Berlin

Spargel, Fish, and Farewells

by Ayesha Adamo

It seemed that the moment my plane landed in Berlin, Spargel season had officially begun.  There was hardly a restaurant in the city that wasn’t offering some sort of Spargel-special, four courses of Spargel…even dessert.  I had never heard of Spargel before, but I learned pretty quick.  Spargel is this thick white asparagus that Germans seem to go crazy for, especially because it’s only available for two weeks out of the entire year.  It’s a little bit phallic looking, and maybe that’s part of the charm, too.  You can see piles of it here, in this photo I took at the Turkish market in Kotti:

The fantastic deli, “Rogacki,” where I got my first taste of Berlin, was no exception to the rule of Spargel either.

Rogacki is the deli to end all delis.  I mean, I used to deeply mourn the loss of Second Avenue Deli down in the East Village after it lost the rent war to a Chase Bank branch (which I suppose is exactly what all those yuppies that have taken over the neighborhood deserve anyway), but Rogacki is in a whole other class.

Rogacki is in Charlottenburg on Wilmersdorfer Strasse, just half a block from the Bismarckstrasse U-bahn.  Everyone stands at the counter to eat, though there were a few tables out front in recognition of the spring weather.

In addition to the seemingly endless window cases of beautiful sausages and deli meats, this place has some serious fish (the big guy with the sad look on his face at the top of this article is also a Rogacki resident).  We ate the most amazing fish soup and grilled fish with vegetables, all prepared by the no-nonsense ladies at the counter before our eyes.  In keeping with the reputation of this family-run business that started in 1928 selling fish exclusively, they still smoke their own fish and eel on site here.  But nowadays, there’s also fresh turkey, venison, duck and on and on…

http://rogacki.de/ro/roga.htm

In general, Berlin is a great place for fish and seafood, and my last night’s dinner at the amazing Turkish-run Fisch Restaurant was the perfect bookend to my Rogacki experience.

Balikci Ergün is on Lüneburger Strasse under the S-Bahn, across the Spree and not so far from Bellevue Station.  You will know it by the blue and yellow sign saying “Fisch Restaurant.”

I’m pretty sure that the entrance on Lüneburger Strasse is a back entrance devoted to their fish distribution business, but after a few moments of confusion and seeing what was behind door number one, two and three, I eventually found my way into the restaurant.

Mick Taussig, Jimmie Durham @ Fisch Restaurant

This last night was a night to say goodbye to Berlin, and to Maria Thereza Alves and Jimmie Durham, whose three exhibits during gallery weekend and talk at the House for World Culture with Mick Taussig were an important part of my visit.

The conversation at our table twisted and turned into and out of politics and Art, Europe and the Americas.  For the struggling and flailing artist that I am, it was fascinating to hear about how someone with a career as enduring as Jimmie’s would repeatedly turn down the opportunity to have a PBS documentary done on his life and work, responding that this sort of documentary kills the artwork, and the artist who made it, every time.  I guess it’s the reaction I would expect from the man who’s just displayed a gallery of modern-art-stuffed-mooseheads (like what you’d see in a fancy hunting lodge, except this was Art – not taxidermy).  It’s hopeful to see someone cleverly poking fun at the bourgeois trophies that great works of Art have become – or always were, perhaps.  But for a young creative who’s tired of trying to reinvent her Art’s PR campaign on a weekly basis, and who enters a state of nearly-epileptic joy anytime some stranger deigns to add a thumbs-up “like” to her latest facebook post, the idea of turning down a documentary makes the eyes a little moist…a little moist.  I get it, though.

But to get back to the food…Jimmie and Maria Thereza were regulars at the Fisch Restaurant when they lived in Berlin.  This secret little gem of a place was opened by a former World Cup soccer star who played for Turkey, and the walls show photos of his soccer days, while hundreds of cards from fans of his fish hang from the ceiling.  The menu features photographs of the different fish you can order, most of them sharing camera time with a tall can of beer, not to make a beverage suggestion, but to help indicate the size of the fish.  I had a plate full of the tasty little red ones.

