Reflections on Berlin

A few weeks ago, I visited Germany for the first time. I haven't written about it in retrospect yet because I wasn't sure just what to say. That Berlin is bohemian and grungy? Quiet and orderly? What do you say about a place that feels so familiar but remains entirely foreign?

An article in last weekend's NY Times Week in Review pretty much sums up my impression of Berlin, and of Germany more generally. While visiting, I was amazed at how everything seems to operate on the honor system, and how rule-abiding everyone is, despite their personal circumstances or the reasonableness of the rule. This kind of culture can't be bred out of thin air; it stems from deep roots in a culture's collective memory, from a shared goal of mutual survival grounded in the experience of selective alienation, and from a slew of interacting situations that countries like ours may never be able to relate to.

Beyond the orderly rule-abiding, I loved Berlin's neighborhoods. Like New York, Berlin feels like a series of pockets sewn loosely together, each with distinct contents and made out of slightly different fabrics. Part of this stems from the division of the city into East and West Berlin until the early 1990s, and part of it flows habitually from the nature of a large city.

Most especially, I appreciated Berlin's late-night conversations--the quiet exchanges between friends and neighbors at casual bars where you pay what you like or at places like Gramophone Bar, where all the pieces fit perfectly together into an irreplicable ambiance. In Berlin, life feels as though it will take its natural course, and that's just as it was meant to be. While Paris is for lovers, Berlin is for thinkers and seekers, for artists building amorphous representations of life and philosophers drowning the hours away in pensive reflection on the reasons behind the state of things, while life goes on within and beyond this creative, conscious city.