The following essay is posted here for use by people in English discussion groups exploring the theme: "Tourists and Tourism: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly"
Good-bye Berlin
Lisa Neal-Rendall, 2013
I am hardly the first to bid farewell to Berlin. In 1939 Christopher Isherwood authored a short autobiographical novel set in the Weimar Republic. His « Good-bye to Berlin, » a city he had come to love, was forced upon him by the rise of the Nazis and their violent efforts to quash the decadence of the German capital. This was a world the young, gay Isherwood had found liberating and exciting. Decades later in his new expatriate home of Los Angeles, Isherwood still yearned for pre-war Berlin. We probably all did when, in the early 1970’s we saw the play and film « Cabaret » based on his novel.
The movie « Good Bye Lenin » (2003) was one of the first films to address the issue of nostalgia after the fall of the Berlin wall. Like Isherwood’s departure from Berlin, this good-bye was forced insofar as the Berlin to which this protagonist’s mother was attached---the DDR Socialist Berlin---had come to an abrupt halt. The film was a farewell to a way of thinking and living, to an ideology that East Germans had been force-fed for nearly forty years.
No serious political event like the rise of Nazism or the fall of the wall was a catalyst for my abandonment of Berlin. And yet I too spent nearly four decades attached to this place. I was perhaps attached to the images I had formed by watching movies set in the city.
My first encounter with Germany was in 1972 when I convinced my older sisters to take me, an impressionable teenager, to Europe. We started our journey in Germany, a country I knew only through black-and-white, or Technicolor grey, World War II movies. Unfortunately, as beautiful as parts of the German countryside were, I wasn’t able to rid myself of my Hollywood-inspired stereotypes. When I started to jay-walk across a street in Wiesbaden and an elderly woman roughly took my arm to march me over to the traffic light, the image of the rule-bound German was reinforced. I could understand that this woman, by virtue of her advanced age, was a member of the old order, but I nonetheless wanted to find a place with less discipline. We changed our plans and traveled to France, where I discovered a heightened sense of individualism, a trait I mistakenly understood as personal freedom. This adolescent experience fed into two decisions: first, to learn French and drop German, and many years later, to settle in France.
But I am getting ahead of myself. In the two and a half decades between my first visit to Europe and my immigration to France in the late 1990’s I visited Berlin on a dozen occasions. I had German-speaking friends, and one in particular was a true Berliner whose family had been separated by the wall. For that reason he was allowed to cross the east-west divide and I, despite my US nationality, crossed not at « Checkpoint Charlie » where most Americans did, but rather with my friend at the Friedrickstrasse Bahnhof, the infamous « Palace of Tears » (Tränenpalast) where Berlin families said their wrenching good-byes. I was an outsider, to be sure, but I felt a connection to this place and its people that was, I believed, close to what had been expressed by the West in the form of the Berlin airlift in 1948, and by President Kennedy in his address at the Berlin Wall in 1961.
Physically, West Berlin was not connected to the West; it was an island and utterly unlike any other city. To go there, you had to make the effort of crossing a great expanse of East Germany, and an even greater effort to visit East Berlin[1] if you were so inclined. In the late 1970’s and 1980’s, East Berlin offered classical music concerts and books that were cheaper than their Western counterparts. West Berlin offered something far different: an anti-establishment, bohemian atmosphere. During these years any German young man who established residence in West Berlin was exempt from military service, and thus an anti-war contingent flocked to the city. The decadence of the Weimar Republic had died, yes, but there was an alternative, creative culture in West Berlin that attracted a new generation of Isherwood-like individuals like David Bowie. No one would think of reprimanding a jay-walker in this city.
This was all very exciting for a girl from the hills of South Dakota! Now the images Hollywood put in my imagination were of John LeCarré’s spies. Being followed by the East German secret police---which happened twice---made me feel like an actor in a Cold War thriller. It was only when the East German border guard kept me much longer than usual in 1986, asking me why I had come so frequently to East Berlin, that I began to worry about other aspects of spy movies : the jails, the lack of due process. That was my last trip across the East German border. Who could have guessed then that the wall would stand for only three more years?