In the later hours, strong coffee and friendly shots of anise liquor circulated, as a couple of tables of smartly dressed Turkish men talked seriously over swirling tendrils of shisha that danced in the low yellow light, disappearing like the hours before my plane ride home.

May Day in Berlin: All That and a Bag of Tea

by Ayesha Adamo

By fate or by accident, I found myself in Berlin on May Day this year.  May Day is not widely recognized as a holiday/day of demonstration in the United States, even though the date was officially chosen for international recognition because of the Chicago workers’ strike-turned-riot in 1886.

But most Americans are unaware of both the Chicago riots and the fact that the rest of the world has a socio-politically vibrant workers’ holiday associated with them.

Instead, America has so-called “Labor Day” at the end of the summer, with its barbeques and one-day sales.  May Day in the US has gone the way of house music, which was also born in Chicago, but instead of celebrating Frankie Knuckles, we celebrate Lady Gaga, who kind of reminds me of a barbeque and one-day sale (think consumerism and slathering ribs in a high-gloss varnish of high fructose corn syrup).

But I digress.  Back in Berlin, I had the chance to listen to German folks complain about the people in their country for a change.  Many longed for the good old days, when supermarkets were burned to the ground in riots that “really meant something.” Many spoke of how May Day has now become a theatre of rage, how the young want to throw their stones and the police play their role dutifully, but the script has lost its meaning compared to what it was like in the 1980’s.  They likened today’s May Day to a ritualized rebellion, a stage on which to act out one’s discontent with society on a single scheduled day of the year so that the other days might remain peaceful.  It’s a bit like carnival: a day when the rules don’t count.

But this year, one meaningful demonstration rose above the usual melee.  At this May Day action, 10,000 peaceful demonstrators gathered in Prenzlauer Berg and blocked all possible paths of a Neo-Nazi march across Berlin.  According to those I met who were there, the cops were obligated to help the Nazi group push through the crowd or find a different route, in protection of their free speech and all that.  Reportedly, the cops lived up to this expectation, albeit somewhat feebly, but when all paths were filled with masses of opposing protesters, they had no choice but to send the Nazis home.

“Who are these Nazis, anyway?” I asked.  It was then explained to me that they weren’t officially a “Nazi” party – that would be illegal – but rather a group of ultra conservatives, “You know, like in America you have the Tea Party.  It’s people like that.”  I soon found out that this was hardly an isolated analogy.  “You know, Nazi’s.  You guys call them the Tea Party.”  In fact, this is what I heard at every dinner party when the subject came up, which it inevitably did, and without the slightest note of force or hatred in the statement, but as though it were just another simple fact – as though this one to one relationship between “Nazi” and “Tea Party” were as natural as breathing Berlin’s spring air…which is much fresher than New York’s spring air, by the way.

Now, I had never thought of it quite in those terms, but I knew what they meant. Sure, the flagrant stars-n-stripes nationalism is a bit of a social gaffe in the international arena, and there’s a hyper-awareness about overt nationalism in a country like Germany, not just because of social sophistication, but because it’s ingredient #1 in a fascist regime…and Germans know how to spot a fascist regime a mile away by now.  Practice makes perfect, but it would be better if America didn’t have to repeat the same exercises to learn the lesson.

