When I first moved to Berlin in 2010, I was insufferable for various reasons. One of the main reasons was because I had just graduated from college with a degree in Anthropology. Anthropology theoretically concerns the study of different cultures, but practically it attracts the type of person who doesn't really like living in the U.S. These kinds of people -- myself included -- think that despite the forced marriages and poverty of India, living there is still superior to living in the United States because people are closer to each other, there's more of an emphasis on family life and the Hindu religion casts everything in a holy glow. Aside from the odd Republican Economics major who was just fulfilling a requirement, the rest of the class was shamelessly exoticising every part of the globe, no matter how hard they tried not to.
So of course I wanted to move abroad as soon as I graduated. I wanted to move to Germany because it seemed like a morally superior place to the United States. Germany recycled, used wind power, provided social benefits to artists, had a great public transportation system, learned from its past, embraced immigrants, had a thriving press, two gay mayors and a gay foreign minister. What wasn't to love?
I spent my first few lonely months in Berlin attempting to look at the culture as if I was a human being with no nationality. Perhaps then I could just effortlessly slide into their way of life without all that culture clash nonsense. I was a citizen of the world! Whatever judgements I had were intrinsically wrong because they didn't come from my most Buddhist core, that which unconditionally accepts my present reality and everyone in it. That dude yelling on the U-Bahn? How healthy that he felt comfortable expressing his anger rather than repressing it like us uptight Seattleites! Everyone was staring at me all the time, but how great that they were attempting to connect with me! What an open society!
I tried to connect with everyone I met in some way or another, mostly to handle the crushing loneliness I felt inside, having moved to a new country with no friends, no job prospects, and no flat lined up. I made jokes about Americans, and lots of small, critical comments about how dumb and fat my fellow countrymen were whenever I came across someone I wanted to be my friend. I wasn't like any of THOSE Americans, of course. I was a traveler! I owned a passport, unlike the other 70%. I quickly made friends with a short, gay, mustached German 25-year-old who found me bizarre enough to keep around. A little angry Jewish boy from Seattle? Now that's what I call comic relief!
We smoked cigarettes on his balcony with his Italian lesbian friend and her French girlfriend, who barely ever spoke. We drank beer and rode our bikes through parks. We spent hours in a bar called "Your Place or My Place?" (Zu Mir Oder Zu Dir?) and I would pretend I could understand their fast-paced German conversations. "Wait, what was that last bit?" I would ask. "Steven, that's not how you smoke a cigarette!" the Italian girl would yell at me. "You're supposed to hold it with two fingers, not cup your entire face with the palm of your hand every time you take a drag." I barely learned any German from those guys.
But no matter -- everyone spoke my mother tongue anyway! What was the point of learning when everyone would switch to English as soon as they heard my horrible accent? There was only one real barrier to my full integration into Berlin high society: my Mother. I was making a little bit of money editing articles for a soulless online company, but I still had to beg her for money every month. My Mother did not understand what I was doing in godforsaken Germany, and I sure wasn't good at convincing her that it was a good idea that I was there. "Steven, come home. Nothing exciting happens in Europe," she would say. "I LOVE EUROPE!" I would yell. "There are so many people from different cultures here." My mother, daughter of German Jewish immigrants, people Germany tried to kill, would sigh. "America has always been the promised land for Jews. Don't get too comfortable in Germany." "I'm more comfortable than I've ever been," I would hiss into the phone, nearly falling over my suitcase as I paced my room. I thought my mother might cry.
My mother, my mother, my MOTHER. My god! She was trying to destroy my life. Why couldn't SHE have majored in Anthropology? What cultures had SHE tried to understand beyond the Jewish American one? Ugh. I went back to the kitchen and complained about her to my new European friends.
But just a sentence or two. After all, it didn't matter. I didn't need to talk. I was trying out this new persona where I was just intrinsically cool because I was in Europe. What was to say, anyway? Life was good; I had just moved into a new flat with this German dude, we were eating delicious pasta every night, having late night conversations about art, going to roof parties, drinking wine in parks.
I could feel myself repressing every part of my being that would intimidate new friends. I wanted to have the same detachment I found so sexy in German men. I couldn't afford to be a basketcase. I'm sure I came across like one anyway, but the point was I was trying to be as open-minded as I possibly could. When my German friend complained that the Jewish Counsel of Germany labeled everyone a Nazi they didn't agree with, I tried to see his perspective. Yeah, what were these Jews doing, keeping on bringing up the Holocaust to a generation that had nothing to do with it? I was embarassed by my religion. Why WERE we obsessed with being the victim?
Wait, what?
And that's when something happened and my artificial facade crumbled. We were not victims, us Jews! We were just like all other people -- rich and poor, dumb and smart, Republican and Democrat. Oh god, my mother was right! Zee Germans didn't want me here. They still resented Jews! Why was I here, thinking I could be a citizen of the world? How clueless was I? ABORT MISSION, ABORT MISSION.
Then it all came tumbling out. I had long, strained conversations with my roommate about my feelings, my mother, my family, my family's history, my upbringing, my culture, my perspectives on guilt and blame and Europe and Jewish culture, my stress levels, my lack of a job, or any prospect of a job, my fear that I was becoming addicted to cigarettes, my fear that nobody understood my sense of humor, my utter terror that I would have to fly home. My cool detachment had left me and I was the same neurotic mess I had been in the U.S. My roommate wasn't really interested in having these loooonnng drawn-out, completely angsty conversations about how I felt about being here, how it was a necessary step for me, and how maybe, if you look at it one way, I was re-writing my family's history. I was being over-dramatic. I could feel it in the way he looked at me.
So I moved out, shacked up with a Swedish fella (more about that later), started dating an Israeli and got a job in English. I slowly wised up, became more comfortable with myself, learned when to open up to (drunk) people, when to hang back, how to like living here without putting the whole country on a pedestal, etc., etc.
Thing is, I'm less integrated than I was when I first moved here, but I'm really okay with that. To me, Berlin is still this unfathomable place that makes me feel all sorts of crazy things, but only when I want it to. Just a brisk walk down a new street, and it's like I'm in a new city all over again. I feel lost, I feel uncomfortable, I feel like I don't really understand what's going on, and I use those feelings to try and make things. It usually works pretty well. My feelings towards the U.S. are so much more complicated, too. Of course I don't hate it there! I just hated the life I had created.
It's hard for me to even understand the person I was when I moved here. He seems like such a hopeless romantic; so out-of-touch with everything and everyone except his own notion of perfection. I want to tap him on the shoulder and say, "Stop trying to erase yourself." But Berlin will do that to you. Berlin will throw your whole world upside down. The city operates on another rhythm than anywhere in the U.S., and it makes you feel like you never have to stop partying and hanging out. But when you're in it for the long haul, eventually you have figure your shit out, and realize that this city isn't a vacation from the back of your mind. Nowhere is. And that's actually a good thing.
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