In 1989 I rushed to Berlin to witness what I thought would be the dawn of a new age. East German border guards were still on payroll and stood motionless as throngs of East Berliners flowed into the western part of the city.
More visits followed. In 1991, driving a rent-a-car for the first time through the eastern part of a now-unified Berlin, I saw that « MacDonalds » had provided street signs adorned with their logo. Clearly life was changing at a fast pace. A decade later I discovered the neighborhood of Prenzlauerberg that was being renovated and gentrified; it boasted the highest birth rate in all of Europe. Despite these changes, Berlin remained in my mind special, different from other cities; its occupants special, its visitors like me privileged to experience it.
I walked the streets and the cinematographic images that came to my mind were no longer from WWII, no longer le Carré’s people, but rather the East German spy depicted in « The Lives of Others » ("Das Leben der Anderen"). Why is it that the films that color our perception of a place are so often out of sync with what we’re actually seeing?
But the visit in the spring of 2013 was different, and I had no film images to guide me.
For the most part, I wasn’t able to spend my time with Berliners or German friends. My interaction with people in the city exposed me for what I am: a foreigner. Worse yet, a tourist. I crossed a street against the light and a woman on the other side of the street, dutifully waiting for the light to change, chastised me for my imprudence. She, as opposed to the woman who reprimanded me in 1972, was not of the « old order. » This woman was in her forties, younger than I was.
I went with my family to a crowded cafe in Prenzlauerberg. The unsmiling waitress barked orders at us : “sit there, give me that extra chair, don’t move the table”. My daughter and I exchanged glances. The waitress was my daughter’s age: twenty.
In Potsdam I made the mistake of placing my purse on the table where we’d just finished lunch. Again a reprimand. Again from a person younger than I.
As we were planning a visit to the Schloss Charlottenburg we read a recent commentary on Tripadvisor.com about how surly the coat-check man is. We went and he was.
As such examples accumulated I started to seriously wonder. Has something changed in Berlin? I naturally opened my computer in search of an answer. And there I found evidence of an anti-tourist movement, or if not a true movement, at least a litany of acts against visitors : stickers in Kreuzberg announcing « Berlin doesn’t love you ; » a sign in Friedrichshain, « Noisy tourists go home ! » ; a message painted on the window of a gallery, « Sorry no entry for hipsters from the U.S. » And this animus extended beyond mere visitors to include investors ; in the summer of 2012, a hundred protesters attacked participants at a business convention.
The hatred toward non-Berliners has now reached such a point that the inevitable has happened: an anti-anti-foreigner group has been founded. The organizer, an anti-fascist who goes by a pseudonym for fear of reprisals, was quoted as saying that "The anti-foreigner thing started as a bit of a joke but now it is much more serious. This is critical, it is sneaking into mainstream thinking – it's almost being perceived as normal to dislike tourists. »
The article goes on to offer a profile of the foreigner-bashers : « Much of the anger is spearheaded by other anti-fascists. The punks of Kreuzberg, who once built their ideologies around a hatred of Nazis and right-wing thinking, are using this same energy to blame tourists for driving them out of the neighbourhoods they love. » [2]
Have we come full circle ? Are some Berliners today the descendants of members of earlier anti-establishment movements, not only the anti-fascists but also those who questioned the policies of the East German communists as well, the kind of people depicted in « the Lives of Others »?
Is it possible that Berlin is, in a way, staying true to itself by refusing to succumb to the big money that fuels urban transformation? [3]
My problem is that I, a middle-class, middle-aged, non-German tourist, find myself on the side of the establishment, the people whose money---the over ten billion euros generated per year by tourism-- pays for the kind of changes that disrupt the lives of long-time residents.[4] As there is nothing I can do to change my nationality, mother-tongue, or socio-economic level, I am inevitably perceived—indeed I am---one of those « others » in the eyes of the foreigner-bashers.
Witnessing Germans being « anti-other, » is disconcerting for anyone who knows Germany’s sad history in the 20th century. This has brought me to say good-bye to Berlin more than the annoyance of being treated rudely by some of the city’s residents. Would I return if someone made a film that romanticized the foreigner-bashers as rebels with a (good) cause? Hard to say, but perhaps. My perception of the city has always been through the lens of a movie camera.