Then there’s the fact that nobody who’s ever lived in a country with socialized healthcare (myself included) has the faintest idea why anyone would be against it – unless of course, you’re one of those greedy assholes who runs a health insurance company.  Do the ‘Baggers just think people should die if they can’t afford to be healthy?  Can’t they imagine that they might one day be in the dollars-or-die quandary? Do they just not care about anyone else?  In Berlin, someone reasoned, “They’ve read Foucault and they’re against biopower!”  Naturally, everybody laughed, for obvious reasons.  After all, a poll by CBS News reported that for all that Tea Baggers are “better educated than most Americans,” many having graduated from college and such, only eight percent of those polled knew that the meaning of the word “socialism” had something to do with a redistribution of wealth.  But then 77 percent of Tea Party activists get their news from Fox News, proving that the ancient art of hypnotism is alive and well.   CBSNews

And how about Fox News.   You know, when you think about it, maybe it took a group of righties to revive the dead artforms known as protest and demonstration in America.  No one in the Murdoch-manipulated press wants to give airtime to lefty protests, even if it’s a movement too large to be ignored.   You don’t even see mention of the less conservative Coffee Party that’s conquered Facebook.  If the Tea Party’s legacy ends up being that they made public demonstration a viable activity in America again, it’s not a bad legacy, but if the lefties want any press in the old media, they’re going to need to jump on the Tea Party’s frock and coattails for it, maybe do what they did in Berlin.

What’s most amazing about Tea Party PR is the way that they, and even their more extreme sub-groups like the American Third Position, have adopted retro lefty lingo from the golden age of protests by calling themselves “anti-establishment” without even a breath of irony.  True Tea Party supporters don’t seem to realize that they’ve latched on to a movement that’s sponsored by corporate giants, the very people that the movement is supposed to be in opposition to.  What kind of grassroots movement can afford to pay Sarah Palin $100,000 for just one appearance?  Here at Loss of Eden, we could have told ‘em first-hand that this wasn’t a grassroots movement back in early 2009, when David and I handed over a copy of our song “Here’s Your Revolution” to someone at Clear Channel who was gathering music for “…a protest, this little Tea Party thing they were hoping to organize.” Something like that.  Who knew that the little-tea-party-that-could would go so far? Rupert Murdoch? The Clear Channel Conspiracy?  What else can one think when all the early press shows up in the same predictable places?

On the other hand, it’s hard to completely write off any group that so vocally opposes bailouts of the financial industry. Now, I can’t really read the German newspapers, but from the looks of the headlines, it doesn’t seem like they’re so excited to bail out Greece, but at least Greece has something to offer Germany: beaches, sunshine, naked statues…When was the last time the Wall Streeters brought anything half that good to the table for Americans?

And yet, that’s when you have to ask yourself: why would the rich guys at Fox and Clear Channel want to pretend to be against the rich guys on Wall Street?  So that they can actually push the real agenda of less regulations for the big, powerful companies?  It’s like a sneaky kind of bailout that keeps on giving, and keeps on taking from the people who need it most, like the fishermen on the Gulf Coast who are going to suffer for the lack of enforced regulations on the big guys for a long, long time.  Kind of reminds me of the way that J.P. Morgan gained support for central banking by spreading rumors that lead to the Panic of 1907, and Warburg kept the volley going by selectively quoting Abe Lincoln to make the central banking idea sound more legit.  Our current financial crisis doesn’t have a spiffy name yet, not like “The Panic of 1907,” and the Tea Party prefers The Constitution to Honest Abe, but the point is to gain popular support for deregulation of any sort – cap and trade, for example – which helps the big corporations, just like the central banking system helps the big financiers.  Resisting cap and trade doesn’t make more jobs for the people who need them.  You would think that with the Grand Ole Opry under water, or the destruction of revenue for fishermen, tourism and ultimately much more on the Gulf, the true Tea Baggers would understand that this kind of action, an action against the environment that we all have to live in, only helps the Halliburtons of the world.

You would think…but you would be wrong, somehow.

