Unscene Berlin

Last weekend, I was working on the Mein Floor bar when a tall guy leaned over the counter and waved at me. I asked him to wait his turn because I was busy serving a few other customers but he kept waving. I tried to ignore him so I could concentrate on those other guests, until my colleague tapped me on the shoulder: "That guy wants to speak with you." I turned and saw the tall guy was still there, waving. "What's up?" I asked. "I'm sorry if I'm making stress… I'm just kind of high and I wanted to say something." "And that is...?" I asked, as patiently as I could. "What happened to MY Meier?" he cried. "I want MY Meier back. You know what I mean?" Yes... kind of.  There are as many Mensch Meiers as there are people that come to this club - that's what sets the place apart. The door crew doesn't expect everyone to dress in black or suspend all of their personal quirks to wait mutely ...

"Berlin is a big city" - this is one of the first misconceptions you'll hear about Germany's capital.   Well, I hate to break it to you, but it's simply not true. Berlin is a small town, even though it sprawls as far as the eye can see. Witness the sheer unfamiliarity that many Berliners have with normal big city features like, say, commuter trains and escalators. Letting people off the train before you board seems like common sense if you live in a big city, doesn't it? The fact that I see scads of people trying to do the exact opposite every rush hour, and have done for the past nine years, tells me that they're still quite new at this whole 'metropolis' thing. And it's quite possible that they always will be. Or check out those big, extended families from Brandenburg that one regularly sees, frozen in fear at the top of the escalators in Alexanderplatz or Hauptbahnhof S-Bahn station.   It's so fast and steep!   Their panic...

Who said, "Tear down this wall?" It hardly matters. All that matters is the people who actually  did  it - people like you and I.  If there’s one thing I’ve learned from living in an ex-Eastern Bloc country, it’s that the Iron Curtain didn’t fall just because of what any one leader said or did. It also fell because the majority of people didn't want it anymore, and refused to let it stand in their way. I think there is a lesson to be learned there for all would-be activists, but especially those who are frustrated with their government's inaction on climate change.  Not that many English speaking visitors to Berlin realise this, but quite a few people who lived in the GDR believed that the Wall was a necessary defence against the capitalist, militarised West.  That was what their leaders led them to believe. Nowadays, we are so used to thinking of the Wall as a fence that kept people in, we forget that for many people on the eastern side of it, it ...

"These past few years have been like that boiling-frog analogy, in reverse. Berlin has gradually crept toward a richer convergence of its various dance music styles, but it's done so in such tiny increments that we didn't even realize it was happening.  It was only when I brought my friend Sisyphos that I suddenly felt the heat.  Finally, Berlin is living up to its hype: this scene is in a full-on boil." CLICK HERE TO KEEP READING THIS POST ==>

Why is Berlin being so meeeean ? Berlin can be so mean. Many of its long-term inhabitants will already know about the Berliner Schnauze . Most visitors will have encountered it, too. Most of us choose not to let it bother us... until it catches us off-guard, in the shape of some car driver spraying us with a stream of water on a drizzly day. In Berlin, you tend to run into people who've got their schnauze on at the worst of all possible times.  Like when some old fogey sticks their foot out to trip you up as you're hurrying to catch the train to get to an appointment on time.  Or when the travel agent starts cackling sourly after you desperately ask her to book a hotel for you in Köln on Rosenmontag (and then shouts at you a bit). Or when the guy at the tax office deliberately gives you the wrong forms to fill in, and then yells at you for not using the right forms after a week spent filling them out.  High-tech 'Fuck You' from an exhibit of robotic art. O...