You can’t ignore it. The minute you start to reflect on the things that happened here, trying to make sense of the history and madness of this place, you get distracted: T-shirts ice cream postcards coffee get your photo taken in an American GI uniform get your passport stamped at Checkpoint Charlie bus tours of the city—board here!
I will be the first to admit that tourists are largely responsible for this. We show up wanting to get our dose of so-called ostalgie (nostalgia for ost, the East). We get our passports stamped at Checkpoint Charlie (guilty, though only because I wanted to talk to the Algerian vendor) or take a driving tour in a Trabant, that infamously unreliable Eastern Bloc car. USA Today recently labeled this Communism-for-the-tourists “Iron Curtain irony,” noting that many who lived in the old East Berlin are actually, you know, kind of pissed off about it. For good reason: to reduce human misery to a theme park is not just to whitewash history but to glorify pain and suffering, to present long-term horrors as fleeting thrills and cheap entertainment.
Even for those to whom it’s not a theme park, it can still be a living museum, more somber but still essentially a war monument rather than a functioning city. The tourist to-do list here includes a day trip to Sachsenhausen, one of the Nazis’ first concentration camps (which Lee and I would visit a few days later); a tour of the infamous sites and grim living conditions of Soviet-era life in East Berlin; or the “Alternative City Tour” showcasing “streets, squats, subculture.”
This type of tourism is nothing new. “Slum tours,” for example, have been growing in popularity in the last twenty to thirty years. You can take a guided tour of Rio de Janeiro’s infamous favelas or a Slumdog Millionaire tour in Mumbai or a day trip through impoverished areas in Los Angeles, Kenya, and elsewhere. In Cambodia the Killing Fields near Phnom Penh have joined Angkor Wat as one of the country’s biggest tourist attractions. The rise of this sort of travel—“dark tourism” is the catchall term—is in large part, I think, a reaction against the sort of Grand Tour I was going on. It feels more authentic, less contrived. (The Anne Frank House, too, could be considered a stop on the “dark tourism” trail.)
Of course, “dark tourism” can still be a packaged, distorted view of reality. It’s not an either-or proposition: theme-parky or gritty. The most disconcerting, I think, is when it’s both, Nietzsche by way of Disney, when you feel like you’re stuck on a ride called It’s a Small, Sucky World After All (But Aren’t You Entertained by It?).
That’s what makes Berlin such a discordant place. The attitude seems to be “never forget, but don’t spend too much time remembering, either.” It makes for some serious cognitive dissonance, simultaneously overloading both the I-want-to-learn-about-the-world and the give-me-my-escapist-kitsch-fix parts of the brain.
Fusion cuisine at its
finest: the famous
German currywurst.
I kept coming back, though, to what Ines XVI said: You can’t make a museum out of an entire city. You can’t not mention the war here, but you can’t dwell on it, either. Go to one extreme and you cheapen the past; go to the other and you limit the present. You have to let the place evolve and be a functional home for its citizens—and visitors. To live is not just to remember.
In any case, I come back to this: in my day, taking an illicit photo of the guard at Checkpoint Charlie can get you a scowl from an actor. In Frommer’s day, it could get you shot. If we’re going to compare Berlin then and now, I’ll take now.
Our tour ended in the former East Berlin. Ines XVI told the story of the night the wall fell. She reminded us how recent that was, how the city and the country were still trying to figure out their identity and piece themselves back together. The old wounds may not have closed, but they have at least superficially begun to heal, in what is, in the slow march of history, basically the blink of an eye.
If you were to drop me into a random Berlin neighborhood, I probably wouldn’t be able to tell you if it was eastern or western. Aside from a few scattered dreary, blocky buildings, the side of town that was East Berlin looks exactly like the area that was West Berlin: same people, same landscape, same architecture, same tourist restaurants.
As we walked back toward the western part of the city, Lee and I paused for a moment to take in the scene. “Look down,” I said to Lee. Without realizing it, he had stopped directly on top of the cobblestones marking the former route of the wall. We both instinctively followed the line with our gaze, seeing where it went from here. It ended a short distance away, running into the outer wall of a new Marriott.
