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- Herausgeber: ONE
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
A young secular writer's journey along ancient religious pilgrimage routes in Spain, Japan and Ukraine leads to a surprise family reconciliation in this literary memoirGideon Lewis-Kraus arrived in free-spirited Berlin from San Francisco as a young writer in search of a place to enjoy life to the fullest, and to forget the pain his father, a gay rabbi, had caused his family when he came out in middle age and emotionally abandoned his sons.But Berlin offers only unfocused dissipation, frustration and anxiety; to find what he is looking for (though he's not quite sure what it is), Gideon undertakes three separate ancient pilgrimages, travelling hundreds of miles: the thousand-year old Camino de Santiago in Spain with a friend, a solo circuit of eighty-eight Buddhist temples on the Japanese island of Shikoku, and finally, with his father and brother, a migration to the tomb of a famous Hassidic mystic in the Ukraine.It is on this last pilgrimage that Gideon reconnects with his father, and discovers that the most difficult and meaningful quest of all was the journey of his heart.A beautifully written, throught-provoking, and very moving meditation on what gives our lives a sense of purpose, and how we travel between past and present in search of hope for our future."Beautiful, often very funny... a story that is both searching and purposeful, one that forces the reader, like the pilgrim, to value the journey as much as the destination." New Yorker"If David Foster Wallace had written Eat, Pray, Love it might have come close to approximating the adventures of Gideon Lewis-Kraus" Gary Shteyngart"Gideon Lewis-Kraus has written a very honest, very smart, very moving book about being young and rootless and even wayward. With great compassion and zeal he gets at the question: why search the world to solve the riddle of your own heart?" Dave EggersGideon Lewis-Kraus has written for numerous US publications, including Harper's, The Believer, The New York Times Book Review, Los Angeles Times Book Review, Slate and others. A 2007-08 Fulbright scholarship brought him to Berlin, a hotbed of contemporary restlessness where he conceived this book. He now lives in New York, but continues to find himself frequently on the road to other places.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014
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A SENSEof DIRECTION
Pilgrimage for the Restless and the Hopeful
GIDEON LEWIS-KRAUS
To Harriet Clark, as promised
And in memory of Richard Rorty
ANNIE HALL: Oh, you see an analyst?
ALVY SINGER: Yeah, just for fifteen years.
ANNIE HALL: Fifteen years?
ALVY SINGER: Yeah, I’m gonna give him one more year, and then I’m goin’ to Lourdes.
—Annie Hall
Contents
Prologue
TALLINN
MY FRIEND TOM WAS TRAPPED at home in a tiny, distant city. He had no Estonian visa, and he knew if he left Tallinn he’d be unable to return. More immediately problematic was the Russian stripper he’d been flirting with, or, more specifically, her boyfriend, who had taken to hanging around Tom’s front door. Tom pleaded with me to visit, confident the guy wouldn’t take on the two of us.
Tom and I didn’t know each other all that well then, nothing like later, but it sounded like a fun excuse for a trip. Unlike Tom, I could leave my apartment in Berlin whenever I wanted—I had a German freelancer’s visa and no cuckolded Baltic criminals camped out on my stoop—and was, in fact, spending more time away than at home. By that point Berlin often left me feeling at loose ends, and one of the things I had come to like most about living there was how easy it was never to be in town. A lot of my friends had already moved on, had gone back to resume their real lives in New York, and I myself was beginning to wonder if it wasn’t time to pack it in. It was unclear where I’d go, though, mostly because nowhere was more appealing than Berlin had once been, should have been still. I’d been living in lovely, provincial San Francisco and had moved to Berlin because I’d felt I was missing out on something exciting, and now I was on the brink of leaving lively, provisional Berlin because I was afraid I was missing out on something serious. A quarter lifetime of anecdotal evidence suggested, however, that once I actually motivated myself to move somewhere I considered serious, somewhere like New York—where I had never actually lived for very long but where, I imagined, I would find myself ready to get on with the routines and attachments that make for a real life (cat, yoga, a relationship)—I would once again regret missing all the novelty diverting people elsewhere. Maybe not New York, then. Maybe Kiev. I’d heard Kiev was cheap and cool. I often reminded myself to look into it.
Tom and I held in common the hope that there might be a geographic ticket out of the problems of indecision, boredom, and the suspicion that more interesting things were happening in more fashionable places to more attractive people. Actually, that last part was my worry; in Tom’s version, less interesting things were happening in contemplative places to more industrious people. Tom had moved to Tallinn with the idea he’d be pressed into productivity there, that the constraint of its distance and exoticism would force him to focus on the work he’d been neglecting in favor of video games and the more dissipated varieties of recreation. I’d moved to Berlin precisely for its lack of constraint, hoping that its sense of vast possibility would help me figure out what I wanted. Needless to say, for reasons that went beyond Russian strippers, it wasn’t really working out for either of us. Tom’s claustrophobia left him desperate for distraction, and my distraction left me desperate for discipline. We were like two ships waiting for a breeze that might float us past each other in the night.
Tom picked me up at the tiny airport in a taxi and brought me up to date. “I was living in Saigon,” he said, “and after a year I had to leave because my life was spinning out of control. Then I was living in Rome, and I had to leave after six months because my life was spinning out of control. Then I moved to Las Vegas, and I had to leave there, too, very quickly, because my life was definitely once again spinning out of control.”
“You were having trouble keeping yourself together in Rome, so you moved to Vegas?”
“So I left Vegas and I thought to myself, okay, I need to finish this long-overdue book, so I’ll go to a small, distant country with an impossible language and I’ll just sit and write all day until the book is done. I came here.”
He looked out the window at the looming medieval spires of the old town, where he was paying Manhattan rent to live in the lavishly restored fourteenth century. “And now I can say, with utter confidence, that my life is spinning out of control.”
I hadn’t known Tom long enough to presume to tell him how to live. Besides, he was a successful writer I admired and had long wished I might one day resemble. He was only six years older than me, not quite enough to make him a paternal figure but enough to make him a guide, and I preferred to think of him as somewhat more together than he liked to suggest. I assumed that despite his life’s apparent mismanagement there must be some greater logic to it. Plus he was living out a somewhat distorted but still recognizable version of my own fantasy: skipping club lines with future Baltic dictators, then until-dawn depravity with minor Baltic celebrities. The best thing I could do for him, I decided, was to provide him with company and reverence.
