Seeing double. / Chronicle of a life foretold.

"You can tell a lot about a person by the places they choose to travel. Some people are drawn to Ireland, Amsterdam. For me it was the Philippines. On the surface an orderly democracy, but barely concealing a world of complete chaos. A place I instantly felt at home." - Alex Garland, The Beach*

"I have decided at twenty-five that something must change." - Bloc Party, "Kreuzberg"

I met my doppelgänger. In Germany, of course.

The story of Berlin for me begins in Bruges, a week before my actual arrival in the city. My hostel in Bruges was above a pretty good restaurant/bar (I think... I only experienced the second half). Just past 5 in the afternoon, which on a Friday is Bruges' Cinderella hour for sightseeing, the only two other people there were a backpacker my age named Johnny, from Derby, England, and a guy named Chris who was from, well he was from everywhere, splitting time in Belgium and Brazil (where he owns a beach resort I'm planning on visiting in the not-too-distant future), but originally from London- a proper bloke that not only should be in an early Guy Ritchie film, but would be the one played by Jason Statham. The only match for the local beer (Bruges Zot- go there and find it... it will change your life) was the local conversation. One round turned in to each of us picking up a shout a-piece, and a few more for good measure before the three of us headed to another restaurant/bar in the next village over for countless (and I do mean countless) rounds of Jupiler and Hoeegaarden.

Traveling this long, meeting this many people, you know in less than one beer whether you get along with someone enough to trust their opinion. With Chris and Johnny, the head hadn't even settled on our first round. Johnny's favorite city was Berlin. And Johnny has great taste.

One of the shitty times as a backpacker is arriving in a new city at night. It's depressing enough to think that you've lost the majority of the day in transit, but before you make it to your hostel to see that all the good beds are taken, you first have to navigate dark unfamiliar streets in a language you can't speak with your luggage silently screaming your status as a tourist. When this happened in Prague last December I was nearly mugged for the first and only time in my life; in Moscow, my very first night in Europe on these travels, I got lost for nearly an hour, trying to make sense of signs that read "крупнейший" .

Thursday.
I arrived in Berlin's Kreuzberg district at 11pm breathing frost. But it was a chill that awakened me, a brisk night walk past graffiti covered buildings that put me more at ease than the sight of flower pots would have. Berlin is another sprawling city, like New York, Paris, London, Chicago, where districts hold far more character than some countries I've been to can even dream of developing. Kreuzberg is kindred to the Lower East Side, the parallels between the two composed of the thick lines of several passes of spray paint. Or tethered by the undulating aromas of Turkish food next to Italian next to Indian food. Kreuzberg was the opposite of an echo. A precursor. A glimpse in to the life I'll be living in 3 months time when I get to New York. My crash education and embrace of the street art that is present throughout the city, my quick ability to decipher the labyrinth of the S-Bahn/U-Bahn system, my immersion in the history that has shaped our modern world, all with Kreuzberg as my base. If my new home is to be like this (which it is) I will be content. A new life that can compete with the one I am leading now (he writes as Italian islands pass by his train window).

Saturday.
The 19th anniversary of the re-unification of Germany.
I began the morning at the East Side Gallery of the Berlin Wall, taking in the rejuvenated beauty of its politically pointed artwork. A few hours and many sights later, I walked through the expansive Tiergarten, meandering vaguely towards the central celebrations near the Brandenberg Gate, but far more concerned with the journey than any fleeting destination. Seeing an unmarked path to my right that lead farther in to the wooded area of the park, I hesitated only briefly before taking it. I soon came upon a gate that held a large garden containing stately yet subtle features, a few gazebos, an anonymous Grecian-style statue of a mother and child bearing alms of fruit to an unseen god, twin bronze elks, a small fountain. The waning flowers that this garden held on a cold October Saturday were not mesmerizing in their beauty but in their mere existence, for each cluster of flowers was accompanied by a small sign marking the date of when it was planted in this garden (got to love German meticulousness). And that's when I became aware that I was not really in a garden, but a time capsule.