Even in Frommer’s day, the story of Berlin was about way more than the war, or war in general. Yes, there was that, but… Well, let’s turn to Frommer, in fine form on the first page of his Berlin chapter:
Berlin possesses a kind of sophistication that will not be found in the rest of Europe. The city lives on the brink of danger; its citizens live from day to day. And yet, this insecurity has resulted in alertness rather than resignation.
The more Lee and I walked around Berlin, the more we, too, found charm and thrills to go with the heavy doses of history-induced unease. Beyond the monuments and ostalgie is normal life, and even the tourist passing through and seeing the sights has to realize that the city is more than a history lesson with residents.
The area in which we were staying, Charlottenburg, was surprisingly nontouristy. Now that the east side of town was open to visitors—and was still something of a novelty to them—the tourist center of gravity had shifted in that direction. For once, Frommer had led us to peace and quiet. Our neighborhood had no museums, no major landmarks, no flash; it was just a nice, calm place filled with shops and, whaddyacallem, Germans. We felt very much at home, particularly since we soon discovered that the spot-the-tourist game was impossible—in appearance, attire, and manner, everyone seemed thoroughly American (at least to our white, middle-class definition of the archetype). So it was downright baffling to hear them speak German; it felt like a put-on for our benefit.
In its own way, this was even more strikingly odd than the truly foreign aspects of European culture. The tourist trail was full of sights and people and moments that superficially fit within my frame of reference but on second glance were entirely different. This sense of the uncanny, of not-quite-right versions of familiar things, is one of the greatest delights and mindblowers of travel on the beaten path—it’s the doppelgänger, not the complete stranger, who is most amusingly strange.
There were the teenagers on the U-Bahn performing an astonishing, soulful cover of the Cranberries’ “Zombie” (a song about the horrors of armed conflict, I couldn’t help but note), in German-accented mimicry of the Irish brogue of the original recording. The food carts selling not hot dogs but currywurst (cultural confusion squared!). The television sitcoms in an unfamiliar tongue but with all-too-familiar plot devices. Smaller details like the little glowing green and red men in the crosswalk signals—“Don’t cross yet,” Lee said as I stepped into the street. “We have to wait for the matador to turn into a leprechaun.”
The discreet poetry of the everyday but unexpected.
It was time for some Frommering. Lee and I headed down the Kurfürstendamm, a wide street populated with both the impossibly ritzy and the astonishingly kitschy, and home to several of Frommer’s recommended restaurants. Just one was still around, a big bistro called Berliner Kindl. You can’t miss it: the name is on the bright red awning and spelled out in yellow neon letters that glow above the bar.
As we took our seats, Lee started laughing. He pointed to the top of the drink menu, which was lying on the table. The text read, “Alt-Berliner Biersalon.” Below, in smaller type, was the name of the restaurant, heading a long list; there was a price after the words “Berliner Kindl.”
“I think Arthur got the name of this place wrong,” Lee said.
“Arthur wouldn’t do that,” I said.
“Well, he did. I’m pretty sure Berliner Kindl is the name of a beer, not the restaurant.”
“What are you saying? That he just saw the beer sign and assumed that was the name? Like thinking an American bar is called Miller Lite?”
Lee pointed to the drink list again and nodded. I didn’t want to believe it. I pulled all the menus and daily-special lists and random promotional materials from the little rack on the table.
“Well… damn it, Arthur,” I said. “You’re letting us down.”
I was less concerned about the name of the place than the fact that we were, finally, going to eat some real German food. For two days, we’d been avoiding it, since none of Frommer’s other recommendations were open and since Lee and I shared a fondness for Thai curries and doner kebabs—the most European of all foods, I’d say, based on sheer ubiquity—a Continent-unifier in the form of veal, chicken, or lamb shaved from a massive, spit-roasted block of meat and tucked into a pita.
