geraniums/Germans

Berlin – at least central Berlin, by which I mean, expansively and subjectively, everything from Charlottenburg in the west to Gesundbrunnen in the north to Friedrichshain in the east and Schöneberg in the south – is mostly a city of apartments, which is to say, it’s mostly a city of terraces and balconies.  The last few weeks, I’ve been admiring the window boxes, which are often filled with geraniums in bright pinks and reds.  Geraniums are not a bad choice, since in Berlin, summer is changeable and tempestuous but rarely hot, and since geraniums do so well when the nights are cool (in New York, mine always looked best in June and September).  Here you have both cool nights and days in which clouds sweep through from horizon to horizon, alternating, seemingly by the hour, sun and gloom and squalls.

As of late, the geraniums have been joined by German flags.  I first noticed a sprinkle of the black-red-gold tricolors a few weeks ago, at the start of the European soccer championships.  In the last two weeks, the flags began to multiply, hung from restaurant awnings, sprouted from the roofs of Volkswagons and Mercedes like curious ears.  After every match in which Germany has played, cars in my neighborhood have raced through the streets honking their horns, while people set off both fireworks and (it sounds like) explosives.  The part of Schöneberg where I live is probably 50% Turkish (unlike the neighborhood where I work, which is probably 50% Bavarian).  My little eddy of a neighborhood was too close to the old Wall, remains too close to the rail line which cleaves between Schöneberg and Kreuzberg, to have thrived.  A third of the store windows are empty; my apartment building is home only to transients.  It is a place where all of the uncomfortable questions about modern German national and ethnic identity seem to face off. Sometimes I am the only woman on the street not wearing a headscarf.  But here, too, the German tricolor flags proliferate. 

I have begun to walk through the streets, craning my neck upwards, looking for flags amid the flowers (just as I spent last spring staring at the sidewalks, searching for stolpersteine to photograph and catalogue).

It’s received wisdom that it’s been “okay” to use a German flag since the World Cup, in 2006; but this is a new level of intensity, and of course it has an underlying edge because, in an unfortunate synchronicity, the Euro seems like it might blow apart just as Germans embrace this newfound, “normal” sense of national pride.  

Perhaps it is not mere coincidence.   Last night, I went out with the others to a restaurant near Hackescher Markt.  We sat in the back garden, surrounded by Germans.  A table of young people, some bearing faces painted with the tricolor, some wearing German flag hats, raptly watched the pre-game analysis.  Among our small group was one Greek, one scholar of Greece, assorted rootless cosmopolites, and one provincial from New Jersey.  The scholar of Greece talked on her cell phone, loudly, fiercely, deliberately, in Greek, to a friend in Athens.  To our left, two very fat women, wearing black-red-and-gold scrunchies with black-red-and-gold feathers that sprang from their heads, calmly ate their dinner.  The scholar confessed that, "at the risk of sounding completely cynical and unsophisticated," she didn't think it mattered any more if Greece left the Euro or not.  "It can't get any worse," she said.  "What pensioner can lose his or her pension?  They've already lost everything."  "Well," I said, because I pride myself on being the most pessimistic person at any table, "it could always get worse.  It could spread laterally - to the US, and to China, India, Brazil, all the nations still astride the process of modernization."  She shrugged.  But we agreed on two things: first, politics aside, Merkel is admirable in her gutsiness, her ambition, the fact that she's not notable for her wardrobe, her husband or her biceps; and second, she appears to feel no particular historical guilt.  Nor does Germany as a whole.  "What's new," she said, "is that for the first time, Germany is willing to say, 'Listen, we call the shots here.'  The situation isn't new - it's always been the most powerful economy, it's always, theoretically, been able to call the shots, but politicians always had to backpedal and gesture to the past" - I thought, here, of Willy Brandt kneeling - "but Merkel's not doing that.  There's no sense of historical debt guiding her actions."  But then, I thought, Herbert Frahm had known firsthand a Europe divided nastily into (ethnic) nations.  There was then a moral imperative that appears to have passed with the generations.  

I left early, well before the match ended in defeat for the Greek team, because I had other plans, and biking along the streets felt like the interlude between attacks in a zombie film, the city absolutely empty of cars or bikes or even pedestrians.  Everyone who could be was parked in front of a television.  At regular intervals, howls would echo through the streets.  Around eleven at night, the familiar honking of horns and explosions began outside my windows.

If you are old enough to remember that there was a thing called Communism – let alone the academic debates over German historical responsibility which ripped through the country in the eighties and nineties – you are old enough to remember the weirdness of German nationalism, the uneasiness with which German unification was met by many other Europeans at the time (counterposed to the smug condescension with which German history is treated in the United States).  I do not at all believe in inherited guilt, but I've nonetheless felt on edge this whole time.  Two weeks ago, I left work just as one of the matches was beginning, and got caught up in the crowds streaming toward Tiergarten - young, drunk, swarming over the sidewalks, obeying no traffic laws.  I gripped my bike handles so hard that I tore one of them loose.  (To be fair, I bought it for 60 euros in Mauerpark.)  

I continue to bike past the Reichstag every morning; I continue to marvel how close I can get.  (Though as an American, I expect to look at my government buildings from behind a wall of concrete and sandbags, at a distance of 500 yards.)  Guards continue to stand outside the synagogues and Jewish centers, but that's routine, the only gesture to historical responsibility that remains; no one else seems particularly vigilant or worried.  Last week, we were told there would be a demonstration, that we should expect it might be difficult to get into our building.  I looked out over the edge of the balcony at noon and saw the polizei massing in the courtyard below, maybe 5 vans' worth.  I found myself on line at the supermarket behind one of the policemen, who, though wearing black body armor, was perfectly friendly to me.  "There is a demonstration, yes?" I asked him.  "What time does it start?"  "Five," he answered.  "What's it about?" I asked, thinking, It will be about Greece, he will advise me to get out of here before it starts, because things are going to get ugly.  "It's a protest against the high cost of housing in the neighborhood," he answered, matter-of-factly, and paid for his apple and energy drink.  When I left that evening, about 20 kids banging drums and bearing signs had indeed shut down the intersection, but they seemed to be having fun dancing in the street, and everyone else just seemed bored.  I could see inside one police van: it appeared to be filled with cans of soda.  I left work tonight, and as I pedaled through Mitte I noticed the heavy traffic, suddenly realized, Uh-oh, something's going on, saw the police ahead and the streets shut off to cars.  I gestured to one of the policemen: Must I stop?  He waved me on dismissively.  The streets were filled with rubbish, broken bottles, paper.  It must have been a demonstration, I thought, or a celebration for the victory over Greece last night.  Then, as I hit Unter den Linden, it occurred to me: No, it's just Pride Weekend.  It isn't the end of anything.  

It's a strange moment to be in Berlin - strange, mostly, because it is so calm, so placid, even as I find myself waiting for disaster to strike, even as it seems that if the possible end to this grand experiment should happen now, here in Berlin, it should end dramatically, in violence, tears.   After every game, the city is filled with racing cars and honking horns and explosions; but the geraniums are gorgeous.