[1] including accepting to change a larger amount of West German marks for the largely worthless East German marks.
[2] Guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 4 December 2012
[3] Tourist-bashing turns ugly in Berlin, Sophie Duvernoy, Sep 13, 2012
[4] Some of whom, the articles point out, are not native Berliners either….just residents of longer duration.
Lisa Neal-Rendall, 2013
I am hardly the first to bid farewell to Berlin. In 1939 Christopher Isherwood authored a short autobiographical novel set in the Weimar Republic. His « Good-bye to Berlin, » a city he had come to love, was forced upon him by the rise of the Nazis and their violent efforts to quash the decadence of the German capital. This was a world the young, gay Isherwood had found liberating and exciting. Decades later in his new expatriate home of Los Angeles, Isherwood still yearned for pre-war Berlin. We probably all did when, in the early 1970’s we saw the play and film « Cabaret » based on his novel.
The movie « Good Bye Lenin » (2003) was one of the first films to address the issue of nostalgia after the fall of the Berlin wall. Like Isherwood’s departure from Berlin, this good-bye was forced insofar as the Berlin to which this protagonist’s mother was attached---the DDR Socialist Berlin---had come to an abrupt halt. The film was a farewell to a way of thinking and living, to an ideology that East Germans had been force-fed for nearly forty years.
No serious political event like the rise of Nazism or the fall of the wall was a catalyst for my abandonment of Berlin. And yet I too spent nearly four decades attached to this place. I was perhaps attached to the images I had formed by watching movies set in the city.
My first encounter with Germany was in 1972 when I convinced my older sisters to take me, an impressionable teenager, to Europe. We started our journey in Germany, a country I knew only through black-and-white, or Technicolor grey, World War II movies. Unfortunately, as beautiful as parts of the German countryside were, I wasn’t able to rid myself of my Hollywood-inspired stereotypes. When I started to jay-walk across a street in Wiesbaden and an elderly woman roughly took my arm to march me over to the traffic light, the image of the rule-bound German was reinforced. I could understand that this woman, by virtue of her advanced age, was a member of the old order, but I nonetheless wanted to find a place with less discipline. We changed our plans and traveled to France, where I discovered a heightened sense of individualism, a trait I mistakenly understood as personal freedom. This adolescent experience fed into two decisions: first, to learn French and drop German, and many years later, to settle in France.
But I am getting ahead of myself. In the two and a half decades between my first visit to Europe and my immigration to France in the late 1990’s I visited Berlin on a dozen occasions. I had German-speaking friends, and one in particular was a true Berliner whose family had been separated by the wall. For that reason he was allowed to cross the east-west divide and I, despite my US nationality, crossed not at « Checkpoint Charlie » where most Americans did, but rather with my friend at the Friedrickstrasse Bahnhof, the infamous « Palace of Tears » (Tränenpalast) where Berlin families said their wrenching good-byes. I was an outsider, to be sure, but I felt a connection to this place and its people that was, I believed, close to what had been expressed by the West in the form of the Berlin airlift in 1948, and by President Kennedy in his address at the Berlin Wall in 1961.
Physically, West Berlin was not connected to the West; it was an island and utterly unlike any other city. To go there, you had to make the effort of crossing a great expanse of East Germany, and an even greater effort to visit East Berlin[1] if you were so inclined. In the late 1970’s and 1980’s, East Berlin offered classical music concerts and books that were cheaper than their Western counterparts. West Berlin offered something far different: an anti-establishment, bohemian atmosphere. During these years any German young man who established residence in West Berlin was exempt from military service, and thus an anti-war contingent flocked to the city. The decadence of the Weimar Republic had died, yes, but there was an alternative, creative culture in West Berlin that attracted a new generation of Isherwood-like individuals like David Bowie. No one would think of reprimanding a jay-walker in this city.
This was all very exciting for a girl from the hills of South Dakota! Now the images Hollywood put in my imagination were of John LeCarré’s spies. Being followed by the East German secret police---which happened twice---made me feel like an actor in a Cold War thriller. It was only when the East German border guard kept me much longer than usual in 1986, asking me why I had come so frequently to East Berlin, that I began to worry about other aspects of spy movies : the jails, the lack of due process. That was my last trip across the East German border. Who could have guessed then that the wall would stand for only three more years?