Here’s the thing. My gut is not an iron one; indeed, given its fragility, it may be made of parchment paper. By this point, I may have gotten a bit more confident, but I sure as hell hadn’t gotten over my single greatest phobia in life: German food. I understand they’ve been eating it for a few years. I realize that many of them—and perhaps one or two non-Germans—like the stuff. But it all seems intentionally calibrated for maximum lack of enjoyment: heavy, dense, not especially flavorful, and likely to contain animal parts that I’d actually rather not consume knowingly. Since I didn’t speak the language, I was terrified of accidentally ordering the daily special of Boiled Sphincter Stuffed with Eyeballs mit Raw Onions.
Arthur Frommer, bless him, translates some of the expected menu items, like turtle soup (Schildkrotensuppe) or pig’s knuckles (Eisbein)… or, yikes, brains (Hirn). He also apparently understands that not everyone enjoys weird foods. What’s interesting, though, is how the concept of “weird” changed between then and now. Frommer notes the sense of dread many of us have when staring at a foreign menu and says, “Absent a translation of these exotic phrases, dinner becomes The Big Surprise. You stab blindly at the bill of fare, hope for the best, and usually end up with Octopus Soup or some similar delicacy.”
Yes, that’s his prime example of scary food: octopus! Eek! Sea monster! Today, when sushi is available at many grocery stores and calamari is on the menu even at dive bars, octopus just doesn’t sound particularly odd. Brains, though? Yeah. Frickin’ terrifying.
I settled on spaetzle. It seemed the most innocuous option—noodles, cheese. Even so, when the platter of food arrived, I sort of expected to find entrails and brain stems and who knows what else at the bottom of that steaming pile—they’d probably spring out at me like a slimy jack-in-the-box. I imagined the headline in the next day’s Der Spiegel: “Tourist dies in spaetzle mishap.” Subhead: “Last words: ‘I should have stuck with pastries.’”
“Well, at least we’re finally eating authentically,” I said ruefully as I started to pick at my food. “I suppose Arthur would approve of that.”
“Yeah, I’m sure this is exactly what Berliners eat every day,” Lee said. “A huge meal in a tourist restaurant.”
I’d been so nervous that I hadn’t taken stock of our fellow patrons. Sure enough, though: all tourists.
“With a City Safari Tour bus letting people off out front,” I noted. And a massive sandwich board on the sidewalk listing the menu in six languages, and sometimes multiple languages in one listing, as in “Groker Baconburger mit Käse und Pommes Frites.”
“Totally authentic,” Lee said. After a few moments, he added, “This feels like some tourist version of Cheers. We could make a sitcom out of it.”
“Schnitzel, Spaetzle, and a Girl Named Gretel,” I said. “That could be the name.”
“Yeah!” Lee laughed. “Okay, so it’s a tourist bar, and our pilot episode opens with them hiring this new manager, Gretel. And she sort of shakes things up, brings a new attitude to this place.”
“Maybe it’s a Berlin theme bar,” I said.
“With a wall.” Lee nodded. “The decor and menu are different on the east and west sides. More bleak in the east.”
“But also more heavily themed in the east,” I said, “to give it some kitschy appeal. And the host stand is Checkpoint Charlie.”
“Yes!”
We both laughed for a moment, then realized what we were laughing at.
My mother also had war on her mind—a different war.
“Got a bitter letter from Jo—2 pages of anti-Vietnam from my apolitical friend was quite a shock,” she wrote from Florence on November 4, 1967. “Larry’s brother is going over, as I guess you know.” Left unsaid in that letter was her own apprehension about my father’s impending air force enlistment, although it came through loud and clear in other correspondence, prompting my father to write, “Don’t be so down on Air Force life even before you try it—to accept something as bad before proven so is sure to make it so.” He went on to criticize the French antiwar talking points that Mom had been espousing, labeling French president Charles de Gaulle’s foreign policy arrogant and “inane”—although, given his overall tone, Dad was merely resigned to air force life, not at all eager for it. He went on active duty a year later, in October 1968, and was sent to an air force base in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, where he and Mom were the token Yanks and token hippies. Though Dad was never sent to Vietnam, there was always that unspoken, unnerving possibility.
