of grieving one’s own child—those would have been beyond my meager, self-absorbed little skill set even if I’d been able to sustain a conversation. But the relentless encroachment of crass Western capitalism into the helpless Eastern districts, and its veritable steamrolling of the elderly population, which was just minding its own damn business—this I could get behind. I perked up immediately. “Everything’s so different now,” Helga said, “with the Mauer gone.”
Nod.
“Worse.”
Another vigorous nod.
And then: “There’s black people everywhere now.”
Oh boy.
I froze and one of those infernal wafer cookies, never making good progress to begin with, lodged itself in the back of my mouth. Not particularly loquacious before, I was now rendered 100 percent mute. My experience with blatant American racists (as opposed to the passive-aggressive or dog-whistle kind we all know and probably don’t love) was limited to my maternal grandfather, who used the n-word in front of me once before my mom read him the riot act. And my German acquaintances were limited to progressive-minded younger people. What I would soon find out from my program directors upon relating this anecdote, though, was that the Frau Helgas of the former East were not anomalous, and their sentiments unfortunately extended to some of their grandchildren, who had taken up with neo-Nazis. For several years after reunification, in fact, the Berlin guide books warned Jews and people of color to avoid the more remote eastern districts altogether, for fear of violence against “foreigners.”
All of my insistence about the superiority of the East was suddenly threatened: They might not be keen on yelling at me for walking in the wrong direction on the sidewalk, but were they racist? Because even someone as self-absorbed as I was knew that was worse. One of the many unfortunate side effects of the Eastern Bloc’s isolation was a near-total lack of immigration from any noncommunist country. The West, on the other hand, had instituted a “guest worker” program after the war, which had brought in a massive influx of cheap labor from Turkey and North Africa. This program was, of course, exploitative—but at least it meant that folks in Düsseldorf, Cologne, West Berlin, Frankfurt, and Munich had at least seen a person of color before 1990.
In 1997, despite the confusion of my Jewish grandpa—himself the son of a man who’d escaped from pogroms on foot at the age of eight, bribing the guards at the Polish border to fire their guns into the air and deliberately miss (basically the Jewish emigration tariff of 1884)—as to why I’d want to devote my undergraduate years to German Studies and set foot in the Fatherland to begin with, and indeed, despite my own selectively Jewish righteousness and insistence that everyone around me feel guilty all the time, there were still more neo-Nazis in my own Fatherland than there were in Germany. But what neo-Nazis there were lived in my precious East Berlin and fed off the xenophobia and fear engendered by five decades of communism, fomenting the very resistance to reunification that I had found it so charming to adopt.
I finally managed to swallow my wafer cookie, washed down with the last of the now-tepid coffee. “Once again,” I said, cradling my purse safe in my lap like a little baby, “I thank you so much. But now I must be going.”
“Of course,” said Helga. “But be careful out there. It’s dark now, and this neighborhood—it’s terrible. You’ll walk an entire block without seeing a German anywhere.” (Including, of course, myself.)
I took one last glance at the needlepoint pillow of Helga’s daughter and let the heavy door of her apartment shut behind me. I heard three locks click as I shuffled down the pitch-black hallway, fumbling for the thirty-second-long light switch I knew was somewhere.
6.
Wohngemeinschaft
n. apartment share, abbr. WG, from dwelling and community.
ex. Triangular room in WG for illegal sublet, DM 300. Near transportation and entertainment. Electricity, hot water, ceiling-swing, some cigarettes, cultural metamorphosis, unlimited petty tyranny incl.
Boooooop. Boooooop. Boooooop. Boooooop. Boooooop.
The German landline issued its disconcerting monotone beep as I held my breath on the other end of the receiver. It was my worst exchange-student nightmare: calling a German stranger unsolicited; failing to be understood—or, worse, being sure that the German stranger was silently deriding my language abilities. Please don’t pick up, please don’t pick up, please don’t pick up. A rather counterproductive prayer, to be sure, as one doesn’t find a new place to live by letting the phone ring, hanging up, and then talking to nobody. On the fifth or six boooooop, a sharp voice answered.
