The Berlin Dispatch—vol. I, no. 1
May Day in Kreuzberg, Neues Off, and Sputnik Kino.
I woke up to the sound of La Marseillaise playing over reverb-stadium loudspeakers. The strange part isn’t that the French national hymn was playing at nine in the morning in Berlin, or that it was playing at a Turkish-German school, but that I was first humming the tune, singing the refrain—Aux aaaaarmes, citoyeeeeens, formeeeeez vos bataillooooons—while heading to the bathroom for my wake-up douse.
The first day of last month I was likewise chanting the marching words of the German Left, black clad and dipso-spritzed, in the nearby area of Neukölln. International Worker’s Day has historically been a special celebration for Kreuzberg, especially since 1987 when it became a media spectacle. On that day, that year, in the early morning hours, Police broke up a leftist resistance HQ at Mehringhof, which created a hotter than usual riotous atmosphere for the traditional beginning of Sunny Berlin. With the fall of the city’s wall two years away—that bloated corpse of a divided city ready to burst—and the attempt of the Berlin city government to celebrate Berlin’s 750th birthday, strength-in-numbers rioters drunk on street festival fun in the afternoon warmth flipped a police car and some construction trailers; police responded with batons and tear gas. Rioters constructed barricades, live broadcasts brought more Berliners to the area; the police retreated and waited. Some barricades were set ablaze, mostly at Oranienstraße. Fire trucks assembled but retreated soon after. Dozens of stores were looted. The police were considerate enough to counterattack after May 1st, precisely two hours into the following day. They used water cannons and riot control vehicles to delouse the areas of occupying—but at this point drunksleep—resisters.
These May Day bursts of protests and riots had their reasons: Berlin police ransacked a political group’s meeting place because of a Minority Reportesque Periculum in mora; or maybe they wanted a protest as renowned as the one in 1968 when Vietnam War protests and left-student movements congealed; or they were still salty from the Nazis takeover in 1933, which occupied and converted all worker’s organizations into national-socialist blood-orgies; or (somehow even worse) just four years prior during Blutmai (Bloody May Day) when three dozen civilians were killed during a Berlin red scare (depicted in season one of Babylon Berlin); or, perhaps, they knew their history well enough to remember Karl Liebknecht (Social Democratic Party Reichstag member who was assassinated alongside Rosa Luxemburg, both dumped unceremoniously into the Landwehrkanal) proclaim “down with the war” during 1916’s May Day, which sparked the first German antiwar movement; or, I can keep going, they were honoring the founding of May Day in 1889 by the Socialist International, which held its first rally inside Neue Welt in Neukölln—because large outdoor protests weren’t allowed in Kaiser Wilhelm II’s recently unified Germany—which sits exactly a kilometer (0.621371 miles) from where I marched 133 years later.
In the years since 1987, police forces responded by greatly increasing their numbers, including the use of officers from all sixteen states, while the Left responded with peaceful protests, communal festivals, and five-Euro Aperols available at every café and bar pass through window. Left-wing radicals stopped targeting businesses and aimed their (vintage black leather) slingshots at the police. When the first May Day of a re-unified Germany led to more peaceful demonstrations in 1990, media orgs and the German Interior Senator publicly apologized for the disproportionate police response.
This specific area of Kreuzberg, SO 36, was historically the area of tenements in cheap old buildings. Over half of the residents lived below the poverty line in the late nineteen-eighties, which was growing each year. Today, this former Problemkiez (problem neighborhood, which can also be translated into “skid row”) is one of the primum exemplum gentrified neighborhoods of Berlin. Immigrants and international students have turned parts of the neighborhood into buzzy social hubs, complete with start-ups in old factory buildings, oat-milk cafés, and escalating rent prices. I lived my first month in Berlin tucked away in the eastern corner of this postal area by the Spree.
Due to poor planning, I ended up in a less-desirable ‘burb of Berlin, mostly for residents at either end of the age bell-curve, in month two. Being back in Kreuzberg for May 1st during this time made me a double-foreigner: USA passport holder and bourgeois Charli (not checkpoint) resident. I toddled in the lengthy Neukölln to Kreuzberg march that attracted twenty-thousand (their estimate) chanters, organized by Die Linke, spear-headed by the Communist Youth, and flanked by a single-file column of riot-police on both sides, marching in solidarity, comrades-in-arms, in opposition. We started on the Hermannstraße decline at Boddinstraße. In between chants of ganz Berlin hasst die Polizei and hoch die Internationale Solidarität, on that multi-lane declension, I glance over at Neues Off, a member of the Yorck Kinogruppe, and notice the Beau is Afraid poster, Joaquin Phoenix’s worried eyes hovering above the riot police helmets. I make a mental note, both to come back for a viewing soon as well as Beau’s May 11th German release date.