American foreign policy, then as now, was a topic of much conversation. Like me, my mother felt compelled to keep a low profile as an American abroad in an age of tumult, although neither of us went as far as affixing a Canadian flag to our bags—a tactic used by some Americans-in-hiding both in the 1960s and today.
Among various other incidents during my trip, Drunk Girl in Amsterdam had complained bitterly about the U.S. war in Iraq and George W. Bush. I couldn’t say I disagreed, but I felt obliged to point out, “Yeah, well, he’s gone now. Back in Texas, puttering around the ranch—not in the White House.”
“You know what I do like about America?” one of Drunk Girl’s friends said. “Dixie cups—is that what you call them? I went to a party in New York, and they had these plastic cups—they were red and big. We don’t have those. You can fit a lot of beer in there.” She was completely earnest.
(So there you have it, diplomats. Start handing out the party cups.)
My mother waded into the foreign-relations fray, too, finding herself on the receiving end of some thought-provoking criticisms of U.S. policies. Some then-and-now parallels are especially striking. Ann’s fiancé, Terry, got into a discussion with a student from South Africa about “the Arab-Israel bit,” Mom reported, and I was depressed to realize that roughly the same conversation had probably taken place in the same hostel every day since then.
It’s sometimes easy to forget that ours is not the only era of discord and fear. The world has always been a scary, violent place. It’s just that we forget the full picture; memory edits history, erasing complexity as it sees fit. So on the one hand, we forget that the Berlin of the past was more than a place of war and tumult, and on the other, we forget that travel—life—in eras past was not truly more innocent. The truth is, we do not, in fact, live in particularly exceptional times.
When I was about eight or ten—right around the time the Eastern Bloc was crumbling and all those adults were telling me to remember this history in the making—my worldly mother took me to see the musical Cabaret. It is set in, well, a cabaret called the Kit Kat Klub in 1930s Berlin, against the backdrop of the Nazis’ rise to power. Mom had seen it years before but had forgotten this key detail: it is unquestionably, empirically, emphatically risqué and dark. It was my first introduction to leather. And pasties. And, wow, lack thereof. As Mom would later say, “No wonder there were no other kids there.” It left more of an impression on me than those grainy images of the wall did, I’ll tell you that.
Frommer’s 1963 descriptions of Berlin’s bars and clubs make it sound like the musical got it right: the nightlife here, fu
eled by the city’s fatalistic energy, is “highly esoteric and intense” and often “erotic and exotic.” Consider:
The Resi: The famous Berlin nightspot where telephones and pneumatic message tubes connect each of the 200 tables in its cavernous ballroom. Women outnumber males here three to one. If you’re even slightly better looking than Yogi Berra, you’ll no sooner sit down than the tubes will go pow! pow! pow! carrying messages from the scores of lonely Berlin femmes who spotted you the moment you entered.
Der Goldene Hufeisin: [G]uests can ride a horse (!) on the combination dance floor–riding rink (price for a trot is 50 pfennigs, a gallop is a stiff 150 marks).
Eden’s Saloon: [P]acked not only with happy young people, but also with every conceivable type of whiz-bang invention and entertainment device.… In one room, for instance, the bar-maid delivers drinks by placing them in a wicker basket hung from a clothes line, which then transports the basket to waiting customers. In the same room, home-made movies—like the one containing surreptitious shots of babes on the beach in St. Tropez, are shown continuously on the bar-room wall, while an American-imitating folksinger bellows from a balcony.
Lee’s eyes bulged when he read the listings. “There’s no way any of these places are still open.”
And thank God, I added to myself. I was perfectly happy to be spared from riding a horse on a dance floor.
Our Frommering confirmed that, yes, they were all closed.
Europe on 5 Wrong Turns a Day: One Man, Eight Countries, One Vintage Travel Guide Page 12