Come on, Schuman, I told myself. Sei tapfer! Be brave! There was no way I was getting stuck out in the Freie Universität dorms, twenty-five miles from anything interesting, with only a bunch of dorko international students to keep me company in my dingy complex that was basically prison with beer. What the fuck was I going to do out there? Study? All the cool kids in my program had taken our possibly misguided directors’ offer to refund our dorm fees and search for housing independently in correspondingly cool Berlin WGs (Wohngemeinschaften, literally “living communities,” the German name for an apartment shared with someone who isn’t one’s family). And since I already lived in a WG with Gertrud, I couldn’t be expected to stop now and be subjected to such indignities as rules and not being cool. What the fuck use was living in the coolest city in the world, at its second-coolest time in its history (after Weimar, natürlich), if I wasn’t going to be cool? This was a potential tragedy. Too bad the only way to find a WG was to step directly into the gaping Nietzschean abyss of terror that was subjecting random potential roommates to my halting, phlegm-filled telephone Deutsch. This I did by answering ads placed in the Zweite Hand, a free weekly that was like Craigslist, but in print and with slightly fewer dick pics.
“Hallo? Halloooooooo?” repeated the voice on the other end, perturbed at my twenty seconds of heavy-breathing silence. My throat had once again coated itself as an immediate reaction to any attempt to speak German with anyone. I finally managed to croak out the single sentence that I’d been practicing under my breath all day: “Ist das Zimmer noch frei?” (“Is the room still available?”)
The voice at the other end paused, but not because he didn’t understand what I said.
“Äh … nein. Nicht mehr. Tut mir leid.” (“No. Not anymore. Sorry.”)
I assumed he paused because he was attempting to process someone being so terrifically rude. Germans are in some situations a direct people: as Gertrud was so kind to point out, they will think nothing of telling you that you have gained weight. But in other situations, they have ironclad laws of politeness. One of these is that when telephoning a stranger, you are expected to give your entire curriculum vitae as your initial greeting. This I learned the hard way, after Gertrud overheard me have one of my doomed conversations and set me straight. The sole acceptable manner in which to announce myself on the other end of a telephone when answering an advertisement for a vacant room from the Zweite Hand rivaled a passage out of Robert Musil’s two-thousand-page novel The Man Without Qualities: Hallo, guten Tag. Mein Name ist Rebecca Schuman, und ich bin Austauschstudentin aus den USA. Ich habe Ihre Anzeige in der Zweiten Hand gelesen, und ich wollte wissen, ob das Zimmer noch frei ist. I wrote it out and practiced it two hundred times in front of the mirror.
For my troubles, I managed to book exactly two viewings of available rooms within my monthly rent budget of three hundred deutsche marks (the rough equivalent, at the time, of $175), a price point at which the pickings were slim to none, and Slim had just walked out the Tür. Furthermore, any place that was available to the likes of me was nightmarish, such as the austere room (with yet another coal oven) in Friedrichshain, where the proprietor was a mopey schlub in his late thirties who insisted that anyone who moved in had to hang out with him.
“So,” I said, when he wouldn’t stop staring at me, “what do you do?”
“Ich bin Arbeitslos,” he said. (“I’m unemployed.”) “Und was machst du denn in Berlin?” he asked. (“What do you do in Berlin, anyway?”)
I told him I was a student of German literature at the FU, which at this point was almost true—language class was over, the FU semester was imminent, and I was even mildly excited to choose between a course on Bertolt Brecht and one on Weimar modernism. Brecht plays were morally instructive and short (bonus), but Weimar modernism included the excellent paintings of Otto Dix, who specialized in the Neue Sachlichkeit, New Objectivity, in which Dix deliberately made pretty people ugly and grotesque, when he wasn’t drawing worms crawling out of the skulls littering the battle sites of the First World War. Another substantial selling point of Dix’s paintings was that I didn’t have to look any words up to read them.
“Ach so,” said Herr Sad-Sack. “What authors do you like?”
“I am a great admirer of Franz Kafka,” I said.
“Er war kein Deutscher.” Did every German in the world have direct orders from the ghost of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe himself to disown Franz Kafka? They were the ones with the imperialistic language that colonized half the damn continent with their Lebensraum. Maybe they were just jealous that Kafka was so good and Faust II was bat-shit crazy.