What I chiefly remember about the four-day jag that followed is waking up in my bed, peering at my uncharacteristically unread email, and realizing that I was back in Berlin. I had vague recollections of sitting in an idling cab outside a Soviet-era tower block on the outskirts of Tallinn, and of spending an evening in the company of some Siberian dancers and the man being groomed to lead Estonia’s next nationalist front, and of gazing through a bobbing porthole at some gray sea while Tom let his forehead cool against a Formica table. I looked at my camera to discover a few blurry images of what I have come to believe was probably Helsinki. The only other clue was a page in my little notebook, where I’d managed one note in four days: “Camino de Santiago—sense of purpose—June 10.” I’d underlined “purpose.”
This Camino business sounded vaguely familiar. The internet dutifully reported that in the year A.D. 813, the alleged bones of the apostle St. James the Greater were unearthed in Santiago de Compostela, in far northwestern Spain. St. James had supposedly evangelized as far afield as Galicia—unlikely, Tom says—before he was martyred in first-century Palestine. His relics were said to have arrived at the Atlantic coast, then the presumed end of the world, in a stone boat, where they remained buried under a hermitage until their discovery eight centuries later. A pilgrimage to the site started up within the next hundred years, probably along the old trail of a pagan death cult. (The Iberian Celts walked to the end of the earth to watch the sun perish nightly into the sea.) Around 1140 the Codex Calixtinus appeared, a book that’s part how-to and part spiritual advice, and that has come to be regarded as the world’s first travel guide—the route is also credited with the invention of the souvenir tchotchke—and since that time the Camino de Compostela has seen a more or less continuous parade of redemptive aspiration. Over the past twenty years, in no small part thanks to the efforts of a dopey German television comedian, the pilgrimage has become popular with a secular crowd. It’s about nine hundred kilometers, or a little less than six hundred miles, depending on where you start and whether you continue to the sea, and takes most people about a month to walk.
The book Tom had moved to Estonia to work on was a record of his visits to the far-flung tombs of the apostles, and by the time I was done reading up on the Camino, which had an immediate appeal for reasons I only dimly understood, I’d retrieved a faint memory of Tom’s having said he planned to spend the following summer strolling across Spain, starting on the French side of the Pyrenean border. I didn’t know what to make of my “June 10” note, though, so I called him up on Skype. He hadn’t slept since I’d left, but he sounded chipper, happy to hear from me.
“I miss you, man,” he said. “I’m lonely again and wish you were still around.”
“Me, too, buddy.” I paused. “So, Tom, what’s going on June 10?”
“That’s the day we start,” he said. “It worked with both of our schedules.”
I had no schedule to speak of, so I couldn’t argue with that. Then again, neither did he. The notion of something working with our schedules made me suspicious.
“The day we start what, Tom?”
“Our walk across Spain. You don’t remember? Strolling through hills by night, just you and me and the long path ahead. I told you any hotels we stay in are on me. You had that whole rousing speech about how we’d wake up each morning full of the simple, broad purpose of moving forward. You pounded your fist on the table and shouted to the whole bar that you were one hundred percent in. A few Estonians even clapped, though maybe they were just trying to get you to be quiet. Then we promised some girls we’d send them postcards from Santiago.”
Part I
BERLIN
MY LITTLE BROTHER, Micah, hadn’t finished college and he was already making more money than I was; he was playing semi-professional poker, day trading with his cardroom winnings. Partway through the winter quarter of his senior year, he applied for a fancy tech job for which he was highly underqualified. Each successive interviewer told him this, and he replied the same way every time: “I’m an engineer who knows how to write a clear and grammatical sentence.” They made him a generous offer.
He was going to move to San Francisco, which I was then preparing to leave, and where, in fact, I’d never meant to settle in the first place. I’d moved there right out of college for the sake of a relationship, had spent three years idly wondering why I was there and not somewhere else—pretty much anywhere else, but especially somewhere that paid slightly less attention to heirloom produce. The long relationship had ended—technically I’d initiated the breakup, though only after she’d moved on to take a job in Peru—and the city was suffused with memories of her. I couldn’t even go enjoy the farmer’s market at the Ferry Building anymore, and I hadn’t even liked farmer’s markets until she’d made us go to them all the time. I was mad at her for having made me like farmer’s markets and then ruining them for me. I dated somebody else for a while—somebody who liked natural history museums instead of farmer’s markets—but I pretty soon realized that I was just in a relationship because I was used to being in relationships. They helped me know when to go to bed at night and when to get up in the morning, and presented me with somebody else’s problems to fix. I was ready to go. I wanted to be in a place that felt more like a choice than a by-product of other decisions.
“Let’s get a place together,” Micah said.
“But I’m leaving San Francisco,” I said.
“But we could get a really nice place.”
“I’m frustrated here, and I’m bored and restless. I feel like I’ve frittered away my early twenties at farmer’s markets and natural history museums and Tartine.” Tartine was the bakery where I read each morning from nine to twelve under the negligent gaze of the world’s comeliest baristas. In order to maintain my self-respect, and in order not to alarm those baristas, I spent my afternoons reading at a different venue, at Atlas or Dolores Park Café. I was paying almost nothing to live in the maid’s quarters of a middle-aged Dutch high-end housecleaner named Jouke. Jouke lived six days a week in Sacramento with his boyfriend, Rex, so I didn’t see him much. Rex had Farrah Fawcett hair and told me each time he came to visit that I ought to give up trying to be a writer and instead use my typing talent to become a court stenographer, like him. Jouke’s walls were crammed with Erté prints and stained kimonos. Two porcelain ponies nuzzled at the top of the stairs. Every Monday I’d give them an inch of breathing room, and every Sunday Jouke would return and re-nuzzle the pair.
Micah ignored my complaint. “Your life is economically nonviable. You write book reviews and work part-time at a literary journal not even Mom reads. I have a proposal to make.”
“Hm?”
“Find us a really great apartment, wherever you want. Make it a three-bedroom so Mom can stay with us when she visits.”
“What about Dad?”
“You’re joking.”
