by Lauren Oyler
A few days before I left the U.S. I found a place to live in Berlin, against all odds. There were many blog posts about the best way to go about it, and they were mostly written in an aspiringly sassy, exasperated tone that I recognized because it had been popularized by the website I used to work for. Craigslist was not what they used in Berlin; you might find something there, but the site was mostly populated by ads for obviously nonexistent glowing living rooms and stainless-steel kitchens sparkling with bad Photoshop. Many landlords were incensed by subletters, so discretion was key. If seeking accommodation on a website called WG-Gesucht, one must begin by apologizing for not writing in German, then offer little tidbits about oneself, and, if seeking a room in a shared apartment, acknowledge the importance of collective living and respect for others. I hadn’t anticipated having to interact with anyone in Berlin—I had imagined myself walking around thoughtfully; getting lunch at the Turkish Market along the canal, which Felix had always talked about but never taken me to; and overcoming my inner turmoil through the delightful surprises and surmountable obstacles of living abroad. The thought of having to pretend to be excited by the idea of cooking dinner with a withdrawn physics student or moony performance artist filled me with dread. I particularly did not want to live with Germans; the presence of another sad, young American was overkill in their country, and I wanted to be able to occupy it quietly, without having to admit that I didn’t speak the language and had no plans to.
At first, I was casual in my approach, responding only to posts including notes about high ceilings and renovations and wood floors, but the blogs warned that I would show up at Tegel with nowhere to go if I continued on this path. I said since I had a layover I was flying into the other airport, Schönefeld. The blogs replied not to be pedantic—this was serious. I needed to be sending ten to twenty messages a day. I said that that couldn’t possibly be right; if that was right I should go to Budapest instead. The blogs said, “Honestly? Probably. Berlin is so tight, though.”
I sent more messages and endured three nodding video-chat interviews for short-term sublets in what a former colleague told me were “not ideal” parts of town. (I asked him if this meant they were dangerous and he said, “Oh, no. Just that only Germans live there.”) The people in the apartments picked up their laptops and walked me around so I could see bumpy visions of the living quarters: long, skinny bathrooms and capacious bedrooms with sofas and balconies, afterthought hallways lined with shoes and the occasional bike. No one had living rooms but everyone had washing machines. They explained the concept of rotating cleaning schedules in excessive detail. Smoking tended to be allowed in the kitchen. As soon as we got off the phone, I would send an email to say I would like to take the apartment, if they would have me; no one would email me back. I began to worry as I considered plan B. The point of going to Berlin, a subconscious line of reasoning went, was to introduce into my life difficulties I could understand and conquer, but not this kind of understandable and conquerable difficulty. I did not want to stay in a hostel and then have to leave the hostel once I found somewhere to live. I did not want to stay in a hostel ever again regardless, but the hypothetical logistical finagling represented more commitment than I was willing to make. I might sink into the cost and wake up three years later eating a five-euro schnitzel under the Oberbaumbrücke thinking, This is not the way my life was supposed to be!
Eventually I found and signed up for a popular, long-running email list for North American academics and miscellaneous intellectuals in Berlin, though the tone of the information about it suggested membership could be more trouble than it was worth. The person who ran it no longer lived in Berlin, and in her About the List section she twice reminded the reader that she no longer lived in Berlin but nevertheless kept up the panlist from her home in Indiana out of the goodness of her heart and her support for the Berlin expatriate community, deserving as it is of support especially at a time like this, when diversity and inclusion are vanishing, when greed and capitalism (developers) seek to destroy all that had drawn us to the Hauptstadt in the first place. You had to fill out a questionnaire to apply to join, and I worried I would be denied because of the flimsiness of my answers—occupation, interests, why was I in Berlin, how long was I staying, did I speak German—but I was accepted the next day and began receiving several emails about furniture for sale and divorce lawyers who speak English and the importance of promoting academic freedom by attending certain lectures. I joined in the middle of a debate over the concept of a young woman’s reading series; the reading series focused on writers under thirty, and another woman had replied to her post promoting the inaugural event with accusations that the young woman was ageist for focusing her resources on the one age group that was interesting enough without needing a reading series to convince people. The young woman replied that there was no money or stakes involved in the reading series and that age was just an arbitrary organizing principle. There was nothing preventing the older woman from starting her own reading series, the young woman pointed out, given that neither performance spaces in Berlin nor the older woman’s own apparent bounty of free time were limitations. I decided to never advertise or protest anything advertised on the list.
After a few more interviews—one in which I suspect I was disqualified for not being a vegan; one in which a girl promised to take me to the drugstore to pick out German hair products after I joked that I would have no idea what bottles said and would probably end up putting foot cream or something on my hair; another in which I was lectured for bringing “false tourist money” to the city by a man who owned a wine bar—a woman spending March and April on a residency in Portugal agreed to rent me her room because she looked up my writing and liked an article I’d written called “It’s Harder to Sleep if You’re a Woman.” I barely remembered writing the article, which aggregated a bunch of information about how women have it bad, sleep-wise, mostly because of stress and circumstance but also because of hormones, but I pretended like it was one of my favorites and said the sunny corner of her kitchen looked really nice for writing, though I doubted very seriously I would write there. Near the end of the call the roommate who would become mine entered the frame carrying several tote bags of groceries and after introducing herself as Frieda with a jaunty little wave asked, “So, why are you going to Berlin anyway?” to the airy laughter of the woman whose room I would be taking, who, ha ha, had forgotten to ask such a basic thing.
