Berlin

by Bea Setton

Berlin is an easy place to start anew, as everyone seems to have just arrived. People even dress as if they are perched on the sill of a long journey, with belt bags and bandannas and tin bottles clipped to rucksacks with complex infrastructures.

I arrived in a winter I found too cold to walk around in, so for the first couple of months I knew the city in skewed constellations of U-Bahn stops. It was only later, when the weather turned warm quite suddenly on the night of the third of April, that I started to color in between the lines.

I was happy. I liked repeating precisely the same thing, putting my brain through its paces, feeling like a powerful gymnast or horse, knowing how much youth shimmers and lust fizzes close to the surface—but keeping it in check, turning in early and alone, delighting in the precision of the coming day’s choreography, choosing to do only this—over and over.

People always seem to trust philosophers. Belonging to that particular department is a kind of stamp of respectability. What most people don’t know is that philosophers (who are mostly men) are dirty maniacs. If a philosopher responded to an ad of mine, I wouldn’t even answer. I would assume that he was aesthetically stunted and sexually frustrated, and that he ate horrible, fishy, bristly things for breakfast.

I love a fresh start. It was magic to feel my self-reliance, and these strongly muscled legs and tight bags swinging against my torso as the train rattled. What a compact adult package I had become!

As I was coming and going, I noticed that there were small brass plaques on the pavement outside EG’s building. Each square was engraved with the name cohen, a date of birth, a date of deportation, and Auschwitz as the place of death. I looked them up on Google and found out that the plaques are memorials called Stolpersteine, or “stumbling stones,” and that they identify each building from which Jewish families were deported.

Once I’d noticed the Stolpersteine outside my door, I realized they were everywhere, a seemingly random scattering of bronze squares outside bars, cinemas, run-down flats, and grand old buildings. It was jarring, at first, to see Berlin’s lively streets filled with so many little graves, but after a f...

I have been fending off prescriptions of antidepressants for most of my adult life because what I hate most about myself is tangled up in with what I like best.

I never posted anything on Facebook or Instagram. I worried that my pictures or status updates would go ignored and receive no likes or comments and that I would fail at being “visibly popular” on the internet, something I thought was beneath me to want but which I craved like everyone else.

The conversation continued this way for an uncomfortable quarter of an hour, with Kat’s leading questions about how “amazing” Venezuela must be going entirely unanswered by Luis and Catalina, who studiously focused on their food, and occasionally looked at each other with raised eyebrows. This was not the first time a Berliner had told them how lucky they were to come from a Communist regime and how much better life in Venezuela must be.

I was to learn, Catalina and Luis despised anyone even vaguely left-wing. They hadn’t moved to Europe to enjoy the free-love YOLO Berlin experience: they were economic immigrants, there to capitalize on Germany’s higher standard of living.

It was easy to forget, in a city full of squats and anarchists and anti-capitalists, that we were living in the strongest economy in Europe. The Venezuelans saw hippies, hipsters, and socialists as a bunch of ungrateful hypocrites: if they didn’t like capitalism, they should m...

No, I said, shocked. Of course not. I haven’t been here long—I have only just got here—I haven’t even had time to make a friend yet, let alone a Feind.

I might be a bad friend with a penchant for ghosting, and a flaky employee, and a controlling girlfriend, but I am a good neighbor. Of this I am still certain, despite everything that happened to me in Berlin.

I still remember that first spring in Berlin, with far more specificity than the stacks and stacks of other springs that linger only as a hazy wash of black manure and optimistic snowdrops. This time, I tracked each change in nature with dogged attentiveness. This had, I am sure, little to do with what happened next, and far more to do with the fact that I was so unoccupied, and that the overdose of sterile grammar had starved my brain of organic pleasures.

I was busy making myself at home, and reestablished my narrow routine: run, coffee, class, grammar, early to bed, never deviating. I was starting to find it boring, though it didn’t occur to me to go out more, to try to make friends, or try to find work.

I adopted their lifestyle: working hectic shifts and then drinking in underground bars in Dalston till morning, dulling the ache in our legs with Dark and Stormies and showing up to work still buzzing from the night. I learned to use the particular language of third-wave coffee people. I watched videos on latte art and studied caffeine-extraction curves. I lectured customers who ordered “extra-hot lattes” about the optimum temperature for milk-protein stretchiness (sixty-five degrees Celsius), and brewed V60s and AeroPresses with the same somber ceremony of a priest preparing sacramental wine.

Stig and his girlfriend didn’t show up that day, but I lived in constant fear that they would, and I imagined the humiliation of having to take their orders and fuss over them with sugar and napkins. The anxiety became too much to bear, and I quit without notice the following week. I let my boss’s reproachful emails accrue in my inbox, and never spoke to anyone from Knights in Black Satin again.

I had doting parents who sent me enough to live on each month. I’d somehow convinced them that learning German would be good for my career as a philosopher. (I had not told them about the graduate school rejections.)

From time to time I would be beset with shame about my circumstances: twenty-six and still dependent, educated expensively but fruitlessly, failing at this crucial stage to get my foot in any professional door.

I thought about all the students I’d known from Oxford who’d had to work as well as study, my friends who were paying off enormous student loans, and those who were using their first ...

