Berlin is “hype”: in and out, inside and outside, surrounded by graffiti’s and white walls, fetish cafés and bookshops that smell like mold, sweet old men covered by incense and 6-year old blonde girls that go to school every day taking the ubahn, beers that cost just as much as a chewing-gum and sodas whose names are just as absurd as their layers are minimal and hipster.
It’s a city that goes beyond German structures, even more beyond European ones, and during these decades has lived by its own rules and times: it’s a short news that every club will close at 3a.m – and the Berliners went nuts. In Milan, the same kind of news would be received with a yawn and a pajama suit. In Berlin people go shopping in slippers and eye-shadows, they fill themselves with pommes until they cannot take it anymore. However, you must prepare yourself for the winter darkness and the wild coldness – crazy enough to prohibit socialization with squirrels.
Named this last January by Gucci “The New Face Of Fashion”, Berlin queer scene is more alive than ever and located in Kreuzberg and Neukölln. The gay scenario, if you don’t consider the club Berghain, is to be found in the streets Kottbusser Tor and Sonnenallee – and it’s literally in every corner in which you turn your head, during a crazy-normal weekend.
It’s within these roads that I ride like a lunatic, on a bike without seller that my Iceland-born flat mate left me. I covered it up with tape and paper, in order to carry myself and my princess-like weight. I ride and breathe an air that starts to feel like mine, even though difficulties and everyday struggles are always here with me. I still struggle to order medicines at the Apotheke, and call a stranger with “du” instead of “Sie” it’s still a big deal – worst than public sneezing in Japan.
I lock my bike, even though it’s not gonna be stolen, and I run the stairs to take the ubahn. Here in front of me I see two awesome guys: one with a big black beard, deep eyes and a perfectly ironed shirt, the other one a tall as a Vikings dude with a perfect blond haircut. They are holding hands, challenging themselves to have the highest cuffs of pants. They’re in love while they wear their sunglasses. In one second they move, and let an old lady come through. She murmurs, as she is running to buy her sweet potatoes.
Berlin for me is a shock, because the old lady couldn’t care less about the gay couple, and she couldn’t care less about me either – dressed up in as a tomboy – and my Austrian girlfriend, waiting for me in front of a Späti. She sees us kissing and goes one, still murmuring about the obstacles she’s finding on her way to the supermarket. She, as a true Berliner, doesn’t judge and is not judged.
Berlin welcomes, lives the refugees issue as a collective commitment made up by used-clothes markets organized every Sunday, free museums for those families who are seeking for a shelter but most of all a familiar scenario inside a stranger city, organizes meeting about women visibility and equality in the workplace, tries to integrate with deep obligation people that for one reason or another feel out of place.
It is a city in which nobody is really a Berliner in the first place. Nobody was really born here, but it’s full of people that in some ways ended up here. From a village like Como, a huge city like New Work, the overcrowded Buenos Aires and the white and untouched Vienna: there’s a little of Berlin in everyone of us, and only by landing here we can discover parts of ourselves we never thought we had. Here we feel like lost souls, we don’t really know what the right path in our career is: we just know we’re special, idealistic and dreamers.
Here’s okay if you go to a bar and have a beer on your own, chatting with the boy next to you or the bartender. It’s okay if you ask to people not about your salary expectations but if you take off your socks or not during sex. It’s okay if you support your trans girlfriend and you will still love her ever after her transition – because it’s about the soul, it’s not about the body, and it’s okay if you have beard and muscles but you introduce yourself as Fransiska, not Hans.
This last semester I attented seminars like “Man, Woman and Nation”, “Queer Theory and Queer Politics”. I spent hours sitting on micro-chairs, knocking my hands on the table instead of clapping at the end of the lesson. I talked about personal pronouns and gender, discussed why is becoming a trend to add “*” after the word trans, why the Schwules Museum* (the gay museum) doesn’t have gender-divided bathrooms, why the queer theorist Judith Halberstam now prefers to be called Jack or simply J. I lived this seminar with my gut, my heart and my belly: new concepts, crazy and electrifying ideas, interesting people to work with.
Am I privileged, am I lucky? I don’t think so; I’m simply a 25-year old Italian girl, looking for her home like a tortoise. Instead of a shell I’m carrying around contact lenses and a laptop, but the concept is still the same.
I wrote this article because I think that everybody should come to Berlin: For a short weekend, financed with Ryanair cheap flights, a sabbatic year, an academic semester, a decade made of bad coffee but gorgeous apple cakes, twenty years of “naja” and “dankeschö—ön”. I think that Berlin is worth of being described, told, represented, but most of all lived. All of this, between a beer and another.
