The last time I visited Berlin I left with the heady feeling of someone in love, to the extent where they cannot conceive that the object of their affection would be capable of any flaw. Berlin was young, progressive, green, experimental, ‘out there’ and much more. It has long been thought of this way:
“Berlin is the newest city I have come across. Even Chicago would appear old and gray by comparison.” Mark Twain
Berlin is still like this, but this time I began to notice the irritating habits, the blind spots, the flaws, not enough to fall out of love, but enough to temper enthusiasm with a little dose of reality. Someone said in recent years that, if you want to see what the future looks like, go to Berlin. It is one of those “world cities” like New York, London or Shanghai, but like all such entities it comes with a shadow side. It’s actually a misconception that Berlin is a young city, its average age is virtually the same as the overall country and several cities have younger average ages. Dresden, where I write this, has greener credentials in terms of its use of power and overall recycling performance. The momentum of reputation often carries a place forward past its justified position.
Whilst walking the Camino we found, has we had done on previous occasions, that the effort of walking wipes aside so many prejudices, preconceptions, and judgements. We struck up conversations with all kinds of people, and they with us. Refreshingly, many of the people who fell in alongside us and chatted as the kilometres slid past, were young people in their 20s and 30s. Berlin reversed that trend, there is a level of ageism there we have encountered in few other places, Berlin conspired to make us feel old – of course we politely declined the offer!
A great deal of this ageism is unconscious, young people have moved to Berlin from all over Germany, and the world, to be with other young people, not with old people. But some of it is also conscious and slightly nasty in its manifestations. I am used to having people walk straight at me on the sidewalk, it seems that after a certain age one becomes invisible. In Berlin this is often ratcheted up to a new level, there is a belligerent intent to actually take you out unless you step abruptly aside.
That’s nothing other than a personal minor gripe; there is something else at work here that is very difficult to get at. I think it has to do with the idea of “cool.” Many, if not most, people (of all ages to be fair) want to be part of whatever is considered to be cool; they want to be at the heart of the Zeitgeist. But it has been my observation (once I stopped the search for cool myself), that often the coolest people do not manifest any of the outward signs of being cool. For example, Stephen Hawking is someone I consider to be very cool, a brain the size of a planet, a life spent probing the outer reaches of human understanding about the Cosmos in which we live – very cool. Yet I seriously doubt that he ever considered the proposition as to whether he was cool or not.
Before Silicon Valley became cool it was full of nerdy geeks exploring the outer reaches of computing power and related technologies. I think my point is that cool is generated not by people desiring to be cool, but by people doing stuff that is genuinely cool, without ever considering whether or not they are personally cool. This generates a kind of vortex of attraction, I think, at least in modern times, the first inkling of this was President Kennedy coming to Berlin and making his famous pronouncement, “Ich bin ein Berliner.” I am a Berliner. Then almost three decades later the Berlin wall fell and set the stage for German Reunification, these events still dominate the modern history of Berlin. The seat of Government moved back to Berlin in the late 90s and the city seemed to develop a deep collective will to move forward in new progressive ways.
In any progressive movement there always appears to be a definite core of genuinely talented, creative people. This core is often surrounded by a second, much larger, group of people who desire progress and creativity but who personally lack the talent or imagination to bring it about, but want to be a part of it. In other words there are the genuinely (but also genuinely disinterested) cool people, and the mass of people desperately seeking to be cool. The former’s source of cool comes from inner depths and visions, the latter’s source of cool is external, a veneer of both appearance and attitude. On this visit I really felt that the crucial balance between these two groups had slipped unfavourably towards the second grouping. There is no doubt that Berlin is still a very interesting place, with a lot of exciting social experimentation, social policy and diversity, a place that is genuinely attempting to address 21st Century problems with the sort of urgency they require. But this time around I also noticed more homelessness, a greater number of people with clear drug, alcohol and mental health issues, and a kind of hardening of the social carapace people wear. It may well be the city of the future, but I am deeply grateful that I have the choice not to live there. Edginess cuts both ways, it can be very stimulating and exciting, and it can also be alienating and scary.
Both Santiago de Compostella and Berlin are cities full of history and the evidence of history. In Santiago this appears, for most people, to be a source of pride, a source of the identity that people clearly feel for themselves. In Berlin there is some of that but there is also a sense that history is not to be trusted, that it was history that landed us in this shit! There are of course, some good reasons for Germans to feel this way; their recent history has not been easy to understand. When this sort of powerful social solvent is poured over national identity, it begins to break down. The scramble begins to rebuild identity in new and more acceptable ways, this gives rise to crisis, which as the ancient Chinese cliché states, is a time of both danger and opportunity.
Another recent example of this happening is the whole 1960s counter culture that took place in the post war United States. Young people rebelling against the smug self-satisfaction of mainstream 1950s America, and propelled to a head by the involvement in a faraway foreign war, for entirely ideological reasons, threw the rule book out the window. Fuelled by anti-war sentiment and mind-altering psychedelic drugs an entire generation turned its back on the acceptable social identities laid out for them by ‘straight society,’ to form new ones. One would have to say that with the passage of time this has proved to have produced mixed results, there is no doubt that the counter culture positively changed society in almost every field of endeavour; lamentably it also left behind many casualties.
History is full of examples where the creation of a social vacuum has led to opportunistic horror on one hand (the rise of the Nazi Party in the 1930s), or the flowering of new vision and renewed positive social cohesion on the other (the Foundation of Israel in the late 1940s). The pulse of civilisation ebbs and flows like a tide, there is no permanent terminus; there are only the collective consequences of billions of daily moral decisions and actions taken by individuals. Young people, it seems, do not want older people standing at the anvil on which history is forged, and I for one, as an older person, don’t want to be anywhere near the thing. The mistakes that those older people have made are clearly on the record, the mistakes that younger people are yet to make, have not yet been revealed. That’s why the edginess of Berlin feels so nerve-wracking; the count is not yet in! I wish them all the best in the world, for all our sakes.