“I’m joking.” Our dad and his partner, Brett, liked to come out for Halloween or Pride and stay in seedy Castro guesthouses. We’d make plans to see each other, but we were often thwarted. Once I called my dad to fix a time for dinner. His speech was slurred, incoherent, and Abba deafened in the background. Brett took the phone and said he’d meet me in the parking lot of the Castro Safeway to return the keys to the car they’d borrowed from me. As Brett saw me approach, the sun falling behind Twin Peaks at his back, he dropped his cigarette and crushed it with a wide, slow swivel of his boot. “I’m sorry,” he said, still crushing the butt. I couldn’t tell if he was sorry he’d been smoking, sorry my dad was so drunk, sorry that they were in love, or sorry they’d canceled plans once again.
“Anyway,” Micah continued, “I’ll pay three-quarters of the rent—”
“And you’ll expect me to do all the cleaning and the laundry?”
“How’d you know?”
“Ever since you were six and I was nine, you’ve been waiting for the day you’d make me do your disgusting laundry.”
“The offer’s on the table. Take it or leave it.” Micah hung up.
I took it. Micah called me each afternoon as he left the office to tell me he’d be home around five thirty. As he changed from office casual into running clothes, he’d tell me about his day, about how some idiot supplier in China was stalling again; and as I changed from pajamas into running clothes, I’d yell at him for forgetting once more to clean out the cat litter. We jogged up to Golden Gate Park, bought seasonal citrus on the way home, spent an hour arguing indecisively about where to eat dinner. We began weekend evenings separately but almost always met up at Taqueria Cancún when the bars closed. Neither of us tended to like the other’s objects of affection, but it didn’t much matter. We dated without any real urgency; after all, we could always kill a long Sunday afternoon together. When I broke up with a girl with whom I’d gotten halfway through the second season of The Wire, I made Micah spend a weekend watching sixteen straight episodes so we could continue together. When we needed time apart, he’d play golf or, worse, watch golf on TV. I only ever got annoyed with him when he asked me to pick up his dry cleaning, the implication being that I didn’t have anything better to do during the day. In the end I always picked up his dry cleaning, mostly because I didn’t have anything better to do during the day.
A year passed and I couldn’t remember ever having been happier, but I also couldn’t remember the last time I’d done anything that felt exciting or youthful or new. I bought a ticket to visit an old friend who’d been living in Berlin for six years, paying a hundred euros a month to live in an unrenovated prewar apartment. Delia had a wide balcony and no discernible line of work. It was midsummer, when Berlin endures only three or four hours of actual darkness, and the air is soft and heavy with desire, clear with vast possibility. In the early evenings we lolled around, drinking cheap beer on the overgrown grass fringe of the canal in the stalled sunset radiance, thick with the scent of untamed green, and later we went out, each night until long past dawn, biking all over the city with a rotating cast of international dubiety—paint-spattered people with unidentifiable accents—dancing at Rio, at WMF, at Bar25, at Club der Visionäre, at Weekend, the last of which had just been written up in the most detailed Berlin-is-the-place-of-the-now sally the New York Times had yet produced. I cannot account for what we did during the day, if we did anything at all. I couldn’t account for what I did during the day in San Francisco, either, but in San Francisco it felt as though there was something wrong if you had daytime available to pick up your little brother’s dry cleaning. In Berlin it was the usual course of things, though in the three years I was in Berlin on and off I don’t think I ever got a single thing dry-cleaned. I didn’t want to come back to San Francisco.
“I’m going to move to Berlin next year,” I told Micah when he picked me up at the airport.
“I knew you’d get sick of doing my laundry.”
I told him his laundry, unappealing as it was, had very little to do with it. I had two main reasons. One was that everyone I encountered in Berlin seemed to have the freedom—economically and culturally—to do exactly what he or she pleased. What was important was what was happening right now. Nobody seemed to hold anybody to account. It wasn’t like San Francisco or New York, where the first question anybody asked at a party was what you did for a living, and the second was where you lived and how much you paid to live there. The other reason was that, perhaps because of that freedom, Berlin felt like the center of something surprising and important, and I couldn’t help thinking it would be a good place for an aspiring writer. The rumors of a new Lost Generation were a terrible cliché, but it was hard to resist them.
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Micah said. “So on the one hand you want to go to Berlin to do nothing at all, and on the other hand you want to go to further your ambition. You’re an idiot.”
I applied for a Fulbright, figuring I could do with at least the imprimatur of institutional legitimacy. My proposal—some essay I planned never to write about contemporary young German novelists, about whom I knew exactly nothing—was the sort of thing I’d been advised the committee wanted to hear, and I got it. A year later Micah took me to the airport and we stood there and cried.
…
TWENTY-SEVEN was an unusual age to move to Berlin, but I’d always had a precocious sense of crisis, and my decision to go was spurred at least in part by my fantasy that I might be able to stave off future regret. I felt like I owed the experience to some subsequent self. Everybody else in Berlin was either twenty-two, just out of leafy liberal arts colleges and in flight from the responsibilities ahead, or they were thirty-nine, just out of a career or a relationship and in flight from the responsibilities behind. For my part, I moved there as a kind of preemptive strike, reasoning that if I bolted while I could, in my late twenties, I wouldn’t bolt when I couldn’t, in my forties, or maybe more specifically at approximately forty-six, when my dad left his marriage and moved in with Brett, a lovely guy he met at the gym, and Micah and I could never get in touch with him about car insurance or baseball games because the two of them were always disappearing to the nightclubs of Key West or Palm Springs. They emailed self-portraits in sailor suits from themed Atlantis cruises down Baja. My dad’s justification for this, in those moments when he felt as though he needed to produce one, was that he was claiming the outré adolescence he’d been denied. He’d lived a life long on sacrifice and short on pleasure, and had begun, at last, to live the life he deserved. “Deserved” was his word.
More than anything, his two mistakes—first, not living the life he wanted; and, second, believing this had been a sacrifice that freed him from all future sacrifices, like having dinner with his children when he wanted to stay longer at the bar, or treating their mother with any respect—were what I hoped to avoid. I explained my fear of regret in terms of how unusually clearly my dad’s life—in which a bad, perhaps even cowardly decision made in his twenties became a thirties of anxiety, a forties of resentment, and a fifties of abandon—exemplified the great cost of not having acted as one wished when one still had time.