For some reason—or perhaps no reason, but given the trajectory so far it’s going to be pretty difficult to convince you there was no reason, the reason being obvious even if it may need unpacking, the reason being like a giant suitcase in the middle of the room with one of those locks on it that legally the airlines have to be able to open with minimal effort, the reason being an insult to people who spend years in therapy trying to understand their own reasons, the reason being nevertheless something I did not think about until later, at which point I felt ashamed and obvious, which I guess is where the transition “For some reason” comes from—I replied, as if I had grown up hearing stories about it my whole life, that my parents had lived in Neukölln before reunification working as English teachers and I had always wanted to learn more about that period of German history. Frieda said, “Ah, cool,” and told me the bus from Schönefeld would drop me off right around the corner from the apartment. Then Frieda’s brow furrowed, and she said, “But you don’t speak German? I don’t care, I want to practice English, but just because your parents, you know . . .” and I said no, and my parents didn’t speak it either. That much being true.
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A WET LATE-WINTER CHILL HAD SEEPED INTO THE STONE OF MY building’s entryway and it often felt colder standing there than in the street. The apartment was in Neukölln, referred to in the literature as “the hipster neighborhood,” off Sonnenallee, near Richardplatz. My street was uglier than others in the area, which was historic and every year hosted a Christmas market with donkeys. On the street were tw
o buildings racked with scaffolding and other facades flat and peeling, and a storefront that, though the space beyond the display was always dark like an office on the weekend, featured a collection of objects that changed frequently: arrangements of beads and copper wire that someone else might call sculptures; a yellowed deck of cards; a wig splayed on a table; cacti; a broom that had been altered to look like a man who was wearing sunglasses with his hair sticking straight up. Next door to my building was a café with a bright AstroTurf welcome mat out front, and on Sundays it was packed for screenings of Tatort, which I was told was the German version of Law & Order. A bakery around the corner sold anemic croissants and pains au chocolat that looked like a child’s finger paintings of pains au chocolat. Across the Sonnenallee were a Turkish grocer, where I bought nuts and fruit; a hut selling Wurst and fries, plus its tables, where men sat alone and stabbed at their sausages with tiny plastic forks; and an old, cheap, German bar with frosted windows. I did not feel I was allowed to enter this bar, particularly not before I mastered how to say “one beer, please,” having rarely ordered for myself on previous trips and blithely asking for what I wanted in English if I did.
It took about seventy-two hours for the pleasant emptiness of my jetlagged mind to morph into discomfort. I’d always believed it was foolish to enter situations without preparing as much as you can, developing expectations and fortifying yourself with realism, yet with this Berlin thing I had for the first time in my memory done just that, gone with the flow, indulged dull impulses without weighing possible outcomes or assessing risk. Now I was facing the consequences, namely aimless despair. I spent my first week in town thinking I should buy a bike and I should take advantage of a world-class museum and doing neither, choosing instead to stay in bed until noon scrolling through social media, looking at the same old posts on Felix’s account, keeping track of the comments from his followers, which I found more interesting than the hopeless captions he’d written or collaged himself. That he hadn’t posted since Trump’s inauguration was cause for alarm. Did that mean, the followers wondered, his mission was complete? Where had he gone? Had he been subsumed in a deep state plot? Was he himself part of a deep state plot all along? Wherever he was, they missed him, though a few thought maybe his absence indicated he was living a better life now, the kind that didn’t require the constant updating of social media. Frieda’s showering noises began around nine, when she got up to go to her internship, which she had despite being, I guessed, around thirty-five years old. She was studying for a master’s degree in something very specific within the realm of sustainable urban development and if she didn’t get a job after she finished she would go on public assistance, which she told me was very good in Germany. I already knew this so I said, “No way, really?” and as she began to explain how the welfare system worked, nodding her sweet accessorized head, I realized I should abstain from knee-jerk sarcasm for a while. Having studied the German numbers up to twenty on the plane I recognized that when Frieda said “Hartz IV” she was not making reference to some Teutonic coinage for the nuanced anxiety induced by joblessness, though I’m sure they have a word for that, too.
