Room for Doubt

by Wendy Lesser

  I was not, before I went to Berlin, a particularly musical person. Like most people of my age and class, I had learned to play an instrument as a child (in my case it was the violin), but I had not been very good at it, and the minute I stopped playing, at the age of thirteen or so, I forgot how to read a score. As an adult, I became interested in opera, but I tended to come at it from the theatrical rather than the musical side. I am fond of saying about myself that I do not have a non-narrative bone in my body, and opera fed this side of me, though it's true that with composers I truly loved, like Rossini, I would buy and listen to the recordings at home without having a clue about what was happening in the plot. I also went to a fair number of concerts and enjoyed them amateurishly.

  But my real access to music is and has always been through dance. I cannot, in general, remember melodic passages, but if I have seen a dance performed to a piece of music, those particular passages stay with me; and whereas I remain utterly ignorant about most aspects of music theory, I can parse the rhythm of a musical piece almost instinctively. Much of my feeling for music can be traced back to my favorite choreographer, Mark Morris, whose own musicality is his most commonly noted attribute. A number of the recordings I have bought over the years are pieces I was first exposed to through his dances, and even my growing interest in vocal music can perhaps be traced to his affection for the human voice. But this becomes one of those chicken-and-egg questions, for in order to fall instantly under Mark Morris's spell, as I did when I first saw his work, I must have had some musical sensibility on which he could begin to build. In any case, the ear I brought with me to Berlin had been trained by Morris's choreography to be receptive, even if it had been trained in very little else.

  During the several months I was in Berlin, I went to an average of three musical performances a week; some weeks I even went to five or six. This was not only because the quality was so high (though it almost always was), nor just that the tickets were so inexpensive (though government subsidies insured that they were: you could regularly get a good seat at the opera for less than a quarter of what it would have cost in San Francisco or New York). Part of the reason I took to Berlin's music so avidly was that it seemed so closely bound up with the life of the city. All sorts of people listened to live classical music in Berlin: students in jeans, provincial women dressed up in dirndl-like outfits, foreigners, locals, people with money, people without. (There was even one homeless-looking man—an American, I thought, judging by the one time I heard him speak—who showed up at most of the concerts I did and seemed always to get in at the last minute for free.) Nor was concert attendance just a form of display or recreation, as it so often seems in American cities. These Berliners knew their stuff, and they weren't shy about expressing their response to the performances. You could learn a lot about musical performance standards just by sitting among them.

  They knew how to be silent, too, which is at least as important an attribute in an audience. I remember the first concert I heard in the Berlin Philharmonic hall, an auditorium ingeniously designed to convey the softest notes, the loudest chords, and every shade of volume in between. Sitting there waiting for the Brahms Requiem to begin, I realized that I had never heard precisely that quality of silence before—a silence that was a combination of audience attentiveness and acoustical perfection.

  In order to attend this particular Brahms concert (which wasn't even performed by the fabled Philharmonic orchestra itself, just a visiting group from Stuttgart), I had to forgo a much-praised performance of La Traviata at the Staatsoper that night. I also had to overcome my initial distaste for the Berliner Philharmoniker building, with its scaly gold-toned skin glinting in the trafficky mess near Potsdamer Platz. My idea, to the extent I can now reconstruct it, was that I would try the venue just once, and then confine myself as much as possible to the more attractive neighborhood around the Staatsoper and the Konzerthaus, an area that East Germany had fortunately been too poor to remodel.

  But, as so often when one quells an initial and largely imaginary aversion, I was to become hopelessly smitten with the Philharmoniker, so that even its local S-Bahn station—a vast space containing an as-yet-unfinished train line, complete with pristine white staircases and untraveled tracks, which always reminded me of a Fritz Lang set—came to seem welcoming and attractive because of its pleasurable associations. I was to become addicted, in particular, to Simon Rattle's performances, so that I began to refuse to leave town, even for a weekend, if I knew that one of his Philharmonic concerts was coming up. My husband, attempting to budge me from this position, pointed out that I would be missing an infinite number of performances after we left Berlin, so I had better learn to live with this condition; but, as with all such attempts to dissuade addicts, this only made me cling more insistently to my precious Philharmonic tickets.

  On this first occasion, though, it was the auditorium rather than the conductor or the orchestra that won me over. As I sat in my cheap but excellent seat, feeling the waves of the German Requiem reverberate through my body and basking in the cunningly designed intimacy of the Philharmonic hall, I understood (or perhaps it would be more accurate to say “believed,” since only time will prove the truth of this perception) that music had suddenly gained a new importance in my life, and that I myself had become a slightly different person as a result.