I cannot now say what, exactly, I was afraid I was going to regret. I was just afraid of the idea of regret in general, and thought my determination to avoid it was a form of being considerate toward those I might otherwise one day resent. I wanted my twenty-seven-year-old self to take good care of my forty-six-year-old self, and I wanted my forty-six-year-old self to be able to look back happily and be proud of my twenty-seven-year-old self. I thought that perhaps my dad’s problem was that he hadn’t had enough experience, that he’d chosen a career and a marriage before he knew what else was out there, and I didn’t want to make the same error. Experiencewise, I wanted what I thought everybody wanted: to go to secret parties with artist/DJs that people in Brooklyn hadn’t even heard of, or to sleep with as many people as, say, Tom, so that when I got back into a committed relationship it wouldn’t be for the mere sake of being in one but because I’d chosen that person. Those were the reasons I gave for moving to Berlin. Or at least, those were the excuses I gave for moving to Berlin.
I arrived in time for a few days of lingering late summer. I took the U-Bahn from the airport, dropped my stuff at a sublet, spent my first euros on a pack of cigarettes, and walked slowly down the Karl-Marx-Allee toward Delia’s apartment feeling alone and free and already different. My first night in town was Delia’s send-off, which seemed cruelly unfortunate at the time. (Later I understood it was a common enough coincidence: every day somebody arrived and somebody else left.) I arrived at her apartment to find the German national women’s Ultimate Frisbee team running around in their underwear in the living room while the men smoked on the balcony, trying to decide where we’d all go later, if the women decidedto put their pants back on.
In Berlin it thus seemed, from that first night’s demented relaxation into morning, as though everything was up in the air at all hours; no possibility was foreclosed. The local custom was to commit to as little as possible, and by “local custom” I do not mean “German custom.” If the twentieth century had taught anybody anything at all, it was that Germans had lousy customs. Hence Berlin’s appeal: there was no cultural arbitration. My colleagues in Paris had the futile errand of trying to resemble the French. Those in Beijing competed in the absurd contest of trying to understand China. In Tokyo, or in London, or in Moscow, your sunlit hours had to have some nontrivial relationship to the economy. Berlin was an experiment in total freedom from authority, an infinitely long weekend with your parents out of town. It felt like an anti-gravity chamber. The old crimes licensed you to ignore the claims of the past; the low cost of living licensed you to ignore the demands of the present; and the future was something that would happen when we moved back to New York, where many of us would once more live in uncomfortable proximity to our actual parents, and where people talked about real estate and restaurants.
It was not that I did not like talking about restaurants. It’s normal to like talking about restaurants. But in Berlin when we talked about restaurants, it was the cheap kebab places; this was part of the ritual by which we acknowledged the aspects of our Berlin existence that differentiated us from our friends at home. We, and now I mean the people I came to love in Berlin, David Levine and Alix and Emilie, often felt like survivors whose home planet had become glutted with condos bought by people who waited in line for cupcakes, and we congratulated ourselves and one another on having gotten out just in time. This gave our decision to do as little of consequence as possible—with this ocean of space and profligacy of hours—the legitimate pretext of cultural and economic protest. We rebelled against the authority of rent and cupcakes.
In theory, this chartered us to do whatever we pleased whenever we wanted. In practice, it meant we spent a lot of time wondering what we wanted to do, and if we wanted to do anything at all. Or maybe that was just me. Part of my anti-regret crusade involved making sure I was always doing just what I felt like, which mostly meant keeping myself open for things that might come up, saying yes to whatever distraction happened along. It was an extremely active kind of passivity and it went swimmingly at night, when things were always coming up: there were gallery openings and bars and clubs, all elbowy with asymmetrical people proving provocative until breakfast. The daytimes were another matter; then it was less clear what the most vital and necessary and memorable experience available might be. I went to Berlin with a whole shelf of unread books, books like Middlemarch, but every time I sat down hungover in a café at eleven a.m. with that copy of Middlemarch, the whole day open before me, I inevitably thought to myself, Why move to Berlin to read Middlemarch? I could read Middlemarch in San Francisco (though, naturally, I hadn’t). The whole point of living in Berlin was being an agent in the world of total possibility. Was readingMiddlemarch the thing I most desired to do in that particular hour? It wasn’t easy to say. Ordinarily I had to put the book down and go on a walk to think it over, to make sure I was maximizing the value of my experience. These often turned into some pretty long walks. When I got back to the neighborhood from my walks, I sat around the Turkish bakery with Alix, or I went with her to check out the newer galleries up in Wedding. When I was with Alix, I felt as though there was nothing else in the world I’d rather be doing. When she was busy I went to see Wings of Desire.
Part of the point of Wim Wenders’s 1987 film, which I must’ve seen a dozen times in that first year, is that Berlin before the fall of the Wall had long been an inertial place, a sort of vacuum. There was no industry in the West; factory owners were afraid the Soviets would blockade the city, as they had shortly after the war. The banks were in grimy Frankfurt, technology and automobiles were in bourgeois Munich and arrogant Stuttgart, the press was in wealthy Hamburg, the provisional government in boring Bonn. West Berlin was merely a symbol of resistance, a great series of photo ops, and America was happy to help pay for it as long as it continued to provide such good press. East Berlin was just as unreal. It was a Communist set, the utopian socialism of the future, but it was also a big, expensive mock-up. The rest of the country was bankrupted by the purchase of ornamental tile for the wedding-cake palazzi that lined the Stalinallee (now the Karl-Marx-Allee I walked to Delia’s Frisbee-underwear going-away). The Fernsehturm, or TV Tower, at Alexanderplatz, the city’s only height of note, had been built in 1969 as a present to the Volk from their twenty-year-old puppet government. They’d had to use Western technology and Swedish engineers, and the people were already picking up TV signals from the free side of the city. After the Wall went up, in 1961, there was never anything of true geopolitical importance at stake. Its construction wasn’t an escalation but a diffusion: it made the conflict not political but rhetorical, for the benefit of the media.