My room was long and skinny and faced the courtyard. It only got light in the morning, when the sun came in through the curtainless window directly onto my face, so I started sleeping with my head at the foot of the bed, symbolically. The mattress was as thick as a copy of Infinite Jest. If I opened the window, I could hear the occasional clank of my neighbors unlocking their bikes from the racks below; otherwise it was very quiet. Because of the time difference, looking at the internet on my phone in bed in the morning in Europe was functionally equivalent to looking at the internet on my phone in bed at 3 a.m. in the U.S.; no matter how much I scrolled, it wasn’t enough to rouse the people I knew to post on Twitter or, more to the point, read anything I might have posted. They were asleep! How stupid not to have considered this technicality, that relocation to a new time zone would make it harder for me to access my method for coping with difficult things, such as relocating to a new time zone. The British journalists I followed were funny, but I never had any idea what they were talking about. In the past I might have also sent Felix text messages through periods of inner turmoil, e.g., “Help I’m trapped in my body!!” He would usually respond with something I interpreted as tough love, telling me to read a book, or write one. “What are you doing” I’d always ask afterward, no question mark, because I didn’t want to seem more desperate than I already did, and he would reply, lying. The internet is always on, interaction always available, but it could not guarantee I would be able to interact with someone I liked and understood, or who (I thought) liked and understood me. I’d gotten used to using people I’d never met, or met a few times, to muffle the sound of time passing without transcendence or joy or any of the good emotions I wanted to experience during my life, and I knew the feeling was mutual, and that was the comfort in it. It was compared to white noise so often for a reason: so many people, talking, mumbling, murmuring, muttering, suggesting, gently reminding, chiming in, jumping in, just wanting to add, just reminding, just asking, just wondering, just letting that sink in, just telling, just saying, just wanting to say, just screaming, just *whispering*, in all lowercase letters, in all caps, with punctuation, with no punctuation, with photos, with GIFs, with related links, Pay attention to me! Saying something as irrelevant to the wider world as “I’m in a bad mood” or “I can’t get out of bed” elicited commiseration, and offering commiseration to similar expressions made me feel I had participated in a banal but important ecosystem. There were so many people in bad moods at any given time; all we had to do was find each other. We could pretend something good, connection, had come of our turning to technology to deal with boredom, loneliness, rejection, heartbreak, irrational rage, Weltschmerz, ennui, frustration with the writing process. We were all self-centered together, supporting each other as we propped up the social media companies. Suddenly finding myself ahead of everyone, spinning my wheels, with no one to acknowledge my existence at the customary intervals, I entered a state of twitchy, frantic boredom, fixating on what I could not stop considering the “real” news, from the United States, though when I was living my “real” life there I had insisted social media was not part of it but rather some aberration, new, ephemeral, a phase passing too quickly to warrant serious inclusion in a summary of my world. It fit in a summary of the world, certainly, but it did not reflect the lofty perch from which I gazed upon it, the world as I thought it should be. In the oddly shaped room, thinking about how I should get out of bed, about the permanent damage I was doing to nerves in my hand by holding my phone above my head in the way I did, my torso at forty-five degrees against those square and illogical European pillows, my pinky occasionally going numb, I had to finally admit that Twitter was not a distraction from reality but representative of it, a projection of the human drives and preoccupations that with free time and publishing platforms had been allowed to multiply and evolve. The superficiality this encouraged—pithiness and oversimplification were rewarded—felt appropriate not merely because it mimicked the way most of us choose to move through life but also because it had compounded those aspects of life that felt so desperate and precipitous.
Time spent this way was worse, but at least it was faster. Spending three hours on Twitter does not feel like three hours; that’s the danger and the appeal. In New York I’d downloaded programs and installed plug-ins with names like StayFocused, Chrome Nanny, SelfControl, and Freedom, which were designed to block you from visiting particular websites for a set amount of time, but the problem with those was you had to turn them on, and besides I still had the phone, on which I had never downloaded any of these aids because I suspected that any day now I would throw it out the window. When the possibility of approval and validation I found online was eliminated I did not miss it as much as I would have assumed; I liked the approval and validation, a lot, but deep down I had always known these affirmations were unsta
ble, not indicative of anything but passing recognition or, in the case of the reliable cadre of anonymous men who responded to everything I posted, sexual attraction. Even the come-ons were illusory, inspired by my virtual persona and not myself, which rendered the paranoid analysis initiated by each private message even more ridiculous, a whole person analyzing a composite’s response to a composite. What I missed, now, in bed in Berlin, was not the attention but the pursuit of it, having even a pathetic project to distract me from the slowly passing minutes. No joke or complaint or article or breaking news would have sated me, but each fragment would have distracted me for a moment, and those moments would have been strung together by waiting, not only for more moments but also for news of something large and encompassing that would shift us out of this place and back where we belonged. If there were going to be such a large and encompassing shift we’d hear about it first on Twitter. Throughout my childhood I’d been warned that I’d grow up to spend a significant portion of my time doing something I could barely stand, but I’d been led to believe I would be paid for it. When I worked at the website, I would often have the distinct thought, appearing in my head as a full sentence visualized, that I want to kill myself. By this I didn’t mean that I wanted to actually end my life but that I wanted to enact something drastic that would eliminate all my tedious problems and erase any obligation that I was not enthusiastic about fulfilling, and also make a statement to those around me that I meant business. I want to kill myself was a sudden expression that recurred discretely rather than developed. Now, in Berlin, on the internet, with no obligations yet nevertheless somehow trapped, knowing that my escape could only be achieved through purposeful examination, the purposeful examination being itself the escape, I felt a strong desire to no longer have anything to do with anyone, but I didn’t want to have to take any action to achieve that.