  Nor did the magic end when I left the concert hall. Joining the crowd of satisfied audience members at the bus stop just outside the Philharmonic's front door, I surged with them aboard the overstuffed Number 200 bus that bore us convivially to Zoo Station. There I mounted the not-yet-familiar steps that led to the Potsdam-bound regional express platform and waited about five minutes for the train to pull in. When it did, I saw through the lighted windows of the nearest compartment my Traviata-going friends, who had just boarded the express at Friedrichstrasse at the end of their evening's performance. So natural did this seem, so consistent with the Midsummer-Night's-Dream-like nature of my newly acquired musical attentiveness, that I barely registered surprise at the happy coincidence. My friends, too, seemed shockingly unshocked by my sudden reappearance in their midst; all they wanted to do was tell me how wonderful the opera had been, just as I only wanted to babble away at them about the Brahms Requiem.

  That experience encapsulated, for me, one of the things that made Berlin so special: its weird and unpredictable combination of smalltown intimacy with worldclass sophistication. The smalltownishness verged on the absurd. My husband and I could hardly go out on a Saturday night, in this city of over three million people, without running into someone we knew—and we only knew about thirty other people in town. The city seemed strangely underpopulated (actually, it is underpopulated, compared with its pre-war self), and as a result we could almost always get a ticket to any event we wanted to attend. Yet these events, which ranged from operas to concerts to strange, hybrid forms (like a grippingly theatrical all-male Così fan tutte, performed to piano music for four hands, that we saw in a little upstairs cabaret theater on Neukölln's Karl Marx Strasse), were consistently better than anything we would have been likely to see had we gone out three nights a week in London or Paris. And then, when we came out of these performances, there was none of the usual searching around for a place to eat—everything in Berlin stayed open late, and opened up early too, and remained open all through the day, so that one could conceivably spend from eleven a.m. to three a.m. in the same bistro— and at the end of the evening there was always a middle-of-the-night train you could catch to get home. All this seemed to mark Berlin as the most worldly and cosmopolitan kind of city. And yet it had none of the ingrained snobbishness or annoying self-esteem of most other capital cities. It somehow knew that it was just a jumped-up small town, at heart, and it made a virtue of the fact.

  I often heard people say—my friend Martin among them— that Berlin was basically a proletarian town. A proletarian town that contained three major opera companies, the world's best orchestra, and an incompa
rable art collection divided up among dozens of museums struck me as a rather humorous oxymoron, to say the least. But that was only because I was used to England and America, where art and culture were inextricably bound up with private money. In Germany, the state paid for all this, or a great deal of it, and the things I had been brought up to view as costly if essential luxuries were just plain essentials in Berlin. It was as if I had gone to sleep and woken up in some kind of socialist dream, but without the unpleasant appurtenances that socialist dreams often carry with them.

  And I did see what people meant about the proletarian character of the city. It was not just that Berlin lacked any hereditary aristocracy or any sizable class of successful businesspeople, though this was indeed true, but that these notable absences gave rise to a whole set of urban attitudes unlike anything I had ever seen in a metropolis before. There was none of that looking over one's shoulder to see how well or poorly everyone else was doing, and there was none of that desperate competition for scarce luxuries—these being two of the defining characteristics of New York, say, with which Berlin is otherwise often compared. On the contrary, the notion of luxury or competition had almost no meaning in Berlin. There were one or two restaurants where it might be a little difficult to get an immediate reservation, but if you waited a few days the problem went away, and in any case no one cared about restaurants in Berlin. That was part of what made it a proletarian town.

  This aspect of Berlin perhaps became clearest to me the night I attended the Rem Koolhaas opening at the Neue Nationalgalerie. Because, as an architect, Koolhaas couldn't help but feel competitive with the marvelous Mies van der Rohe building in which his show was to take place, he had obtained special permission to stage the exhibit on the upper, glass-walled floor of the gallery, a huge space which is almost always left empty. In the event, this proved to be a disastrous aesthetic decision— both Mies's and Koolhaas's architecture looked the worse for it—but in prospect it had a terrific lure, and the opening party for the Koolhaas show was the hottest ticket in town. Or would have been, rather, if the opening had taken place in New York, where only the richest and artiest and most beautiful of the city's elite would have been allowed to attend. In Berlin, anyone who knew anyone who had ever had anything to do with the arts could get in; in fact, I don't think a single gate-crasher was turned away, despite the pretense at an invitation list. Nor did the guests resemble the usual New York crème de la crème. There were a large number of extremely scruffy architecture students, for instance, who spent most of the party sitting together on the floor of the museum's lower level, guzzling the free beer and chatting with their equally scruffy friends. Then there were the milling crowds of gawkers on the exhibition floor itself, none of whom displayed the bare minimum of fashion sense that would be required to walk safely down a Paris street. (Fashion, in general, is not something that has infiltrated Berlin. That too is part of what it means to be a proletarian town.) Some of the guests may well have been socially important people, but it was impossible to tell who they might be—they were all swirled together in the crowd, the important and the unimportant, with Rem Koolhaas in their midst, his tall, beaky profile only occasionally visible over the mass of heads.