The movie follows two angels as they bum around the city. One of them becomes smitten with a doleful French trapeze artist, and his feelings for her convince him to leap from eternity into time. Peter Falk, playing himself as a former angel, encourages Damiel’s transition. In the scene where he first wakes up as a mortal, he asks a passerby for help. The man teaches him the words for the colors in the graffiti on the Wall—his life until then had been in black and white—and then gives him change for his first hot coffee and pack of cigarettes. He gulps the black coffee, his eyes wide.
This had always evoked what felt like a disproportionate response in me; it wasn’t the sort of movie that was supposed to make you cry. On some level it was probably just because I was lonely and indecisive, sitting yet again by myself on a Tuesday at one in the afternoon at the Kino Babylon or at the Moviemento, and because it ends with the inevitability of an enduring romance, which already seemed impossibly remote in libertine Berlin. But it wasn’t just that. The citizens of divided Berlin were marooned on an island outside of time. Their ability to do what they wanted to do was thwarted by their historical circumstance. But once they, like the angel, were able to pass through the Wall, they would leave behind their suspended existence and enter the swift current of life.
When the angel wakes up as a mortal, he strides away from the Wall with the assurance and the joy of the convalescent. He’s so giddy to have time—to have finite time, time that now counts for precisely something because its quantity is fixed—that he knows just how he’s going to use it. I’d been so entranced by this image that I’d missed the crucial prelude, the process by which his desires crystallize and he understands why he wants to be free: to share a fleeting life with his trapeze artist. In moving to Berlin, I was working (or not working, as the case may have been) on the assumption that a grand gesture was itself enough—that, in the wake of the decision to uproot myself, my true desires would emerge to fill the vacuum. In the nineties Wenders made a sequel to the movie that I’d never seen; the last thing I wanted to know was what happened next.
But I realize now I should have known what would happen next. One of the very first things I’d heard upon arrival in Berlin was a line from the 1920s feuilletonist Karl Scheffler: Berlin dazu verdammt; immerfort zu werden und niemals zu sein. Berlin is damned always to become and never to be. It was such a seductive idea, that the city would never grow fusty or calcific and that, by proxy, you would never become fusty or calcific. And if a place was always becoming, there was no time for belatedness, no great era you’d missed out on, no cost to frittering away your time doing this or that. But we were, I was, so easily seduced, I missed the part about damned.
FOR A WHILE THERE, at the beginning, starting with that Frisbee panty party, things were genuinely fizzy and I didn’t at all mind spending my days just walking around and my nights saying yes to whatever happened to present itself. Just being there felt glorious, or, more than glorious, felt like enough. We felt like participants. The cigarettes, those endless stockpiles of cigarettes, and the coffee really did taste different, as they always do in a new place, and drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes felt like sufficient acts. Cigarettes marked off the time. For the few minutes one lasted, you knew exactly what you were doing: you were smoking that cigarette. When it was done, you would figure out what to do next, or you would just light another.
I arrived in Berlin with ten email addresses. The first person I met, Emilie, looked at my list and said I needn’t bother emailing the rest; she knew them all, and I’d see them the next day at the big gallery opening. Her friend Alix was coming along, and I’d love her.
We met at Emilie’s place first, in a cobbled and uncharacteristically pretty street behind Arkonaplatz. Alix’s name was pronounced in the French style, ah-LEEX, and she arrived with a duffel bag big enough for a body.
“Where did you just come from?” I asked. “A trip? Hockey practice?”
“Nowhere,” Alix said. She’s thin and angular and striking, with pointy elbows, long, nervous fingers, and deep-set almond eyes. She has a soft rumpled tide of unruly hair and glows with a cold marmoreal light. She opened the bag and changed in front of us, into a billowy unbelted stained silk dress and Thirty Years’ War–vintage combat boots tourniqueted at the ankles.
The economic, cultural, and psychological draws of Berlin—the sheer amounts of time and space that in other cities would be taken up by day jobs or the steady emotional drain of long-standing friendships; the almost religiously shared belief in the possibility of personal reinvention; and an addiction to the promise of the new—made for a robust art scene, at least according to various multilingual periodicals. This opening was at the new outpost of a huge London gallery. The room, or rather the space—nothing took place in something as banal as a room—had the size and character of a well-swept munitions depot, and probably had served as one once. Everything in Berlin happened in a former somewhere: the former sanitation-technology factory in the Ritterstraße, the former pretzel factory in the Prenzlauer Allee, the dome of the former post office in the Oranienburgerstraße that now had a restaurant/club that would only take reservations via text message to a secret number, the former department-store-vault club that was now in the former basement of the former (current?) power station, and of course the former dentist’s office, which the white tiles heated up like a sauna. All of these rooms had been liberated from their erstwhile indebtedness to productivity.
In the former munitions depot, people dressed in lab coats angled through the crowd with purpose, and I assumed they were caterers. Once I’d become a little more familiar with art, I’d look back and wonder if they hadn’t been part of the installation, or, once I felt as though I knew even more about art, if they’d possibly been both caterers and part of the installation. After the opening we got into a cab and went to a party in Kreuzberg hosted by a fragile, fey artist in a black feathered boa and his bloodshot gallerist, who was wearing a T-shirt that said “Vulva Vaginal Scent” and chewing on lollipops. I texted a friend in San Francisco, described these guys, and asked if they were anybody I should feel pleased to be at a party with. He wrote: FAMOUS GUY SAATCHI ART CAVE OF DICKS. I tried nonchalantly to ask Emilie what CAVE OF DICKS meant and she said that the guy in the black feathered boa had once made a cave of dicks. Actual live dicks. They hung down from unsuckably distant glory holes in the ceiling.
A sometimes-celebrated young conceptual artist who, I was told, was always on the prowl, found out I was a writer and asked me to help him craft a text message to a chick photographer on assignment for Vice in Stockholm. He had thick tortoiseshell glasses and whined with refinement. He assumed I was an art critic, as most everyone did when I introduced myself as a writer, and asked me about magazines.
“Have you ever written for Domus? No? But you’ve heard of Domus, right? What about Precept? Not that, either? Yeah, it’s weird, me neither, I hadn’t heard of them until recently. There are just all these magazines, and it’s weird, all of them profile me. And you’re, like, what are you, you know? Are you art magazines or fashion magazines or what, when you profile me?” He named more magazines. “Uovo. Texte zur Kunst. 032c, Bidoun, Monopol, mono.kultur. So many. Texte zur Kunst.”