Berlin is arguably the capital of history in the Twentieth Century. It was here that the Nazis seized and held power, pulling the majority of the world in to a war they were antagonizing. The city's capture coupled with Hitler's suicide in a bunker below it (in what is now a car park that locals take their dogs to shit on) marked the end of this conflict in Europe, only for it to then re-emerge as the epicenter of the Cold War. A city divided in to quadrants, but realistically into two parts, a division that became concrete in 1961 when the Berlin Wall was surreptitiously erected by the Soviets essentially overnight. The end of the Cold War was marked not by events in Moscow, or Washington, but by the breaching and dismantling of the Berlin Wall. (An event which had as much to do with Ronald Reagan as it did with David Hasselhoff, so let's dispel that fraud of an assertion right now). Point being, for a fifty year stretch there, to watch Berlin was to watch the world. So when I stood in that garden and saw a plaque for Gloria Dei, 1942, what I really saw was the Battle of Midway.... Anne Frank going in to hiding. Gloire de Dijon, 1853 : the Crimean War. Lavender Lassie, 1959 : Fidel Castro coming to power in Cuba, the USSR escalating the space race, Ben-Hur and Some Like It Hot. Alchymist Rambler, 1956: West Germany banning the Communist party, Soviet troops suppressing the Hungarian uprising. Ghislaine de Feligonde, 1916 : Germans bombing Paris with zepplins, the battlefields of Verdun and the Somme running red and ashen from all the slaughtered youth. A garden, but not Eden. That would be boring. Rather a garden in which time ceased to be linear, and was a flat one-dimensional disc on the ground before me. All became equal, and history could be read all at once on a pink and white petal rather than a yellowed page.

Monday.
The story of Berlin ends for me (for now) in Switzerland. I left the city late Sunday night, more out of the duty of seeing Italy in detail than my desire to depart. Friday was my first real look at the city, and I had the privilege of experiencing a massive amount of it, probably the most I've seen in any one day on my travels so far. That night I had a dream. An actual dream. Not the bs pick-up line we've all heard way too often, or a hopeful fantasy that I could control, guide. This was a dream that I could not wake up from right away, and thought of really as a nightmare up until last night, when I finally understood it. In the dream I was in my hostel in Berlin that I had just gone to sleep in and I woke up to see a person sleeping in the bottom bunk across from me. He awoke, rolled over, and looked at me. And he was me. I was instantly pretty terrified, and first checked that I was actually me by looking for the tattoo on my bicep. The one-of-a-kind work was there, but it was on his as well. We both claimed to be me, and what frightened me the most is that I didn't know which of us was telling the truth. Justine, one of my oldest friends in the world, was for some reason there as well, and she could not tell the real me either. This panic went on for what felt like ten minutes, before I finally managed to wake up.

It took me until last night to realize that I met my doppelgänger. And he is Berlin.

I can't describe it any further than that, and am positive that I would sound really idiotic even trying.

I agree with Alex Garland that you can tell a lot about a person by the places one chooses to travel (Having been, every enthusiastic Amsterdam review I hear in hostels, tends to elicit an eye roll, a shift of my lower jaw). But you can tell even more about a person by what places choose to travel to them. That is a defining moment in the life of a backpacker, if it ever comes at all. And I am inexpressibly grateful that this came in Berlin, as opposed to Liverpool or Bern. That the city that I embraced closer than any of the thirty or so I have been to thus far requited that affection. That I can now look at a map and see a mirror.



*My copy of The Beach is in a box somewhere in Pennsylvania, and Alex Garland is not as prevalent in Italian bookstores as I was hoping, so this is a paraphrase, but pretty close to the original.

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(post-script) Incredibly long entry, so thanks if you've made it this far. I actually feel like I've said nothing about the city itself and want to very, VERY briefly. Given the city's history, I anticipated before my arrival that it would fascinate and sicken me, and if I were to read this post from your perspective, I would be a little dismayed that one of my friends found some sort of union with a city with such a dark history. But Berlin is not merely cognizant of its past and hurriedly rushes past it (like the BMW Factory in Munich did). It is proactive in its apology, as well as phenomenally artistic. There is no monument called the Holocaust Memorial. That is because there are five or six separate ones, and a new one currently being built, to honor all of the groups of victims individually, not only the Jewish dead, and they're all centrally located. This is in addition to an incredibly moving Monument to the Victims of War and Tyranny, and a prominently-placed recognition of the Nazi book burning of 1933 to call attention to us to never allow something like that to happen again. And in contemporary times, as I alluded to, it is a Mecca of street artists. Not simply worthless tagging (although that is of course there as well), but true artistry in a subversive, sometimes illegal, form.

Berlin:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2104926&id=35804394&l=a1003e77fe

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2105381&id=35804394&l=67f870bc6b