July 2011

Enjoy a drink at the Cafe Einstein and watch the world pass by. Photo by David Lansing.

On Sunday I found myself back at the Café Einstein, sitting in a green and white wicker chair beneath a red umbrella. It was not quite eleven and I was having a discussion with myself as to whether to order a coffee or a glass of Sekt. If you order a coffee at the Einstein, it comes with a little double-shot glass of water. I don’t know why.

I ordered a Sket. And the strawberry cake, which is quite good. A naked man, standing in the middle of the closed-off street in front of the American Embassy, was handing out fliers until two German policemen on bikes came by and put a vinyl raincoat on him and stood him up against the wall of the Café Einstein, waiting for backup. One of the policemen was laughing, obviously amused by the whole thing, and the other one stood about a foot away from the naked man, yelling at him, gesturing with his hands at where the man’s penis was now covered by the vinyl raincoat.

The backups started arriving; you could hear that scary oscillating siren noise long before you saw the police cars. Once they got there, the naked man, who’d been quite calm, suddenly got agitated. In the end, it took five polizei, including two women, to subdue the naked man and move him away from the crowd. And then another police car showed up so that now there were at least ten cops.

A German woman with red hair sitting next to me got up quickly and hurried from the café to go talk to the naked man. When she came back, I asked her what he was protesting about and in halting English she said she wasn’t sure. “He is saying something about you don’t have to be a slave, but I can’t understand him. He makes no sense. I think he is a little bit crazy, you know?”

Coffee at the Cafe Einstein always comes with two shot glasses of water. God knows why.

It is early Sunday afternoon and I am sitting outside the Café Einstein drinking Sekt around the corner from the American Embassy, watching a naked man get arrested. The day is as beautiful as the pale green linden trees flirting with the puffy white clouds above, and women more beautiful than any you  would see along the Champs-Elysées, stroll by smiling at me and shyly saying, “Guten Tag!” There are so many bicycles rolling down the boulevard and the people on them seem not to have a particular destination in mind but are simply sightseeing along the shady boulevard on this beautiful July afternoon. And there are tons of freaks walking by as well: A short, stubby blond hooker in a black mini-dress that only pretends to cover her red thong underwear; albino twin girls, about 19 or 20, with hair dyed the color of cotton candy; a transvestite who looks like Marlene Dietrich, drinking Berliner Weiss. And, of course, the naked man now being forced into a police car. Who, I notice as he is driven off, looks very much like Lenin.

I think I love Berlin.

The sparkling new Potsdamer Platz, the hub of Berlin.

Having spent a fair amount of time in Las Vegas, I am intimately familiar with the conceit of what I call Cup-o’-Soup Architecture or COSA. In Vegas, the Eiffel Tower can be constructed in a matter of months. Add a little water, wait a few minutes, and where there was once a vacant lot is now the Doge’s Palace.

Potsdamer Platz, which was totally laid to waste during World War II and then sat as a desolate no-man’s land throughout the Cold War, now looks like a futuristic movie set for a sci-fi film, something titled “Europa: 2030.”

But here’s the thing: These are not streets of plywood facades like the movie sets at Universal Studios. Nor are they the 2/3 size trompe l’oeils of Vegas or Disneland. These are the real things. Full size. Street after street of noveau office buildings and glitzy apartments, restaurants and museums, all beautiful, all very modern, and all designed by a host of world-renowned architects like Renzo Piano, Arata Isozaki, Richard Rogers, and Jose Rafael Moneo.

And all of these stunning-looking building have sprung up in the last 20 years. I’ve never seen anything like it. Not on this scale. Not as a national statement. This is a brave new world. And it is endlessly fascinating.

Does this young student know the history of The Wall? Maybe, maybe not. Photo by David Lansing.

I went looking for a chunk of the Berlin Wall today and had a hell of a time finding it (more on that later) but it got me to thinking.

In a very short period of time—perhaps no more than ten years at most—Berlin as the metaphysical symbol of the Cold War will be all but forgotten outside of history books.

High school-aged students from London and Prague and Kansas City will hop off stuffy motor coaches and be herded towards a rather non-descript gray monolith of pitted cement and, being informed by a buttoned-up, sweaty-browed teacher that this is, in fact, a piece of the Berlin Wall, they will think—or perhaps even say out loud—“So what’s the big deal?”

It will carry no emotional weight for them. It will seem much ado about nothing. The some 1,200 people who died trying to get up and over that wall (the last, Chris Gueffroy, was shot trying to flee East Berlin the night of February 5, 1989) will be no more meaningful than the names on that forgotten plaque in their little hometowns honoring the dead from WWI.

Anyway, yesterday I hopped in a taxi and asked my driver to take me to the Berlin Wall. Minutes later we were at Checkpoint Charlie where there is, indeed, a chunk of what’s left, but what I was interested in seeing was the graffiti-filled section of the Wall. My driver had no idea where that was. It’s in Kreuzberg, I told him. What street? He asked. I told him I wasn’t sure but surely someone would be able to point us in the right direction.

After driving aimlessly around Kreuzberg for a bit, I told the driver to pull over. I got out, paid the driver, and then asked the first person I saw, a young woman who looked to be 16 or 17, how to get to the Berlin Wall. She shrugged and kept walking. I decided to do the same. A block later, there it was. Being passed by dozens of strollers who never gave it a second look. Some twenty years after The Fall, and The Wall is all but forgotten. At least by those born after 1990.

I'm waiting for the soft parade to begin in Berlin.

It is warm and humid with gray thunder clouds hovering over the dingy Aeroflot building. I am walking up Unter den Linden, which is becoming my favorite street for strolling aimlessly in Berlin. Usually I stop at the Cafe Einstein and sit at an outdoor table drinking a rich König-Pilsener and just take in the scene. It’s the perfect spot for a flâneur.

Across the boulevard is the old cakebread Russian Embassy which looks childish and ridiculous, like a Legoland castle. The crossstreet to Unter den Linden is blocked off; the gi-normous American Embassy is nearby, guarded and protected within an inch of its life. Hot wars, cold wars—it never really ends.

As I am sipping my beer thinking about all this, there is a sudden commotion coming up Unter den Linden. It’s a surrealist scene of Indians, in full war paint, on horseback and an Old West wagon train. There are cowboys in buckskin, waving their hats, and Indian chiefs in headdresses. All led by motorcycle polizei and trailed by a truck with DJs playing harmonica-laden dance music.

When I ask the woman sitting next to me what it is they are saying on the screeching speakers, she says it is a promotion for a new dance club in Mitte. “Something to do with cowboys and Indians,” she says, shrugging.

Berlin is such a startling city. And, it seems, the soft parade never ends. It all reminds me a bit of that Doors song:

The soft parade has now begun

Listen to the engines hum

People out to have some fun

A cobra on my left

Leopard on my right, yeah

The deer woman in a silk dress

Girls with beads around their necks

Kiss the hunter of the green vest

Sometimes when life hands you traffic congestion it also hands you free beer.

Yesterday I got stuck under the shadows of the Brandenburg Gate waiting for a long line of police vehicles escorting some political dignitary or another to the Reichstag, Germany’s parliament building.

Just as the traffic signals finally cleared and the motorcycle cops hurried away, several vans pulled up at the very busy intersection and a dozen or so extremely attractive young people, dressed in green and gold uniforms, piled out, walking through the middle of the still-stalled traffic handing out purple bags inside of which were large bottles of Berliner Pilsner.

They were giving away beer samples.

Now just try and imagine that happening a block away from the Capitol building in D.C.—or anywhere in America, for that matter.