Alix swooped in and delivered me onto a roof to smoke, though of course you could smoke inside too. She rolled her eyes and promisedthat there was more to the art scene here than naming magazines. There were, to be fair, some very fine artists. There was Omer, a gruff Israeli who made multichannel video installations; there was the pretty much just Danish guy who made a big deal about being Icelandic and had a dirigible hangar and eighty pretty assistants; there was Maxime, a French kid in his early twenties who shot the kind of harsh and tender photographs one might have seen on Nan Goldin’s Facebook page; and there was Ignacio, who’d spent ten years in an office job making private artworks out of thousand-cell Excel spreadsheets. However, with the exception of Maxime, who had to stay out late enough for his friends to start tattooing each other so he could take pictures of them to put online, the really good artists didn’t seem to go out that much.
“Let’s get out of here,” Alix said, and took me to Bar Drei, where we sat until seven o’clock in the morning. There was no art space in Berlin more interesting than Bar Drei, and it wasn’t an art space at all. It looked like a gallery that had dispensed with the pretext of art entirely in favor of the unimpeachable idea of charging money for the free drinks. It was a fishbowl on a lonely corner behind the Volksbühne and had no sign save a large “3” stenciled on the door. The bar itself was a trapezoid of black Formica countertop in the center of the room, its vertices rounded off, so sitting at it made you feel as though you were a member of some deliberative post-tribal council of the future. The walls to the street were enormous windows. Everyone went there after the openings, or, as you got smarter about things, you skipped the openings and went straight to Drei, which was like an opening but with chairs. That was all anybody wanted at an opening, anyway, were chairs. The only other furnishings at Drei were black spherical bulbs that hung on cords at even intervals over the bar, like soft interrogation lamps; they weren’t fixed to anything and the only thing that would get you kicked out was pendulating them. Drei hired mostly artists, both Americans and Germans, as bartenders, and part of their art practice—I assumed this had something to do with the art world’s recent infatuation with something called “relational aesthetics”—was never keeping precise tabs. At the end of the night there was always a tense but pleasurable negotiation about the matter of what to pay.
Drei, I came to see as I became part of it, had an astonishingly regular clientele. Berlin was a city where three-quarters of the population couldn’t drag itself out of bed before noon, but if there was one place that made people reliable, it was Drei. It was safe to assume that on any given evening, between the closing of the openings and the opening of the clubs, most of the people I came to know would be there. Some people I knew I saw only there. I met David Levine at Drei; and Zhivago, a beefy and voluble half-Danish, half-Syrian installation artist who grew up between Sacramento, Paris, and Valletta, and spoke at least eight languages, all of them fluently, none of them natively; and Carson, the gentle czar of the international-art-expat scene, who ran a noncommercial space devoted to intersections of art and architecture, dressed in sheer and tasteful varieties of drapery, and was always off to Osaka or Cap d’Antibes or Istanbul for a biennial or panel; and the other David, who painted surgically enhanced women in oils with textbook anatomical precision and spent three hours each day at the gym and seven hours each night smoking; and the style bloggers; and the Norwegian video artists; and, a little while later, the younger guys with the internet-based work. In the summer everyone sat around on the monument outside, the one to all the lost and forgotten monuments, and in the winter the smoke was so thick inside that nobody had to smoke at all.
BUT BAR DREI DIDN’TOPEN until nine thirty at night, which still left the matter of the daytime. As far as doing nothing was concerned, if you couldn’t be an artist, you could at least be Jewish; in a way all the Americans in Berlin were honorary Jews. (Many of them were actual Jews.) In the first quarter of the twentieth century the saying used to go that “every Berliner comes from Breslau,” from the shtetls of the Pale of Settlement. They also said that “the Jew comes from the East and has no time.” He was an avatar of restless commercial modernity. These days the Jew comes from the West and has more time than he knows what to do with. He is an avatar of restless noncommercial modernity. I got by in that first year by writing up cranky little dispatches for a web-based Jewish magazine out of New York that allowed the Jewishness of my content to be glancing.
The main trouble, it seemed to me, was that American Jews and Germans felt as though they needed to say something to one another, but never quite knew what. My mom, a rabbi and a psychoanalyst, came to visit for my first Thanksgiving, and we toured the standard Jewish monuments and memorials. Her feeling about the monuments and the memorials, like her feelings about anything in general, was that it was important to keep the conversation going, that the only way toward healing is through talk. I told her that of course I tended to agree with her, but that the problem in Berlin was that the conversational partners just didn’t match up. It often felt as though Germans over a certain age—twenty-five, say—wanted something from you, some sign that everything had finally become okay. I mostly did think that everything had become okay, but I never felt entitled to say that. After all, I hadn’t any personal connection to the Holocaust. The people who could offer real forgiveness were dead, or they were dying.
The ubiquity of these conversational templates made it impossibleto forget I was Jewish. In the States it was something I’d never thought much about, which had always struck my friends as strange. They assumed that I, as the son of two rabbis, would have a strong religious commitment. But my parents had been savvy enough to know that if they made a big deal out of observance, we’d certainly end up defecting; so—with the exception of weekly Shabbat dinners at home and High Holiday attendance and large annual seders—they left it up to us, which meant we’d ended up mostly like normal, suburban, disaffected cultural Jews. Our Jewishness meant Woody Allen and latkes, like anybody else’s.
But in Berlin this ambivalent patrimony was foisted upon you. It was immediately clear that Jews had a certain purchase in Berlin; as David Levine let me quote him in one of my first columns, “They really know how to torque it.” I decided at a certain point that I liked those Jews best who were a little interested in the Holocaust, who liked to talk a few minutes of Holocaust now and then, technical stuff, mostly. These were often academics, like my friend who was writing a dissertation about the few exiles who returned, against their wives’ protests, to help rebuild German universities after the war. But a healthy relationship to the Holocaust wasn’t the norm. Melodrama was easier, more cheaply satisfying, and it was one way to explain to yourself what you were doing in Germany: just existing there was an act of defiance and strength. Being a Jew in New York is a mark of some considerable banality, but being a Jew in Berlin makes you special. You have the Holocaust in your pocket, the run of a city you rightly deserve.