But on May Day in Berlin, we’re pouring wine and clinking glasses, distancing ourselves from the insurrection that we might already be in the middle of, and waiting for the big meltdown.  The expat next to me mentioned how surprised and embarrassed he was on his first European theatre tour when he heard that the money allotted to the Arts in the city of Frankfurt was equal to the entire budget for the National Endowment for the Arts in America.  But America does have its theatre, no doubt.  When I heard about the man who suicide bombed the IRS in Texas a few months back, it was hard not to be moved by the performance.  It hardly mattered that the far right had adopted this fallen pilot as a hero; it was the gesture itself and the reasoning behind it that meant something.  In Berlin, you can tell from the ease in a person’s step, the ease in their lifestyle, the funding of their Art and their healthcare, the way that all their trains run smoothly and on-time: however imperfect it may be, these Germans have a government that cares enough to support people.  Americans do not.  As I always say, “when you have nothing to lose, you become capable of anything.”  So many in America are reaching that point, the point of having nothing to lose.  It is no longer theatre, or perhaps it’s theatre of the best sort: the theatre of rage that is real.

On my very first day of acting class, I learned that Sandy Meisner defined acting as “living truthfully under imaginary circumstances.”  Is it any wonder that crashing a plane into an IRS building seemed to one man the most truthful way to live, and die, under the imaginary system of market economy, now that we’ve taken capitalism all the way?  The man with a plane is the proof that when America finally decides to do theatre, America does it all the way, too.  Maybe it’s those living truthfully in the imaginary circumstances of our economy that are the only ones living truthfully at all.

Across the table, Thomas, who had long ago abandoned the rebel life of a pre-teen Maoist who lived to beat up cops to embrace academic life as an anthropologist, pointed out the sound of the May Day helicopters circling above us – the sound of keeping order, but it’s really more for show.  He said, “When I hear that, I start treading in my stall.”

Me too.

How I Almost Lost a Lung in the Name of Techno

by Ayesha Adamo

They told me Berghain, Panorama Bar, and an online search admittedly made Watergate and Maria’s sound tempting. But what they didn’t understand was that I can go to a pretentious club with a line out the front – filled with models and yuppie-come-latelies who order bottle service and live to siphon their soulless bodies into fancy suits and stiletto heels (who can dance in that stuff anyway?), albeit to the tune of way shittier music – in my home base town of New York, where the losers wear Prada.

There was no way I was going to Berghain…even though they don’t play top 40 and other sweet sixteen/bar mitzvah soundtracks there like they do in the cipher-of-a-once-great-nightlife-town that is Manhattan. That’s not to say that I needed to help inflate the ego-balloon of the international DJs that I can also hear at the last two worthy dance clubs left in the city-that-used-to-have-a-reason-not-to-sleep either.

I wanted local Berlin, and I was willing to go rogue to get it.

It took some asking around, but eventually I was able to procure a map drawn on a napkin showing how to get to Golden Gate. A subsequent online search back at headquarters (the hotel) turned up a primitive and very basic website, also with a map. X marked a spot near Jannowitzbrücke Station, actually directly across the street from it, and I even managed to excavate a photo of the place – a few hundred square pixels under the train tracks and covered with graffiti: now that’s the kind of nightclub I want to be at.

Naturally, I set out with the hope finding a club that was just a few shades less underground than the place I DJ at in Brooklyn, and this looked like it might be it. I clicked on the links to the myspace pages of the DJs for that night, and was surprised to read “93s to infinity!” at the top of one of the DJ’s pages. A thelemite?!? A sign. This was all I really needed to be 156% sure that I had found the club for me. (You’re only getting that last joke if you’re playing with Magick.)

Showed up at 3 am, which was kind of early, but I didn’t think I’d be able to handle it if I tried for much later, jetlag and all. The door was at the side, but there’s no real way to know that besides luck…and now, by reading my blog. It was also surprisingly quiet, and I wondered if the music had even started yet – it’s hard to hear from the street because the main room is nestled far below at the bottom of a narrow stairwell.

But it sure is loud when you get down there.

And the music! It was like the 1990’s all over again. (I got a little misty eyed). There were dirty sneakers and jeans and cheap beer and bombed out bathroom stalls…heaven. I guess that’s where they got the name Golden Gate.