“Well,” I said, “I also enjoy the poems of Gottfried Benn.” I’d just discovered them, and because they were short and used small words, Benn had officially become my second-favorite author. Also because he was dark and disturbing: much of the verse was set in a Berlin morgue around 1912, because Benn was a medical examiner by Brotberuf, which literally means “bread-career” but is German for “day job.” My Lieblingsgedicht, or favorite poem, I told the guy, was a particularly graphic piece of expressionism called “Schöne Jugend,” or “A Fine Childhood,” about a family of rats discovered inside the decomposing body of a young prostitute. At the end, the mortician drowns them in a bucket. “Oh, how the little snouts squeaked!” Excellent dinner-party fodder, I found. “Have you heard it?” I asked my potential new roommate, who finally found occasion to stop staring at me.
Directly after that, I schlepped out to the desolate nether regions of the eastern district of Treptow, populated only by neo-Nazis, their racist grannies, and Hans and Effi, the two incredulous roommates who were attempting to rent out a windowless closet, one that might have been able to accommodate a twin mattress on the floor if it were placed diagonally. “It’s yours if you want it,” said Hans. I kept the Gottfried Benn quotes to myself and tried not to weep openly until I’d made it halfway back to the U-Bahn.
In the depths of my housing despair, Gertrud persuaded me to see a movie, the highly anticipated feature-length version of Kleiner Arschloch (Little Asshole), a proto–South Park cartoon starring a gleefully obscene little boy. I only understood about a fifth of it, and I was too deeply ensconced within my own personal storm cloud to laugh at anything I did understand, with the sole exception of the titular Asshole’s grandpa—voiced by legendary German comedian Helge Schneider—who insisted that he was a tithe-paying worshipper at the Church of the Holy Vagina. After the film ended, I very much wanted to harrumph my way home and feel sorry for myself within the confines of my own frigid four walls while I still had them, but Gertrud cajoled me into going out with her and Paul, a very tall and floppy-haired friend from Chemnitz who was now a computer science student at the FU. “Look, I’ll even invite you,” she said, meaning she’d pay.
Unable to pass up free beer, I moped my way to the bar and then fretted in silence. I had had it with Berlin—it was fucking freezing, everything had meat in it, there were racist grannies everywhere, and nobody would let me live with them. And, worst of all, I definitely wasn’t cool.
The good news is that if you are in an uncool mood and don’t feel like talking to anyone, going out drinking with a bunch of Germans is exactly the right thing to do with yourself, as you will not have to utter a single syllable. There’s an old joke related by Walter Benjamin (another legendary German comedian), about three authors who are out at a pub. After fifteen minutes of silence, one of them says: “It’s hot today.” After another fifteen minutes of silence, the second says, “No wind, either.” And the third one, after another fifteen minutes, goes: “I came here to drink, not to talk!” The joke was supposed to be making fun of the Swiss (Germans are always picking on the Swiss), but I have instead found it to be a nonfictional account of almost every night out I have ever spent with German-speakers of any nationality. These are people who do not engage in small talk. If you ask a German-speaker wie geht’s (how they are), you’d better be prepared to hear some details about irritable bowel syndrome or some such, because that motherfucker assumes your query is sincere. Germans either talk about real topics or they don’t talk at all. If you don’t know the person well, or are not intimately familiar with either German football rivalries or the ninety-thousand political parties, you can expect to sit there in silence.
The bar Gertrud and Paul chose was near pitch-black inside, which saved the proprietor the trouble of decorating, save for a row of sticky semicircular booths. Paul disappeared and reappeared with three beers. The three of us drank in silence, lit cigarettes, smoked them, put them out, lit more. After the requisite hours of staring, Gertrud became the evening’s abject blabbermouth.
“Na du,” she said to Paul, who was hunched over one of the same cheap cigarettes Gertrud preferred. “Rebecca’s looking for a place to live.”
At that, Paul shot up to his full height, and his small round glasses almost flew off his pale visage. “We have one for you!” he said. “Wait, how much can you pay?”
“Three hundred.”