There was the feeling that the Holocaust got you off the hook, only furthering the idea that you were in Berlin to do just as you pleased, sleep with whomever you felt like, even if she had a boyfriend. It allowed you to be contemptuous of the Germans, gave you an excuse to ignore the local culture. Or you could be obsequious, make a big deal out of how little you cared about the Holocaust, how much you despised the “Shoah industry,” how awful the histrionics of Libeskind. Jews like this were ambassadors; they found it in themselves to congratulate the Germans for having gotten over the past, which often—counterintuitively—meant congratulating themselves for having overcome their own fraught Jewish-American identity. It was a gesture of forgiveness that had everything to do with the forgiver and little to do with the forgiven. It was forgiveness as power, as arrogance.
This was all true, in an inverse way, about the Germans too. They reveled in their powerlessness. For them simply not being a Nazi counted as an accomplishment. For decades they had done really fine work not being Nazis—unlike the Austrians, who were still basically Nazis. The Germans had made not being Nazis into a central plank of their identity, and, as with the Jews, that meant they could be absolved of other ambitions.
As uncomfortable as it made me, it was often easiest just to give in to the sense of Holocaust-related entitlement. Sometimes this took the form of standard guilt. When the synagogue in the Rykestraße reopened to great fanfare, I felt I had to go at least hear Kol Nidre, and I did, though I left after fifteen minutes. Other times it took odder forms, like the habit I developed of walking around listening to Paul Celan read “Todesfuge” on my iPod. But most of the time these feelings were desublimated, more crassly manifested. At a birthday party for an Icelandic artist a young and beautiful German Goth reclined in a bathtub. The bathtub was in the kitchen; it pulled down from a closet between the sink and the stove, like a Murphy bed. She lolled against the dry porcelain and told me she’d just finished her degree in Anti-Semitism Studies, with a focus on the post-Shoah relationship between West Germany and Israel. My friend Max was tall and handsome and obviouslyJewish and made a habit of this sort of thing, and I pulled him aside to ask for the encouraging advice I knew he’d give. “The only way we—Germans and Jews alike—will heal these old wounds,” he said, “is if we take seriously our duty, difficult as it may often be, to take women like that home.”
THE PERSON who pulled off the bohemian thing most convincingly—that is, neither self-consciously nor apologetically—was Emilie, which was funny, because Emilie was also the only one of us who had an actual job—in fact, a whole series of them. The rest of us had come to Berlin to escape the authority of work, but Emilie hustled. She was always on the phone, screaming at someone in German customs to free up a six-foot carved totem from Uttar Pradesh in time for an opening that night; or running a gallery while her boss languished in Moabit Prison on charges of fraud (later acquitted); or curating a genuinely good group show in a former brewery, featuring work by some of our friends and later written up on the style-and-art-blog circuit by other of our friends. But she also managed to party as though it were her job. She worked harder than anybody I knew.
Emilie’s life may have been in a constant state of crisis, but it was never an existential crisis. They were practical crises. Some of them might have landed her in bureaucratic labyrinths or trapped her on Baltic islands with street-art-dealing aristocrats, but none of them ever seemed to make her wonder why she was in Berlin, which was something she could be specific about: she sold art. One of the nice things about Berlin was that you didn’t have to be specific if you didn’t feel like it. If somebody asked you what you were up to in town, you could say you were an artist or just interested in art and leave it at that. They didn’t need to know anything more, didn’t have to worry you were withholding anything, because in part what you were communicating was that you probably weren’t a hundred percent sure what you were doing there. But your erstwhile interrogator almost certainly wasn’t sure what she was doing there, either, so everybody could get away with being broad-brush about things. This obtained in general. Part of the liberation of Berlin in Berlin was the permission to be vague.
Emilie was different, though. She was good at the specific thing she did during the day, knew the right ways to talk to artists and collectors. She paid taxes, had been audited, had an expensive couch she tried not to get too many cigarette holes in. She was also loyal, and loyal in a way nobody in Berlin ever seemed to try very hard to be. She had principles, made a point of never sleeping with anybody her friends had slept with, and never cheated. Rarely cheated. All of these things were of a piece. The rest of us, at a certain point, began to worry that we were going out too much, felt mildly concerned that we were somehow betraying our true selves by not feeling held to account, not getting enough done—enough of what done we could rarely say—but Emilie never had that problem. She got done during the day what she had to get done and she did at night what she wanted to do. She was comfortable with her desire for some things because she was obligated to do others; she was able to oblige some things because she desired others. She bore the same relationship to us that Micah bore to the friends he had in Shanghai—shortly after I abandoned him he put in for a transfer overseas—who were always arguing about whose Mandarin had the best tones. Micah just went to the factory in Suzhou or Zhuhai or Taiyuan and got on with it.
Emilie, so confident about how she spent her time, was the closest thing we had to a true doyenne, and she could have posted up at Bar Drei with the rest of us. But she was cut out for demimonde grandeur, and was delighted to include anybody who wanted in. For a while Emilie dated an endearingly feckless East German named Kevin, a sweet case study in the most extreme psychological effects of the nanny state. Kevin was notionally a DJ, but sometimes he was so busy partying he would forget to play music; when he remembered, though, everybody had a good time, and even when he forgot, it was okay. At the beginning we’d hang out in his studio—he was also, notionally, a photographer—and he’d spin records. He and his studio-mate called the place the Bernsteinzimmer, the “Amber Room,” after the alleged hoard of still-missing Nazi gold. His DJ name was Kevin9/11 until Emilie forced him to change it. Then he called himself Kevolution. Emilie sighed and gave up.
They had a pretty good relationship for a while, one mostly based on mutual respect for the intensity with which the other could party. Their terms of endearment were party related. «Du bist das Partymäuschen», they would say with affectionate accuracy. “You are the little party mouse.”
At four thirty one December weekday morning, at the close of what felt like my first semester in Berlin, we left Kevolution behind at the Bernsteinzimmer to play or not play records as he continued to see fit. It was Alix’s birthday and we were near the Prenzlauer Berg–Pankow border. Emilie had heard about a new club, and six or ten of us were wandering around in the chilly dark looking for it. As we walked past one of the entrances to the Mauerpark, a disputably green zone where a strip of no-man’s-land once was, she noticed a single votive candle on a sidewalk. She swerved into the black lane. Someone asked where she thought she was going.