  The Koolhaas opening wasn't the only place I encountered this raw, bracingly unrefined excitement. As a matter of fact, I saw a version of it every time I went to any kind of contemporary art event, even in those cases where the art wasn't particularly good. There is something about Berlin that allows it to combine its own brand of world-weary pessimism with a perennially youthful sense of enthusiasm, and this in turn means that a certain kind of naivety—a quality which one needs in order to constantly reinvent the arts for one's own generation—is available in Berlin in a form that is neither false nor stupid. It is a richly inflected innocence, a zeal for the new that is premised on both appreciation of and wariness about the old. We have nothing like it in America. Every few years New York (and then the rest of the country) goes into a tortured soul-search and decides that we are all too ironic, that irony must now be thrown out so that something more—more what? more childlike? more authentic? more credulous?— something fresher and newer, at any rate, can be ushered in. But you cannot will such reforms, and in any case the thing that substitutes for irony, in America, is almost always worse than what it is replacing. In Berlin, on the other hand, there is no need to indulge in this kind of fruitless search for the uncorrupted, because the built-in German sense of bleakness (which lies deep within the culture, and which recent events have only confirmed) is able to coexist with a quite inspiring sense of optimistic inventiveness. The possibility that things are terrible does not obliterate the hope that they might also be great.

  It is something I am always looking for, this intelligent innocence, this case-hardened optimism. I thought I had found it once before in my life, in another country, in another time. When I was twenty-one, I went to live in England for two years, and I fell madly in love with the place in very much the same way I was later to fall for Berlin. That too was a difficult time in American history (my English stay encompassed the late stages of the Vietnam War, the Watergate hearings, and the televised fiery deaths of the Symbionese Liberation Army, among other gruesome events), and so I was perhaps more prone than usual to admire anything that was not America. But England offered more than this. It was a place that seemed to have left its glory days behind, and in the aftermath of empire it displayed what struck me as a certain becoming modesty.

  Success, in the England of that time, was seen as something brash and superficial, while honorable failure had its articulate adherents. The subtle and complex— whether in art, in politics, or in daily speech—took precedence over the easy and the obvious. Wisdom was more highly valued than information, but even information came in an appealing form: Penguin and Puffin books were cheap and attractive, the best British newspapers of that day were far more thoughtful and comprehensive than the New York Times, and the BBC made even television and radio into something smart and interesting. And while the life of the mind was acknowledged, so were the needs of the hungry body—not so much by the food per se (which was almost uniformly terrible, in the then-typical British manner) but through the overriding concern for public welfare. The Labor Party was still unflinchingly socialist in its aims, and most important functions were either state-run or state-subsidized. This included the arts, which flourished at a very high level: theater, literature, music, and sculpture offered the most outstanding examples, but the new National Film Theatre was also terrific, as was the Royal Ballet. And all of this—reading matter, medical care, films and plays, higher education, pub lunches, even rental housing— was affordable by almost anyone.

  Margaret Thatcher changed all this. She didn't act alone, of course: history, in the form of Ronald Reagan, Rubert Murdoch, and other destroyers of the public good, helped her out. I was shocked to see how completely an entire country could alter its basic nature, how quickly things that had once seemed permanent could disappear. Within less than a generation, Britain went from having the best newspapers in English to having the worst; a nation that had once been singularly decent and polite turned into a hive of ruthless rudeness; and daily life in London became more frenzied, more superficial, and more money-oriented than anything one normally saw in New York.

  So when I once again came across this dream, thirty years later in Berlin, I understood exactly how fragile it was. If anything, the commitment to the arts, the level of public education, and the connection between individual and common benefit seemed even deeper in Germany than they had in England. Lengthy newspaper commentaries on the latest opera production or political development, written by knowledgeable people with enormous space at their disposal, were a routine part of the German press, and it seemed impossible to imagine that these features, which the German readership took for granted, could ever disappear. But I knew that a mere decade or two of bottom-line business practices could wipe them out. Even while I was there, high
ly placed politicians and economists were talking about how the subsidies to the arts might have to be cut, in order to address Berlin's parlous financial condition. When I pointed out that the arts were exactly what could draw paying customers to the city, my native informants told me, yes, well, we know that, but try telling it to the legislators and the bookkeepers. In any case, I was ambivalent about the idea of drawing people to the city at all. Berlin's pleasing uncrowdedness—the fact that it had not yet been discovered by tourists, so that you could stand for half an hour in the Vermeer room of the Gemälde-galerie without being interrupted by another soul—was part of what made me love the place. As with the London of the 1970s, Berlin's poverty was a significant aspect of its virtue, and I was loath to see it disappear. In my (admittedly limited) experience of Western cities, humane impecuniousness is too often replaced by ill-divided wealth, so that what seems an overall improvement is actually, for most people, a tangible loss. It was this fate, which had overtaken all the other cities I'd ever loved, that I most feared for Berlin.