The Neues Off, Yorck’s first acquisition of a theater not named Yorck, is a 1919 music hall convertee restored in 1998 with a nineteen fifties décor—flamboyantly symmetrical and pastel enough to get featured in Accidentally Wes Anderson. I showed up eight days after the march to watch Afire, via Mubi Go’s brilliant ticket-of-the-week program. (Side tangent: for my first five weeks in Berlin, I assumed my Polish-based SIM card wouldn’t allow my geo-specific Mubi Go app to work. But, from simple VPN advice from an Ami friend, I was able to properly situate my smartphone, sans Wi-Fi, in its proper spacetime, which would allow me to present a barcode for the latest Mubi—how many times do I need to mention them for a free-subscription sponsorship?—theatrical release.) But the scanner couldn’t scan, which I tested, it passed, three weeks ago at Rollberg. I scrutinized the barcode as if my cornea-pupil-iris combination could find any digital impurities. But this is Berlin, so the twenty-something guy, in black, printed a free-of-charge kind-of ticket.
I enjoyed the film a lot, my first Christian Petzold film viewing, who the New York Times recently anointed as the “Best German Filmmaker You’ve Never Heard Of,” which the newspaper-of-record immediately contradicted with a reference to a Petzold profile from 2009. (The editors need not write such clickbaity titles, nobody is reading it anyway.) Jedenfalls, one note worth complaining about: Germans are an incessant talking-through-movies people. I’ve done my research and conclusively determined from rhyme/meter/accent that they are, in fact, Germans, committing this reprehensibly heinous act. Whether bozos from Saxony, boozers from Bayern, or bonners from Nordrhein-Westfalen, a couplet feeling protected through darkness and cinema-speakers is all it takes. I glare at these offenders, when possible…
Berlin’s social scene creeps into every gap and dilapidated setting that’s often reclaimed as a bar or club or café, in time. But the reputation of Germans, from personal experience and corroborated by Germans, and outsiders, is a closed-wall of close friendship governed by linguistics and Heimat. Make lifelong friends in K-12 but merely acquaint oneself with Fremde, so says the German social code. Conservatism runs deep in German society (though this bias can be due to my three and a half years in Munich—trotzdem noch) but fails to make gains in the Berlin inner-city, even though this polis just voted in CDU while the three liberal and left parties split the majority in Berlin’s donut voting pattern. And don’t forget the AfD’s push from the east in Brandenburg, which will inevitably sweep into Berlin’s outer districts and surround it in a classic pincer movement—which worked well for Miltiades, Alexander the Great, Hannibal (famously), Khalid ibn al-Walid, Genghis Khan (clumsily), Süleyman the Magnificent (brilliantly), Field Marshal Carl Gustav Rehnskiöld, Nader Shah (doubly and triply), Daniel Morgan, and who can forget the German Wehrmacht during Blitzkrieg (magnificently on both fronts)? Seeing that no party supports the public banning of theater-chatting (and because I’m not a German citizen), I remain in abstention.
Where was I.
After delousing and La Marseillaise fading away, I made the critical choice-of-the-day, which Kino to go see All the Beauty and the Bloodshed. There’s basically three kinds of cinemas in Berlin: multiplexes named Cine-something, Yorck Kinos, and Indiekinos. The latter two are chains that control most of the seemingly independent, small, sub-six-screen Berlin cinemas. Yorck has a popular subscription service (twenty euros per month with a year minimum contract, monthly thereafter) but Indiekino tickets are individually cheaper. Both generally exhibit original versions (OV) in one or two cinemas while the rest feature original with German subtitles (OmU). Unless one is itching to see the tenth fast car movie, multiplexes are unnecessary.
My Mubi Go subscription gives me a ticket for Yorck Kino theaters, and because I don’t have the Yorck subscription, I tend to avoid them. I fired up Cinematic Berlin, the second-best website after Google, and found All the Beauty playing at Sputnik Kino, named after the Soviet satellite because it’s located five stories above ground level (the fifth floor in Germany, sixth in the USA), and it’s the closest cinema to me at that moment. I was supposed to go here a few weeks after moving to Berlin, but it was a first date and we ended up just drinking at a bar in the style of (according to the bartender/owner and from mental notes) The Shining, Twin Peaks, 1984, and Hunter S. Thompson, all smushed together, underground of course.
After getting to floor three at Sputnik, I watched an amateur football scrimmage across the Hof to catch my breath before ordering a ticket in Amideutsch. Like most Berlin cinemas, Sputnik has a main waiting area for casual drinking and idling, but, uniquely here, with balconies. I got a ticket for room two but was ushered into room one, where I awaited the three-tone film’s-ready signal, but only after ads about Berlin attractions, news sites, and ice-creams available in the lobby. I fail to properly adjust to the plush cushions resting on narrow concrete-reinforced brick rows, which is also what the arm rests are made of. Nichtsdestotrotz, All the Beauty was one of the greatest documentaries I’d ever seen, brick or no brick.
Only a week before this I walked along the long Karneval der Kulturen procession on Hasenheide, right outside Sputnik’s entrance, which, if you walked due east for a block would take you to Neue Welt, home of the first May Day celebration in 1890, and if you walked due west, you’d end up at my apartment for month three in Berlin. But that gangly, verkatert performance of mine at the Karneval will have to be fully rendered in a future Berlin Dispatch…
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