In 1989 I rushed to Berlin to witness what I thought would be the dawn of a new age. East German border guards were still on payroll and stood motionless as throngs of East Berliners flowed into the western part of the city.
More visits followed. In 1991, driving a rent-a-car for the first time through the eastern part of a now-unified Berlin, I saw that « MacDonalds » had provided street signs adorned with their logo. Clearly life was changing at a fast pace. A decade later I discovered the neighborhood of Prenzlauerberg that was being renovated and gentrified; it boasted the highest birth rate in all of Europe. Despite these changes, Berlin remained in my mind special, different from other cities; its occupants special, its visitors like me privileged to experience it.
I walked the streets and the cinematographic images that came to my mind were no longer from WWII, no longer le Carré’s people, but rather the East German spy depicted in « The Lives of Others » ("Das Leben der Anderen"). Why is it that the films that color our perception of a place are so often out of sync with what we’re actually seeing?
But the visit in the spring of 2013 was different, and I had no film images to guide me.
For the most part, I wasn’t able to spend my time with Berliners or German friends. My interaction with people in the city exposed me for what I am: a foreigner. Worse yet, a tourist. I crossed a street against the light and a woman on the other side of the street, dutifully waiting for the light to change, chastised me for my imprudence. She, as opposed to the woman who reprimanded me in 1972, was not of the « old order. » This woman was in her forties, younger than I was.
I went with my family to a crowded cafe in Prenzlauerberg. The unsmiling waitress barked orders at us : “sit there, give me that extra chair, don’t move the table”. My daughter and I exchanged glances. The waitress was my daughter’s age: twenty.
In Potsdam I made the mistake of placing my purse on the table where we’d just finished lunch. Again a reprimand. Again from a person younger than I.
As we were planning a visit to the Schloss Charlottenburg we read a recent commentary on Tripadvisor.com about how surly the coat-check man is. We went and he was.
As such examples accumulated I started to seriously wonder. Has something changed in Berlin? I naturally opened my computer in search of an answer. And there I found evidence of an anti-tourist movement, or if not a true movement, at least a litany of acts against visitors : stickers in Kreuzberg announcing « Berlin doesn’t love you ; » a sign in Friedrichshain, « Noisy tourists go home ! » ; a message painted on the window of a gallery, « Sorry no entry for hipsters from the U.S. » And this animus extended beyond mere visitors to include investors ; in the summer of 2012, a hundred protesters attacked participants at a business convention.
The hatred toward non-Berliners has now reached such a point that the inevitable has happened: an anti-anti-foreigner group has been founded. The organizer, an anti-fascist who goes by a pseudonym for fear of reprisals, was quoted as saying that "The anti-foreigner thing started as a bit of a joke but now it is much more serious. This is critical, it is sneaking into mainstream thinking – it's almost being perceived as normal to dislike tourists. »
The article goes on to offer a profile of the foreigner-bashers : « Much of the anger is spearheaded by other anti-fascists. The punks of Kreuzberg, who once built their ideologies around a hatred of Nazis and right-wing thinking, are using this same energy to blame tourists for driving them out of the neighbourhoods they love. » [2]
Have we come full circle ? Are some Berliners today the descendants of members of earlier anti-establishment movements, not only the anti-fascists but also those who questioned the policies of the East German communists as well, the kind of people depicted in « the Lives of Others »?
Is it possible that Berlin is, in a way, staying true to itself by refusing to succumb to the big money that fuels urban transformation? [3]
My problem is that I, a middle-class, middle-aged, non-German tourist, find myself on the side of the establishment, the people whose money---the over ten billion euros generated per year by tourism-- pays for the kind of changes that disrupt the lives of long-time residents.[4] As there is nothing I can do to change my nationality, mother-tongue, or socio-economic level, I am inevitably perceived—indeed I am---one of those « others » in the eyes of the foreigner-bashers.
