One of the teenagers played me songs by the “Lesbians Poets” and read me their own.
The other, soon not to be a teenager, arrived in Berlin, via Los Angeles, for holiday break.
We met at the airport and rode home.
Early December, I always think of Darby Crash and John Lennon, crossing, transcending, their journey through time, perhaps passing each other on the way up in early December 1980. Welcome to the '80's. Welcome to December, the air of December.
“I swear I remember it that way.”
Back home for dinner, back together the four of us ate away, enjoying the spetzle, for a second it was all right, before the little one falls into slumber, catching up on sleep, dreaming of Sally Bowles, and her hellos and goodbyes to Berlin.
The next day, all of us venture out, roaming through the holiday markets and art openings, looking at the art scenesters in their fabulousness, pink fur coats and oblong glasses, in the mausoleums, ever commodifying the spectacle, always more interesting.
The history of art is built on a junk pile, says Caroline over and over here.
The beauty is this city allows it; it supports it. Ideas and images born from this wreckage.
We meet everyone Friday for Caroline’s Stammtisch, with the art gang. A few grumble the bar is too expensive. That's not good for Berlin, says Alessandra. We can’t normalize that.
Walking all day Saturday, down Danzingerstrasse, catching the train, making a detour to Shakespeare Books Bagels on Warschauer Str. 74, sitting for a hot chocolate, looking at people and books, reading the graffiti, the posters reading us, Morocco scoring on our way to Kreutzberg, immigrants ever changing the city, as the sun fades, strolling about Orienstrasse, checking out their goods, the teenager picking up a Sally Bowles hat, before we make our way to Köpi-Platz, a squat recently evicted. The Berlin of old is always contending with the new, old craters in the ground, from the war, tags on the walls, remnants of bygone cities and times, even political structures and squat histories, ever recycling. Berlin’s seen poverty and mutual aid, a welfare state and a warfare state, modes of socialism, national and otherwise, fascism, communism, capitalism, liberalism and neoliberalism, most every model we can imagine, save anarchism, displacement and gentrification ever cycling, signs up for buildings people want to sell. You see it all here, walking the streets of the ever shifting city, ever rebuilding itself, its four quarters from the walled off city, still desperately trying to reconcile themselves, with each other.
Back home on zoom later that Saturday, Thomas Mann, Faustus is our book club choice, with Catherine, Joanie, Julie, Vicki and yours truly, chatting through the years. Mann reminds us we have choices about what to do with our lives, each action, has their reactions, however precarious, ever reverberating. Embrace our everything and see what happens; forget civilization and see what happens. Be proud of your history, sell your soul. Allow a bit more Bachus than Apollo and see what could possibly go wrong, ruminatines the author, who understood temptations like few else, the call of Tadzio to disease and Death in Venice, ever looming. His characters ruminate on the possibilities:
“Bound by the self restraint of order, which means free?” wonders Adrian.
“Well yes, the dialectic of freedom is unfathomable,” says Dr Zeitblom, ever the unreliable narrator, seeming to channel Adorno’s counsel. “But whoever shaped the harmony could be called free. Would the building of the chords not be haphazard?”
“Life's interesting phenomena,” Adrian follows, ever conflicted, seemingly channeling a Neitzchian clash between self doubt, order and ever expanding abundance, drink, and decadence. ”We furnish uplifting and illuminations, experiences of release and unshackling… the self glorious shudder, yea the precious horror of himself… in which he seems to himself a mouthpiece, well graced, a divine monster, his descent into intervals, not only into emptiness, and waste and rich sorrow, but also into pain and nausea… There are pains that one gladly and proudly takes in bargain with pleasure so enormous, pains one knows such as from a fairy tale, pains like slashing knives…”
By 1245 AM, Federico and I waited in line at the Kit Kat club.
Opened in 1994, the Kit Kat maintains district niche in Berlin's nightlife:
It's not too cold. The lines moving.
A group from Brussels is turned away for wearing white sneakers.
A man from Istanbul, just ahead of us, who tried to befriend us, is turned away.
Here we go, says Federico.
In between the layers, Federico and I show the door guy our leather. And he waves us in.
I had prepped. But there are always details to attend to.