I was grateful to my own parents, who had always made my life incredibly easy, but I also blamed them for many of my failures. I thought my failure to thrive might be due to my privilege, the blanket of security which smothered my creative impulse and removed all necessity from my life.

there’s some bitter irony in blaming others for your inability to shoulder any responsibility

All the students in my language course were either “freelancing,” receiving unemployment benefits, or doing the same as me, covertly living off their parents while remaining vague about the source of their income. This idleness was a citywide phenomenon and was part of the strange, disorienting social fabric of Berlin. Weekends and weekdays had much the same texture, as the streets were always full of people with no place to be and nothing much to do. People did not discuss their work, or lack thereof, as both the rich and the poor were scared of being exposed.

men inevitably drifted into the orbit of my life. This is not because I am a beauty—although I do have nice ankles and an expensive colorist—but because I am such a brilliant bullshitter that I can blow air into the holiest of egos.

my soul is very nimble when it comes to conjuring enthusiasm for mediocrity. I think, all things considered, that this is one of my best qualities.

I am relieved that I have the capacity for such edge and cruelty. It isn’t that I think I am too good, but I do worry that I am weak.

Even though I was not interested in Callum romantically, I instinctively did what I do when “Boys” come over. I put on makeup, but not too much.

A key part of my charm rested on giving the illusion I was a “natural beauty.” I pretended I was one of those “chill” girls who didn’t care about her looks. But secretly there was little I cared about more.

Callum did not drink, which theoretically I do not mind, or at least pretend not to mind, because what kind of a person would mind about a person not drinking? But in fact I do mind, it actually really bothers me, because I doubt people who don’t drink really know how to enjoy things. Of course, I can’t be sure of this, nor can I assert that I know how to enjoy things, either. But someone who feels out of control around alcohol may not be the best at managing their own pleasures, and that leaves me unconvinced that they will allow me to enjoy pleasure myself, let alone give it to me.

whatever bright literary future awaited him did not compensate for his complete lack of curiosity about me. Not that I complained. On the inside I was Estella, full of seething disdain, but on the outside, I just smiled demurely and egged him on: “It sounds great! So then what happens?”

I really was amazed by the depths I had sunk to again, lying in bed in spring in Berlin with a boy who I did not like, unable to sleep, and not saying a single honest thing.

spring pressed on and things got a little more expansive. I learned to leave glass bottles in the street for the homeless to collect instead of throwing them in the bottle bins. In mid-April I skipped a level in German—I jumped from A1.1 to A2.1—and left Russian Katya and Venezuelan Catalina and Luis behind. Kat came with me—her German was even better than mine—but apart from her all the students were new.

My clothes were sequestered in a no-man’s-land between contemporary trends and vintage ones, and so I was perpetually out of fashion. A futuristic throwback to something that never was and never shall be.

Her energy was chaotic, a mixture of naked vulnerability and cruel edginess, and the combination made me wary. I found her difficult to read; I could imagine her being spiteful and kind, and neither would have seemed out of character for her.

Tempelhof used to be an airport: its curved terminal building was designed by Hitler’s favorite architect Albert Speer, but ten years ago the air traffic was moved southward to Schönefeld, and gardeners and skaters and runners have reclaimed it. That evening was warm, and so the park was full of groups of friends lighting early spring barbecues and couples twisted in blankets. I felt full of a kind of illicit hope, witnessing such human-scale pleasures taking place on a site designed for machines and industry and war.

I was hungry. I had nothing that I really liked to eat in the fridge, and the cupboards were intentionally bare, because Day Daphne knows that Night Daphne’s resolve is weak.

I’ve wanted to obliterate a most shame-inducing character from my narrative. But if I can’t be honest in writing, when will I ever really be honest?

I titled the email “Our Automated Souls” (which is poetic, not flirtatious) and he replied immediately, telling me how “tense” my email had made him feel, and could we meet so that I could share my knowledge of the philosophy of technology with him, please.

I cannot remember our exchange and I can’t present any of his emails as evidence, because I deleted them from my inbox, blotting him out from my digital biography.

He thought, as many intellectual men do, that ceaselessly pointing out everything that is bad in the world was enough to make him good.

I kissed him, and spent several hours in his company, a passive floor-to-ceiling Woolfian mirror.[*]

At first I could not understand what was going on, nor why my I’m sorry and nos and my stop and eventually my desperate please, please leave me alone were so ineffective. And then I realized he was actually pretty clever, because he used words in a careful manner which always gave the impression that he was answering me, but he was in fact ignoring my lines, and reading from his own much-rehearsed script, which came from a story in which he always, always gets what he wants.

Every day, every time you meet someone new, you are called upon to make decisions—can you really trust this employer, employee, teacher, taxi driver, friend, lover? However much you might hope that this question will fall to the police, the doorman, your boss—the decision and responsibility to keep yourself safe is no one’s but yours. No one else has access to the only power which can truly protect you from violence, and which can tell you who deserves your trust: your intuition.

The variations on the au-pair job and philosophy PhD stories all got so confusing that in the end I referred obliquely to “my work” whenever anyone asked. We didn’t speak much anyway, as the path was sandy and sloped and we had to fight for breath.