“There’s a party in here,” she said, gesturing ahead of us into the dark. Someone asked how she knew.
“Did you not see the votive candle? Whenever you see votive candles, you follow them, and they take you to a rave.” We followed the votive candles a kilometer into the park. The tree branches stitched a starless canopy against the black sky. Somebody picked his or her way along in heels. We tried to turn back.
“Do whatever you like,” Emilie said, “but I’m going to this party.”
“This is bonkers,” Alix said, and shivered.
We walked for twenty more minutes, rounded a corner, and came through a copse to a Weimar-era toolshed. Inside there was a spectacular rave, with several rooms of music, an enormous amount of barely nibbled Turkish Fladenbrot, hundreds of people.
“This is bonkers,” Alix said again, and we went to dance. We left Emilie there at eight thirty in the morning and took the M10 tram in a wide arc back to our side of town. The streets were just beginning to steep in the squalid sub-lactic half-light of a winter Thursday. Commuters read nationalist tabloids of anti-immigrant sentiment. Alix folded herself under my arm and fell asleep, I had nothing to do for the rest of the day, and life to me felt almost unbearably full.
ALIX AND I LIVED in the same neighborhood for a while, on the east side of Kreuzberg near the river, and we would sit outside the Turkish bakery and watch the elevated orange U-Bahn grind by as we shooed finches from our crumbs. Alix was probably the smartest, certainly the most alluring, and probably the strangest person I knew in Berlin. She talked in big impressionistic clouds and then gesticulated in their vicinity to disperse them. She was in the middle of applying to grad school and was writing about art; she wrote about the new gallery shows each month for a magazine out of London. She was one of the very few critics around who said anything interesting about what she saw, though she could also be pretty opaque, about art and in general.
She was American but most people thought she was French and she didn’t discourage that. She wore ballet slippers that Maxime, the young crooked-grinned amateur-tattooing photographer had given her, and a very tight and short lacy alabaster one-piece we called the “ivory TK,” after the typesetter’s code for a descriptor to come later. No proper word did ever come later, but somehow the infinitely deferred description made sense. Alix went on to acquire a denim TK, which was like a cross between a tent and a jean onesie, and then several other TKs, many of them from the closet of the Long Island home of her crazy aunt Terry, a high school art teacher and the relative she most longed to resemble.
Alix had lexical idiosyncrasies, told hammy old jokes, dazzled, and made oblique references. Her basic reaction to the world was to call it bonkers. It was hard, in fact, to spend as much time with her as I did—or any time at all with her, really—and not become convinced that everything was indeed bonkers, not least of all Alix. She was nearly incompetent logistically, could talk in whole paragraphs about trends in analytical Marxism but could only under very unusual circumstances catch a train. She’d ended up in Berlin, in fact, due to logistical mishaps. She’d been at Oxford, then worked as a labor organizer in London and overstayed her visa. One February she came to Berlin, about six months before I did, to draw some panels for an opera—she was most relaxed when she was drawing, which she does quite well—and was deported upon her attempted return to the UK. They’d made her sit in a deportation lounge with an entire Cypriot village. She’d come back to town and spent a year always on the verge of leaving. Neither of us had any furniture.
Her place was in a nonresidentially zoned converted factory with old concrete walls painted the color of newer concrete. It was thousands of square feet and nobody was ever sure how many people, or which ones, were living there at any given time. Sometimes Alix would come home and there would be new walls blocking out fresh rooms. Alix’s favorite roommate, Thilo, was an East German whose family had escaped to the West when he was a kid—they’d been separated during their flight, though, and he’d gone years without seeing them; he didn’t like to talk about it—and he was now a makeup artist. He did high-end fashion campaigns for magazines and TV commercials, cut hair, and sold drugs when he had them, often to the people whose hair he was cutting. It wasn’t ever clear if it was an outrageously overpriced haircut with complimentary drugs, or a standard price for drugs along with a free haircut. The drug-haircut thing was only to support his real passion, though, which was working on splatter films. There was only one bathroom, and it had a shower on a faux-marble pedestal and a high-backed antique couch in it. An unlit air shaft lined with decapitated mannequins ran from behind the shower to Alix’s room. You could hear the U-Bahn trains screeching around the bend in the tracks before they disappeared over the bridge.
Alix often communicated via annotated press release. She’d forward the emails she got from the galleries and highlight sentences like this: “By exploring a system in which the traditional Hegelian linear progression of time is replaced by one that is cyclical and self-reflexive—in which the mechanics of chronology are rendered inoperative—we approach a logic of preemptive action and calculated risk that has taken hold of Western politics at large.” That one was for a group show called “Back to the Future,” which was based on the Robert Zemeckis film of the same name. More than anything, though, the press releases were interested in the French philosopher Jacques Rancière, and frequently something called “object sexuality.” It was unclear if anybody had actually read Rancière, but they knew that he had written a famous essay called “The Emancipated Spectator,” and that phrase in and of itself was some comfort. Nobody liked to think of himself as a fettered spectator.
Object sexuality, perhaps relatedly, described people who fell in love with, and sometimes married, objects. The most famous of these people, their de facto international spokeswoman, had once married the Berlin Wall, and a young Norwegian video artist made a haunting film about it for a Berlin Biennial. The film was shown on a loop in a trailer in an empty lot where the death strip had been, and Alix and I jogged through the late-spring snow to see it at least half a dozen times. A few months later we went to see the spokeswoman talk, and someone asked her how she knew the Berlin Wall loved her back. “I do not hold him to human standards,” she said, “just like I would never expect him to hold me to object standards.” Everyone else nodded in agreement and Alix dug her nails into my palm to keep from falling off her seat.
This was around the close of my first year in Berlin, when the novelty had largely worn off and the cigarettes were once again just cigarettes. I no longer wrote home when I was invited to a party in an abandoned S-Bahn station or underneath a stalled produce truck. That early shipwrecked period—when everybody you met had a history you neither knew nor cared much about, when all that mattered was that you were in it together—had come to a close, the press releases and “emancipated spectator” and “object sexuality” had started to seem less transgressive than ridiculous, and among the few things that felt real and important to me were Alix’s conspiratorial