Witnessing Germans being « anti-other, » is disconcerting for anyone who knows Germany’s sad history in the 20th century. This has brought me to say good-bye to Berlin more than the annoyance of being treated rudely by some of the city’s residents. Would I return if someone made a film that romanticized the foreigner-bashers as rebels with a (good) cause? Hard to say, but perhaps. My perception of the city has always been through the lens of a movie camera.
[1] including accepting to change a larger amount of West German marks for the largely worthless East German marks.
[2] Guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 4 December 2012
[3] Tourist-bashing turns ugly in Berlin, Sophie Duvernoy, Sep 13, 2012
[4] Some of whom, the articles point out, are not native Berliners either….just residents of longer duration.
This essay is part of the theme:
"What and how we eat and ate"
that a number of groups discussed in November 2017.
Deboning Fish[1]
My father loved to fish[2]. Maybe he wanted a son to go fishing[3] with him, but after he and my mother had three daughters, he chose me, the youngest, to go with him to the many trout streams we had in the Black Hills[4]. He always caught[5] more fish than I did.
We would often eat the trout very soon after we caught them, sometimes even for breakfast, which is not uncommon in the Western United States. My father cleaned the fish, made a camp fire next to the stream, and grilled them. When he gave me my trout to eat, the trout had no bones in it because my father had “deboned,” it, that is, he had removed the spine and all the little bones. When my mother served fish at our home, my father always deboned my fish for me. That is why I never learned to do this important task.
Later, when I went to university and lived away from home, I never cooked fish and I never ordered it in restaurants either. Why? Because I was afraid of the bones and I didn’t know how to remove them!
Finally, I moved to Paris and became friends with a person who wrote articles in newspapers about food: a food critic. It was this man who encouraged me to order fish and who also taught me to debone them. It’s really not very difficult and I wonder why I never learned to do this earlier in my life.
There is a very famous saying in English (and maybe in French? I don’t know…)
Give someone a fish, and you feed him for a day.
Teach someone to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.
I would like to add something to this saying:
Teach someone to debone a fish and that person will eat fish forever.
For elementary students:
[1] The noun “fish” is both singular and plural.
[2] The verb “love” can be followed by either the infinitive “to fish” or the gerund “fishing.” There is a small difference between the two but it is too small to worry about!
[3] There are many expressions “to go” + gerund for activities. Go fishing; go skiing; go hiking (faire une randonnée); go sailing.
[4] The Black Hills are in the northern U.S. on the far western side of South Dakota.
[5] Caught. This is the past tense of what verb?
"What and how we eat and ate"
that a number of groups discussed in November 2017.
Deboning Fish[1]
My father loved to fish[2]. Maybe he wanted a son to go fishing[3] with him, but after he and my mother had three daughters, he chose me, the youngest, to go with him to the many trout streams we had in the Black Hills[4]. He always caught[5] more fish than I did.
We would often eat the trout very soon after we caught them, sometimes even for breakfast, which is not uncommon in the Western United States. My father cleaned the fish, made a camp fire next to the stream, and grilled them. When he gave me my trout to eat, the trout had no bones in it because my father had “deboned,” it, that is, he had removed the spine and all the little bones. When my mother served fish at our home, my father always deboned my fish for me. That is why I never learned to do this important task.
Later, when I went to university and lived away from home, I never cooked fish and I never ordered it in restaurants either. Why? Because I was afraid of the bones and I didn’t know how to remove them!
Finally, I moved to Paris and became friends with a person who wrote articles in newspapers about food: a food critic. It was this man who encouraged me to order fish and who also taught me to debone them. It’s really not very difficult and I wonder why I never learned to do this earlier in my life.
There is a very famous saying in English (and maybe in French? I don’t know…)
Give someone a fish, and you feed him for a day.
Teach someone to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.
I would like to add something to this saying:
Teach someone to debone a fish and that person will eat fish forever.
For elementary students:
[1] The noun “fish” is both singular and plural.
[2] The verb “love” can be followed by either the infinitive “to fish” or the gerund “fishing.” There is a small difference between the two but it is too small to worry about!
[3] There are many expressions “to go” + gerund for activities. Go fishing; go skiing; go hiking (faire une randonnée); go sailing.
[4] The Black Hills are in the northern U.S. on the far western side of South Dakota.
[5] Caught. This is the past tense of what verb?