In The End, It Was All About Love

PART ONE:

Righteous Migrants

What happened to the winds that sent the slave ships?

Some of these gusts are proud that they filled those ancient sails.

You could hear them above Berlin on election night,

Hailing the arrival of the moonlight and far-right;

You could hear them whistling through the corridors

Of the Holocaust memorial, slapping its stone walls and floors,

Gasping applause.

What happened to the winds that sent the slave ships?

Some of these breezes, still thick with guilt,

Now speed refugees towards Europe;

Impatient to atone,

They toss yet more dark bodies into the foam.

What happened to the winds that sent the slave ships?

Some of this air is in the best of health,

Since it has forgiven itself:

I was simply swept along by the prevailing mood,

There was nothing I could do.

What happened to the winds that sent the slave ships?

Some of these hurricanes remain enraged;

You can hear them in the chests of activists

Who stand across from fascists in Spandau:

They are the howls of every African child, woman and man drowned.

These winds have always resisted With every major and minor breath—

Whether forming storms that left the slaver’s ship a wreck

Or sending mischievous wafts to blow the hats from masters’ heads.

What happened to the winds that sent the slave ships?

None of them have retired:

They’ve migrated to Germany in their millions,

And you can find the righteous ones

Whispering through its capital city at weekends,

Slipping through a window to cool a queer couple after a long afternoon of love:

Or sighing through the barbecues at Tempelhofer Feld,

Content that there is still a world that knows how freedom smells.

Berlin Is Not Germany.

Sooner or later Berlin will punch you in the stomach. When it does, please try not to take this personally—instead, try to treat it as a passport stamp, as a sign of your arrival. You won’t get on here if you don’t. If you hang around long enough, it will give you a kiss on the forehead, it will invite you to the less harsh parts of itself.

You won’t know when the blow is coming or where the blow is coming from, but if it takes over a year to strike then you should be highly suspicious. The longer you wait, the more likely it is to be cataclysmic: there is a good chance that, like an inefficient yet vengeful tax collector, it is merely getting ready to collect an epic debt.

Berlin is not Germany, people will tell you. What they mean, of course, is that Berlin is not like the rest of Germany. But Berlin is deeply German. If each of this country’s towns are members of the same family, then Berlin is merely the mischievous sibling that ran away from home. While Munich and Frankfurt each got themselves a mortgage, Berlin hooked up with an older partner and took a couple of bar jobs.

Berlin is not a city for grown-ups. They will say that, and think it is true, but they are wrong. Berlin is often terrifyingly adult. Innocence doesn’t linger here. To survive here, you need to be at least half wolf. What they mean is: Berlin is as volatile as an angry adolescent. Other cities can’t match its emotional extremes. To live in Berlin, you must actually have something of the parent about you—you need to tolerate the town as it surges through its range of mood swings.

Ah, mood swings. Though Berlin is a place of extreme seasons, this city’s divergent turns are not confined to the weather. Its inhabitants will shock you with acts of rudeness and kindness, often in the course of the same day. For that reason, you might find Berlin addictive. If so, that’s because it’s both too much and not nearly enough. You can saturate yourself in this city, but still find yourself deprived.

People will often ask what brought you to Berlin—and they will often ask it in just those words, as if you were summoned here. Perhaps, in some sense, you were. Living in Berlin, if not quite a calling, is compelling. It takes a particular breed to come here, and a different sort altogether to stay. Soon enough, this city will tell you which type you are.

***

What Brought You To Berlin?

Everyone asks you this. You answer glibly—that you came here to do four things: to write during the day, to see your friends during the evening, to fall in love, and to stay in love.

But that’s not the root of it. You came here to disappear. For the first few months you are in Berlin you are largely invisible, or at least as invisible as a dark-skinned black man in an overwhelmingly white city can be. The colours of your clothes mimic those of the city: concrete, tarmac, plaster. You wish to be as innocuous as a cobblestone.

You have had a suspiciously perfect start to life here. Perhaps Berlin can sense that it must go easy on you at first, that you are not yet battle- ready. Miraculously, you end up renting the very first flat that you view. It’s on the first floor on a quiet street in the near east of the city; all warm wooden floors and buttermilk walls, it’s your own small corner of honeycomb. Your landlady, a kind, softly-spoken knitwear designer, knows how hard it is for Africans to find places to rent here. She tells you the story of her three Moroccan friends with well-paying jobs who visited Berlin for a month, and who could barely get any apartment viewings in that time. I think, she says smiling, that my flat will be safe with you.

You feel safe here. It’s not far from the centre of town, but your nearest train station is one which few people outside your area have heard of. You’ve only been here a few months, and to your delight you are already beginning to vanish.

***

Berlin Is Still Going Too Well.

Winter has arrived. The sky is sealed shut, closed until spring. The wind is a true Berliner; whenever it meets you in the street, it charges rudely past, convinced its destination is more important than yours. It whips through the city, hostile as a cocked pistol, barging through doors with the cold tucked under one arm.

Despite the weather’s severe welcome, Berlin is still going too well. You have made several new friends. You are seeing a woman you met through the literature scene, and she gives you a happiness—a sense of calm, and comfort—that you didn’t dare imagine. She believes in your writing. She is wonderful. You are told you often overcomplicate things when it comes to relationships, but this feels easy, so you allow yourself to enjoy it. You are not sure how things turned out so well—to be with someone so kind, so concerned about the world around them, so purposeful in their work. You float forwards, enveloped by love.

***

A Never-ending Blizzard Of Syllables.

There are many foods that have attracted your interest since you arrived in Germany, but the most intriguing of all these must be the schnitzel. You are fascinated by the schnitzel because it is not so much a meal as a thorough assault on the very concept of hunger itself. A thinnish slab of meat coated in breadcrumbs, it is a huge item, typically filling two-thirds of your plate. The largest one you have seen is not much smaller than a paving stone.

The schnitzel is Austrian but the Germans have adopted it with the vigour that the English have taken to curry. It is one of several immigrants to dinner tables in east Berlin, the more recent arrivals being Italian, Lebanese, Syrian, Colombian, Portuguese and Sudanese, but it stands apart from them in one crucial respect: it is generally consumed without the accompaniment of sauce. This is something you do not understand—this dish is biscuit-dry but many Germans eat it with no moisture other than a dash of lemon juice.

The startling dryness of schnitzel is in keeping with the Germans’ apparently robust attitude to discomfort. When you first have a hangover in the city, you go looking for painkillers on Sunday morning, only to find that every chemist in your area is shut till tomorrow. It feels like a punishment for getting hammered. The next time you have a hangover, you have long since invested in painkillers—but then you find that they are not as strong as the ones you bought in Britain, and still leave you with a substantial ache, as if to make you suffer a little further for your drunkenness.

German bureaucracy makes you work for it too. You have learned to treat each new avalanche of admin as different stages of an assault course, at the end of which you will achieve integration in German society. The language sometimes seems like a neverending blizzard of syllables, even to someone who studied it at school. But slowly, gently, you make your way, dealing with the Künstlersozialkasse, acquiring your Anmeldungsbestätigung. Each month, you pass a new test; each month, the place