Disenchanted with Berlin

It is distinctly possible to stay too long at the rave (as Joan Didion said).

It’s been nearly two years since I moved to Berlin, lonely, cold, and disoriented, assuming this low-grade misery would be a temporary state.

Two years in Berlin, and I’ve mostly forgotten the excitement and intrigue of living abroad. The other day, while day biking to the train station to pick mushrooms in the forest, I uncovered it again in a short burst: the smell of cigarettes mixed with onions from the doner stand; the computerized trill of bells signaling an announcement for the train track.

I remembered the anonymity and freedom I once felt here—how cool it was to cross the bridge over a city canal or drink a beer on the street. I remembered how transcendent it felt to go to a Berlin club for the first time—the feeling of the bass from my feet to the hollow of my chest—full-body, immersive vibrations. Or falling asleep in a strange altbau flat. Tapered candles and cold wind.

I remembered loving Berlin. I once loved Berlin. Now I only love talking about how much I hate it.

*

My first visit to Berlin was in February 2009 when my college roommate studied abroad and lived in an 8-person flatshare in Prenzlauerberg. I met this girl on my first day of school. Her T-shirt said “Hallo Berlin.” Fresh from my Jewish high school where all but one of my core group of friends had Aushwitz survivor grandparents, I thought I’d never be friends with this Germanophile. Of course, she became my very best friend. And part of loving her was reluctantly learning to know and appreciate Berlin.

I knew about the courtyards and backhouses of her Prenzlauerberg building from Holocaust history books. That droll week, we ate marzipan croissants from parchment bags on freezing train platforms. She asked me what I wanted to do and I insisted on visiting every depressing DDR or Holocaust museum I could think of. I refused to have fun. Berlin was where I went to punish myself with memory.

The city was overcast and enormous. Hardly any advertisements aside from public health campaigns for safer sex. It was grungy and edgy and I had no appetite the whole trip. On my first night in the city, I picked at Knodel in a mushroom cream sauce, disgusted by this foreign mix of bland and rich.

Berlin was a slow burn and from the start, the attraction was masochistic. It felt wrong to be there—like an insult to my ancestors. And at the same time, Berlin’s brokenness mirrored my own grief and allowed me to externalize it in a way I’d never wanted to before. I could embrace the darkness of a sunless winter, and find the complexity and beauty of recovering from a major trauma. No wonder I came here, like so many others, in the aftermath of a life rupture, hoping to find something good and healing in the intensity of my pain.

*

Around a year after moving to Berlin, I began to acknowledge the stagnancy I feel here. My life is not progressing.

Since I moved to Berlin, my friends have had children, job promotions, and weddings. And I’ve done nothing but go out, nurse hangovers, avoid writing, and suffer a repetition of breakups with a DJ. Even as I write this, I feel the music through the walls of his studio, sort of threatening in its repetitive allure. I hardly remember when a track begins and it never ends.

Berlin is a circle. That’s why you ride “the Ring” on the S-Bahn. You can live your life in an endless loop of parties and hungover self-analysis and vague creative striving with undefined and unmet goals and that is what I once loved about the city in contrast to the neurotic, stressful competition in New York. But lately, I make the same flippant remark over and over when people ask me how I like living in Berlin: when I moved here, I discovered a deep well of loneliness and depression, which the anxious chaos of New York had always masked.

Since Annie Ernaux won the Nobel Prize, I’ve been reading her writing on the years she spent languishing, unfulfilled as a young mother and wife. I think: at least she got married and had children. I fear I’ll never have the opportunity to languish in this kind of bourgeois life. Instead, I’m here, in Berlin, texting friends to borrow a leather bra or negligee for a hetero-kink party on a Thursday night. I’m dating people who can’t commit to plans a week in advance, let alone a life together.

The other day I heard a baby in the hallway outside my apartment babbling for its mother and started crying. I moved to Berlin, in part, to escape “bourgeois expectations.” Now I am preemptively mourning the stable life I thought I’d have. I can’t tell if having children is something I wanted out of fear or an earnest desire. I live in this thick ambivalence.

And I worry about money. I am underpaid by everyone I work for. I struggle with time alone at home. The pace of New York kept me spinning, running to countless self-imposed social obligations. In New York, no one lives in a nice-enough apartment to want to spend time at home. But people in Berlin seem to enjoy spending time relaxing in their nice homes. I am supposedly a writer. But the expectation to be alone in silence has always felt inhumane and insane to me. If I could be perpetually out and surrounded by other people I would be. Anything to avoid my silent living room and the idea of sitting there and not writing.

Many days, I’m not writing, because I’m sleeping. This seems to be normal in Berlin: you go out until 7 AM and spend the entire next day in emotional torment. If it’s Sunday, the supermarkets are closed and usually, I haven’t thought ahead, and I’m forced to order from Eastern European DoorDash, or “Wolt.” Usually, the food tastes repulsive because it’s German or because I took a “microdose” of MDMA. I sit up in bed eating Turkish food, tormented by excruciating, nostalgic memories of the DJ holding me close at night. Some of my clothes still smell like his Lucky Strike cigarettes. This is why you need a nice apartment in Berlin—you need somewhere to hide when you’re sunk deep in your longing and shame. Here in Berlin, the loneliness is full-body, it nags at your stomach. A friend told me: this is the perfect city to keep returning to your toxic ex.

During the stretches of this year when I was not experiencing heartache, I was processing other memories of abandonment and other existential horrors like the horror of living in a body with the potential to betray me. Watching my dad get sick was my loss of innocence. I realized life can be truly cruel and unfair and senseless and meaningless and Americans always say things will work out in the end but Europeans know they won’t. Like, any of us could all develop Parkinson’s Disease or dementia. We could all lose our minds or mobility and need a caretaker. And what if we’re not lucky enough to find ourselves with the kind of kindness and empathy we need in our most vulnerable moments?

This morbid state of mind led me into a brief, depressing friendship with a Russian man who continually reminded me of my sense of “American exceptionalism.”

“Feel lucky you ever had a sense of optimism,” he told me, “don’t laugh too much. You’ll cry later.”

I’ve spent the last year trying to make new friends in this city, but many of the people I’ve met are addicts, struggling with self-diagnosed ADHD and autism spectrum disorder (apparently everyone in Berlin is neuro-atypical, which is a convenient excuse for not being able to keep appointments or show empathy.)

Sometimes I lie in bed feeling my feelings and thinking of an excellent Reductress headline: “woman’s self-care beginning to look a lot like self-sabotage.” Where’s the line between healing from your grief through fleeting moments of joy and wasting away in self-destruction? What is the difference between feeling your feelings and endless rumination?

I once loved Berlin but lately, it seems caught in an awkward state of gentrification: too expensive to be an edgy artists’ paradise; too irrelevant and rough-at-the-seams to have the polished allure of London, Paris, and New York. The tech bros are here drinking bad natural wine, waiting in line for Berghain before it supposedly shuts down.

But sometimes I think I’ll never really be satisfied. Four years ago I lived in Park Slope with a partner. When I left the apartment in the morning for my job at CUNY, I looked around Brooklyn and thought: this is cold and ugly; I want to live in Berlin. Where did I think I was going? The South of France? I could’ve gone anywhere in Europe, but I wanted Berlin.