And the DJs were spinning…could it be? Vinyl?!? Then it really felt like the 90’s all over again. Can’t say I miss dragging around a record box that was double my weight, but compared to New York, it’s nice to see a club that even has turntables. I could see that this place was also equipped with nice CDJs, and what more can a DJ want, really? I mean, besides having the crowd completely entranced and loving it…which they were, myself included.

The only problem was that every person in there was a chain smoker, packed body to rockin’ body in a little black box that was buried underground (literally), and that is how I almost lost a lung in the name of techno.

Sometimes, it’s dangerous goin’ rogue.

When I got back to headquarters, I had to wash my hair 3 times, air out my leather jacket in the window for 2 days, and wrap my dirty clothes in plastic to prevent them from permeating the rest of my luggage with stank. Ah the things we do for love…

http://www.goldengate-berlin.de/html.htm

Memorials: Berlin

by Ayesha Adamo

While in Berlin, I visited two large-scale Holocaust memorials – one was the well-publicized and controversial Holocaust Memorial near the Brandenburg Gate; the other was Gleis 17, a seemingly less known spot at Grünewald Station on the S-Bahn.

The official title of the first memorial is Denkmal für die emordeten Juden Europas, or Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, but no one seems to want to use this title.  Most just call it Holocaust Memorial and everyone appears to know which one you mean, which is amazing when you consider that every turn of a street corner in Berlin brings a different plaque or statue to be discovered.  Whether it be names and dates in brass on the ground, bullet dents building character on a beautiful facade, or the graffiti that’s left up for posterity, every manmade surface in Berlin carries the marks of who-wuz-here and what happened before, one great layer of impasto after another.

The Holocaust Memorial doesn’t have graffiti, though, which has been cause for much controversy – not because people feel that it would be better with graffiti, but because Degussa, the company that made the graffiti-proof coating for the large stone slabs that populate this monument, also made Zyklon B during WWII.

While the inclusion of the word “Murdered” in the Memorial’s full title has the sound of something flashy, the actual monument is stoic and austere.  Each of the rectangular stones is of a different height, and the ground that the stones stand on has visible waves of hills and valleys, creating a kind of visual discord that, like the event the monument recognizes, is difficult to comprehend in any simple kind of understanding.  The vertical parallels of stones, and the grey grids created between them, give the feeling of some fleeting yet absolute form and structure, like entering deeper and deeper into the labyrinth of infinity.

The Memorial expects you to be a part of it, to be in it.  I watched a group of kids playing games and leaping from stone to stone, a high-stakes version of hopscotch.  They were reclaiming the tall grey pillars as their playground in a way that seemed obvious and natural.  And why wouldn’t this be a place for play as much as anything else?  There are no signs here to state otherwise.

Gleis 17 was the site of deportations to extermination camps during WWII.  The tracks are no longer in use, but remain as part of this memorial, bending off ominously in the distance.  Each of the iron grates along the length of the platform is engraved with the date, destination, and number of Jewish passengers on a different deportation.

The tracks here are now quiet and serene.  There was hardly anyone else around when I visited, but a fresh single rose left at one of the grates proved that others had been there recently.  The only marks of the many that stood there decades before were the numbers pressed into iron every few feet, but there was a feeling about standing there that marked the place unmistakably.

A little dandelion pushing through the platform grate caught my eye, and at one end of the station trees have grown up through parts of the tracks.  Here, nature is reclaiming both the tracks and the memorial.  New life is filling up all the spaces between grates and between tracks, but when we left on the S-Bahn, there was a Roma playing accordion while his son held a cup out that no one was filling up.  Hardly anyone even looked up.

Wagons!

by Ayesha Adamo

Even before I got to Berlin, I couldn’t wait to go and explore the wagon community called Lohmühle that I read about on my Internet explorations.

