On the Move Again

I recently moved across Berlin. I had always planned to spend two months here, but when my first housing arrangement fell through only a week before I was supposed to move in, I took a one-month sublease in Kreuzberg. My roommates were three men (the German owner and two Italians). They were the nicest guys, but the place was a stereotypical bachelor pad (i.e. gross). What was tragicomic was the number of cleaning products laying around that never seemed to get used (cleaning spray, mop, vacuum). It didn’t help that they smoked, either. Number of lighters on the magazine table in the bathroom: 7 (once I counted 8). The kitchen had what I took as classic Berlin WG* décor: a newspaper mural on the wall and rainbow flags as cabinet curtains. The clippings were mostly of athletes and various sexy women. The sign in the photo sums up the situation: Wo staubt liegt, herrscht Frieden. “Where dust lies, peace reigns.” Interpret that how you will!

Kreuzberg used to be divided into two zip codes, 61 and 63, which Berliners still use as shorthand. The former area in particular has a reputation for being hip and happening. That’s where I ended up, and hopefully my earlier posts about the street festivals (here and here) convey something of the vibe. Also characteristic of Kreuzberg are numerous Turkish-Germans (like the taxi driver who helped me move) and an active gay community. There’s a Schwules Museum (Gay Museum) down the street from my old place, and St. Matthew’s Cemetery is the resting place of quite a few famous Germans, including Rudolf Virchow** and Rio Reiser (of the band Ton Steine Scherben).*** I’m hoping to get there on a sunny afternoon after church one Sunday.

 

The map is a screen grab from a website that catalogs what is left of the Berlin Wall and its history. The dark red line follows the path of the Wall, and the orange circles have numbers to show how many objects or places of interest are nearby. I moved from bottom to top on the map, from old West Berlin to old East Berlin (black arrow).

As you can see, Prenzlauer Berg is on the other side of the city center from Kreuzberg. Also a desirable neighborhood in Berlin, it is more gentrified, and there are supposed to be more Russians and Spaniards living here. Unlike Kreuzberg, however, Prenzlauer Berg is actually on a hill (ein Berg is a mountain). This means that it stills takes me about 15 minutes to get to the library in the morning (tiny black circle in center of map), but the return trip is more like 20 minutes. I used to bike past the Holocaust Museum and then up through the side streets of the city center behind the Gendarmenmarkt, where traffic is regulated partly by courtesy and partly by who’s bigger/gutsier. Now I ride up and down one major thoroughfare, but the car traffic stays on the street, and the bicycle traffic has bike paths on the sidewalk. I pass the Fernseherturm (tv tower) on Alexanderplatz, the Berliner Dom on the Museuminseln (Museum Island in the Spree River), the Neue Wache (Tomb to the Unknown Soldier), and Humboldt Universität.

Interestingly enough, in both places my bedroom has/had yellow walls. Other than that, the new apartment is very different from the last one. For one, a family lives there (parents and elementary school-aged son) and rents out two spare bedrooms. Although they especially like to have non-German guests, the other roommate here now is a law student from Hamburg. After we leave, a college student from Chicago and a Chinese student are moving in. For two, the place is clean and bright. The décor has three themes: Berlin, Fußball (soccer), and Britania. There are garlands, postcards, and collages everywhere. The photo shows part of the mural in the guest bathroom, which also features three ladies running a currywurst stand and a green Ampelmann waving the Union Jack from the prow of the HMS Merlin.

I typed this while the “unfriendly” apartment cat sat in my lap. The landlady warned me about her when I came to view the place, and she (the cat, not the landlady!) promptly jumped into my lap. She’s a stripey tabby like my beloved fur-face back home, but decidedly plumper and not declawed, so I’ve had to discourage her from shredding my jeans in thanks for keeping her company while her humans are gone on vacation.

*--Wohngemeinschaft or “living community,” the typical living arrangement for single Germans. These are formal or ad hoc roommate arrangements.

**--I wrote my undergraduate senior honors thesis on this pathological anatomist-anthropologist-politician.

***--This is the first thing my new landlady mentioned when I told her where I was moving from.