“This legendary sex and techno club for all is a labyrinthine complex of half a dozen dancefloors, a dubious swimming pool and a grimy mock-operating room. Saturday nights feature the club’s flagship CarneBall Bizarre, with an after-hours event that runs through Sunday. For pure polysexual hedonism, look out for cult party Gegen every two months. Most nights have a fetish dress code – except Electric Mondays – so if you arrive wearing jeans, you’ll have to leave them in the cloakroom and dance in your knickers.”
Inside, we strip to shorts, fetish gear, bathing suits. Without tops, even the folks in coat-check two thirds naked.
The point of the dress code is pretty simple says the website:
In other words, let your freak fly.
Go for it.
Don’t dream it, live it.
Live bands are playing an almost absurd Vegas- like, funky jazz set, half dressed by the pool bar, where people are hanging out, in various states of undress in and out of the water. Clothes check at the spa.
Let me show you around, says Federico, walking me from room to room, through the disco, where everyone’s dancing. People are dancing on tables, with whips, chains. Someones tying a younger lady up, hanging her by her feet and arms, in a bit of rope play. She’s ungagged.
Its seems to be an 80/20 straight, queer split says Federico, looking about, sizing up the crowd, ladies dancing on the bar, a few guys making out.
Hallway after hallway, into back rooms, secret drinking areas, bathroom lines, where doors are shot. Some actually have to pee. I feel sorry for them, as the rooms are occupied.
Room after room, more and more dancing, more rubbing, running into others.
Wow.
I didn’t know these places actually existed.
Public sex has been villified and policed in the US, pushed underground in NYC.
In Berlin, the line around deviance is much larger, allowing the city and the culture to grow, as Durkheim counseled.
The later it gets, the less the clothes.
Clothes, what are clothes, Rachel joked our first week in Berlin.
Back to the hot cold baths and sauna, obligatory clothes check. Swimming a bit, back to the sauna naked.
Lights shine in the shower in the middle of the room.
More disco.
More bodies intertwined.
One couple sits down, each taking a turn on the other.
He's doing a good job, notes one woman laughing at a couple in the back play room by the bar. Others join them in a secret corner room. Now four couples and a threesome are at it.
Are you guys boyfriends, come hang with us, says an elder women with her boyfriend.
Back to the dance hall, more techno, more dancing, more bodies connecting, a threesome, a woman from behind.
In front, two guys in cop hats, blowing each other.
A woman dragging another by her chain.
More just naked.
More bodies in dark corners.
People stand around.
We hit the sauna again, before a picking up our clothes.
Not home till 6 am.
Back to the books by 10 AM, studying rules of causality, ontology, fallacies, Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Simmel and DuBois for a quiz on Monday, trying to channel everything I know into a specificity which is very very German, and somewhat beyond my grasp.
In between my studies, the teenager and I chat about American history.
They have an AP exam the next day.
“On May 22, 1856, Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina entered the Senate Chamber and repeatedly struck Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts over the head with a cane,” says the little one. He was reading too much about abolition for young representatives taste. Was he punished, I ask. No, they little one laughs. US history is always revealing, ever repeating.
The quiz is terrifying. But I manage to pass our mid term quiz. The cultural differences here. No essays or essay based exams. Just two quizzes on sociological theory. Lots to learn.
And we talk about Georg Simmel.
I find myself thinking about my advisor’s words.
Irwin Epstein posted. ""Did they tell you that G. Simmel (a Jew) was so charismatic that women swooned during his lectures? What kind of a school is that anyway?"
The darkness is always there, just under the surface.
“Gender no danke,” says the writing on the wall in the bathroom, visiting the soon to be not a teenager after class, escaping the December cold.
The next day, a few final adventures in sociology for the year. Lots of discussion about multiculturalism, feminism, and the backlashes which go on and on. I find myself thinking about the civil war and the physical attacks on supporters of abolition in congress. The beat goes on and on through time through reactions and counteractions through minority and majority clashes over democracy and the public sphere which support it.
Schools over for a few weeks.
Off for a quiet morning of yoga and a bike ride through the city, blue skies and cobblestones about the city, to the Herman Schulz cafe on Finowstrasse. And a trip to the movies at Lichtblick Kino, taking in stories of activists from Rojava to Los Angeles in a cozy theater on a cold night.
The air of December is crisp.
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