For a gal who has never been to Berlin before, and was functioning entirely on tea-stained tourist maps, this place was not so easy to find.  The Kotbusser Tor U-Bahn stop in Kreuzberg is probably the closest, though there’s still a bit of a walk ahead from there.  It’s kind of in the middle of a park, so the roads I was expecting to take to get there were all wrong.  I ended up just aiming for the general direction and suddenly the wagons appeared like a mirage on the opposite side of a canal.

Wagons!

When I finally figured out how to cross the canal and get to the wagons, I could already hear the sound of easy retro records sliding between the two turntables that were perched centerstage.  There were posters up for upcoming events and shows, one for a performance of Macbeth that had unfortunately passed already.  I threw several euros into the bake sale donation cup for a slice of vegan marble cake; the chocolaty part was better than the vegan part, to my semi-carnivorous palate, but the vibe was compensation enough for no eggs.

The people who live here have decided to name this community the “Gesamtkunstwerk” meaning a total artwork that involves many different artistic disciplines.  The term was popularized by Wagner in his essay, “Art and Revolution,” and there’s clearly plenty of both here.  Walking through Lohmühle, every home is a vibrant expression of Art, and of the part of daily living that is Art – both contributing to what has become a social public space.  The Lohmühle folks are technically squatting on public land but have created a place where anyone is welcome to wander through and visit, enjoy the open-air café, music, and the regular outdoor movies in the summer, among other events.  Proceeds from the events go to funding of the Lohmühle community and to charitable groups beyond the community.  Also, when building the café, gallery, and stage areas of the grounds, the residents invited the rest of their neighborhood to join in, again making it a project that extends beyond the community wagon-dwellers themselves.  Here, the total work of art has become a total work of connection between these brave artisans and their neighbors.  The result of this ultimately functions as an alternative culture center that people from anywhere in Berlin – and even people from as far away as America – can enjoy.

I circled the grounds several times, mostly wishing I could speak more German so that I would feel less shy about jumping into one of the clusters of tea and conversation that seemed to blossom in rings of chairs outside the wagons.  Some were talking government in earnest, but I felt like an interruption from a foreign-speaking stranger might disperse the bubble of their intensity, not that I wasn’t interested in what the people with pink and aqua anarchy symbols spray-painted on the side of their wagons would have to say.

I did get to speak to one of the residents who was tending bar at the café.  He’s lived in the Wagendorf for 6 years, but is soon to move out to travel the world.  Outside of the Gesamtkunstwerk, he works in physical therapy, I think, and from the sound of it, world travel is the only reason for him to want to give up his life with the wagons.

With the huge emphasis and basic need for community here (the winters are clearly not to be braved alone), those in residence seem to place a high value on creating a lifestyle outside of the anonymity of living box-to-box in urban apartments.  Face-time appears to be the preferred mode of operations.

Environmental awareness also presents itself – not just in the way that the Wagendorf folks have blended their community into the environment, but in the group’s ideals concerning conservation of resources – ideals that are visibly practiced and not just spoken about. All of the wagons make heavy use of solar panels, and their residents are clearly conservative of water since there is no running water here.

I told the boy at the café that we don’t have anything like this in New York, though the Sanctuary in Brooklyn, which has come to be a sanctuary to me at times, shares some of the same ideals.   For certain, there are others in the New York area who are working in this direction, though in New York it’s hard to even imagine doing what they’ve done at Lohmühle.  The idea of creating a squatting community that is essentially illegal but has been accepted for long enough that it may become legal seems an impossibility in the Five Boroughs, or any other American city I can think of.  And that’s what has been going on successfully at Lohmühle for nearly twenty years now.

Here is a link to the Lohmühle website, though you may want to use Google translate to get a better idea of it in English:

http://www.lohmuehle-berlin.de/LM_home.htm

Another site that has a couple of great pictures of what the Wagendorf looked like when it was the dividing line between East and West Berlin is this one (in English):

http://www.a-r-d.org/HamburgerB/Lohmuhle.htm

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