What were we doing in Berlin? I mean the group of expats who arrived in the German capital at the start of the 21st-century and built small but dynamic cultural and literary scenes, who made funny in our flats, who drank Club-Mate and got very drunk and generally didn’t settle down there: Why of all places Berlin? Why was it particularly the capital of Germany that we were drawn to, and why at that time? And if Berlin was the new Paris, is it still, or is that moment already past?
I lived in Berlin from 2004-13, a serendipitous time to be there, and it will always be the most formative part of my life, as you can only become yourself once. Or rather your early attempts are usually the ones which provide the formula for being to which you either divert or adhere. I wrote, as you might know, a novel about my own coming-of-age in Berlin, wrote it in medias res in the months before I departed and then just after I returned, keen not to lose the memories while they were still fresh.
I should say that I have never once regretted leaving Berlin just as I have never once regretted moving there. Yet as time has gone on on a kind of befuddlement has arisen in me as to why I was there in the first place. Many years into my stay, a Berlin-veteran friend asked me that very basic question of ‘What are you doing in Germany?’, and it struck me how self-explanatory it had seemed to me in many others, as if there had been some kind of artistic bat signal sent up to head to the German capital.
Let’s remember Berlin at the start of the 21st century, a city Obama called on a visit just before he became President ‘a dream of freedom’, which drew a friend to drily remark that in fact we’d all moved not as a vanguardists of liberty but because the beer and rent was cheap. It certainly was when I first moved there; you could rent a large room for 280€ a month, a small for 200€, and there were even spaces for well below that, though there was often a little extra like ‘Kohleneizung’ (coal heating) to sour that particular deal. In the first place I lived the shower was in the middle of the kitchen.
But still – there were big rooms listed in the city magazines Zitty or Tip and this was long before queues round the block to even view one. In my first digs, I remember phoning a friend from the England and saying ‘I’ll talk to you for the entire time it takes me to walk the length of my room,’ and that taking easy ten seconds in a way which saw her greatly impressed. And there was cheap alcohol too - €1 Späti drinks and bars with various offers – which provided a powerful incentive for skint young creatives to relocate.
There was an older class of Berliner too, even within expat Berlin, who’d been there before the early 2000s wave, many from the ‘90s, some even survivors from the ‘80s and West Berlin. These Berlin veterans were often some of the most interesting people I met there – I recall an Iranian woman at a party, long resident in the city, telling me that Berlin had always been crazy. Even if they’d now had kids and families they looked youthful, these people, as if a life in a place of great hedonism had kept them younger than you’d expect. It was from those people that I finally figured out that, rather than being located as the border point between West and East Germany, the former West Berlin had itself been a small isolated island in the communist sea.
There were sadder stories too. I remember meeting an older woman, a Theaterdame, at a party one time; she wore a red dress and told me that, on the day the Wall fell, her lover had been in a car accident and died. How was that for a historical double whammy – the simultaneous collapse of both the system you lived in and your most important relationship. I often had long conversations with such people because they didn’t know English. Some of them spoke some Russian though.
Whatever the artists in Berlin were coming for it wasn’t the money. Early on in my stay, or at least early on in the time I’d committed to Berlin come what may, I chatted with a man in a cafe. He spoke in an accent which I would later come to understand as South London and complained to me that there wasn’t ‘the wealth’ in Berlin. Well, he was right about that; this was the kind of city where my bank advisor would congratulate me for earning 1000€ a month. A little went a long way in Berlin. But even that didn’t go forever, and, though few people left Berlin to earn more money – if that was your motivation you were unlikely to have come there in the first place – it became part of the equation to live in Berlin that, by and large, our lives could be done on the cheap.
In terms of payment method, there was a lot of cash floating around in those days; my friend Chris, who provided the inspiration for one of the figures in my debut novel, legendarily lost a grand in paper money. He’d been given a cash payment for a sell-out run in play and had stuffed it in his pocket before going out for some drinks – Berlin priorities - before later, finding the pocket empty. I could empathize; a few years later I was given an envelope of cash by some nice Mormons in a hotel lobby in Prague which I too didn’t see again. We often had buckets of coins after shows and wads of cash from various schemes around, like some low-rent Kleinkunst version of Goodfellas.