Love People, Not Places

How can you love a place instead of a person?
How can you think a place has a personality?
People make the personality of a place.
Love people, not places!
— MC Paul Barman, “Love People Not Places”

I have now spent a week in Berlin, trying as best I can to get some sense of what it might be like to live in the place. Getting up every weekday and making the trek to the office by train and underground. Going to the shops. Exploring the restaurant scene. Avoiding, at all costs, any kind of tourist destination, unless you count walking past the East Side Gallery that happens to sit next to my hotel. I didn’t go to “Checkpoint Charlie”, I didn’t wander any great museums, or wander into any ancient cathedrals. I think I saw the Brandenburg Gate only from the back seat of a taxi after dark.

I’ve been here before. It’s why I came. Something about this city felt like something, something different, at a time in my life where I find myself feeling increasingly trapped and yet unwelcome in the country in which I live. I needed a way out, or at least the hope of one, and then I found myself in Berlin. And somehow, in spite of its efforts to repel me, I found myself loving the place. I had to come back, with more time and more freedom, to confirm it.

Berlin certainly makes no deliberate effort at first to be lovable. I know a German fellow online who loathes the place, and speaks of it only in curses whenever the subject is raised. Conversations with other Germans since has somewhat confirmed a sense that many outside of Berlin quite often despise it.

There’s certainly plenty to dislike about Berlin. It’s dirty. It often smells terrible. The transit system is slow and unreliable. The cell service is awful. The water is awful. No one takes credit cards without a sense of grudging resentment. Navigating the place is at times almost impossible even with modern GPS. At times the whole city feels as if its been neglected, except for the parts undergoing rapid gentrification. The celebrated “German efficiency” seems to be nowhere in sight here, so if it’s not a national myth, I can see why non-Berliners might detest the place. It certainly tries my patience the first day or two of any trip here.

But there’s two sides to Berlin.

Berlin the place, the edifice, the ragged hodgepodge of new and old, ruined and remade, is as unwelcoming a facade as you could expect. It defies you to exist within it, or is at least indifferent to your presence.

Yet it is in that very unfeeling chaotic edifice that you begin to see what is possible beneath that indifference. If no one matters, no one is looking, no one is watching, then everyone can just … be. Be who and what they are.

The streets and trains and bars of Berlin are another kind of hodgepodge too: a hodgepodge of people. Young, old, native, immigrant, straight, queer. Everyone is here, and everyone is, at least, not so much more unwelcome than anyone else. The chaotic throng of the weird and the mundane both creates wonders, and dulls them of their shock. They simply are. Now get out of the way, I’m trying to get off the tram.

I’ve spoken before of the Nordic Stare. The silent (and sometimes not so silent) glare of the Finn or the Dane at the sight of someone who does not Follow The Order Of Things, that follows you everywhere you go as a trans woman in the supposedly liberal utopia of the North.

I don’t get that stare here.

I can walk through town dressed to the nines in full platform heels and stockings, or full fluid butch with makeup and combat boots, and not receive so much as a blink.

I am just another person like anyone else. You can, and probably will, see weirder shit at the club on any given night of the week. Hell, just this afternoon, apropos of nothing, there was a man in Ostbanhof in a velvet Super Mario onesie. Just because, I guess. One of my favorite places in town is a queer feminist anti-fascist sex shop. That’s Berlin. Welcome to the chaos.

In some senses, both Finland and Berlin are indifferent to my presence, but where they differ is in the nature of that indifference, in the tone of it. Finland holds an antipathy to difference; Berlin simply isn’t impressed by it anymore. Finland is uncomfortable with the mad and the strange, and would rather they go away and stop bothering everyone, but remains too polite to actually say so. Berlin knows we’re all a bit mad.

It isn’t perfect of course. I have caught a few stray glances from the oldest among the crowd, and certainly the issue of wider German politics is in a scary place right now. I’m also not entirely on-board with a certain subtle undercurrent of capitalist gloating in a city that still bears Karl Marx’s name on the streets. Gentrification threatens to water down Berlin into another shitty tech city like what became of San Francisco and Amsterdam, and drive out anyone who can’t afford the spiraling rents that come with it.

Yet the fight is not yet over. Recently, a combined union of countless activists groups managed to scare off the almighty Google, even as the neighborhood around the East Gallery is suddenly a wash in high-rent high-rises. Time will tell.

I hope it wins though, that the Berlin spirit survives it. It has survived so much, after all. And right now, it feels like a place I could call home one day, with the right cat and the right friends. Only time will tell.