The Wi-Fi on grocery store SIM cards never worked when I needed it. For an entire year, I hadn’t figured out a phone situation that worked, tangled in international phone plans and roaming charges. I’d sit on the S-Bahn for forty-five minutes, get off at some stop I didn’t recognize, and find I was an hour outside of the ring. That first year, I would try to memorize the colored lines on all the transit maps. In New York, it was easy to lose your spot, but in Berlin, it was easy to lose your way. Unlike New York, Berlin displayed, for me, an unconquerable expansiveness.
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Dreams.” Taking the S-Bahn from Alexanderplatz to Ostkreuz had a natural pace to it, moving from the TV tower over the market stalls at Hackescher Markt, then over to Warschauer where I could see the bridge, the silvery water, and the Mercedes Benz building with its revolving logo on top. I remember exiting the U-Bahn station at Kurfürstenstraße to greet the neon pink sign of LSD store: “Love. I felt elated ordering a burger, because I somehow still thought the hamburger originated in Hamburg, and my burger tasted terrible, and I didn’t care.Įvery detail that first week had appeared sumptuous: garlands of sweet tomatoes at the market, or the sound of taxis on cobblestones, lazily tranquilizing. The leather pair at the table next to us chatted us up while we were brimming with possibility and naiveté for what this city now afforded us. It was Easter weekend, I remember, because Danielle and I had gone to a diner around the corner and saw men walking around the streets in leather jackets, police hats, harnesses. From the airport, I went to meet my friend Danielle who was renting a flat out in Schöneberg where she let me crash on her couch. My luggage had been lost, my phone plan wasn’t working, but none of it had any effect on my incorrigible optimism. I remember the electrifying surge in my limbs as I first touched down at Tegel airport. At twenty-five, I wasn’t looking for anything other than ‘new experiences,’ which can feel something like purpose to a twenty-five-year-old. We were a new wave of downwardly mobile burnouts, a “surplus population” of emotional descendants of East Berlin squatters post-reunification, or Thatcherite ravers in search of ecstasy and the second Summer of Love. Finding our futures canceled and job potentials erased, we became skeptical of anything but pleasure, which was, in the present moment, the only viable investment. The euro’s exchange rate to the dollar had hit a historic low, paving the way for an entire generation of Americans to suddenly ask, “Why not Berlin?” The city, with its low rents and seventy-two hour parties, prefigured in the millennial imagination as a post-industrial wasteland whose aesthetic mirrored, in emotional timbre, a lost generation who entered an evaporated job market after the 2008 financial crisis. I can’t remember why, exactly, I decided to move there. The Berlin I know is more elusive, seeping into nocturnal moods in which the crucial details blur, leaving a hazy when without the why, with the four-four beat of the techno soundtrack running through virtually all my memories of the time. Around this time, I remember seeing a Mark Borthwick photograph, in a magazine, of a woman in heels standing beside a dumpster, and I recognized there the Berlin I know but keep failing to articulate outside the usual techno, artist squats, and open sex. This I knew to be true by its cadence, saying something about sweaty bed sheets, infinite bathroom lines, and midnight confessionals along the canal. Once, at a dinner party in New York, I overheard someone say he’d never fallen so in love with something that wasn’t a person before he fell in love with Berlin.
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I was here for it, the good with the bad, and no regrets either way.
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This essay portrays those years as they appeared to me, brimming with arrogant pleasure, and ending in a comedown I always knew was in the cards. Such places in Berlin are disappearing, and these past few years may have been witness to the city’s final years of decadence.
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Gay bars, darkrooms, techno clubs-each are hosts, places of fantasy, to people who engage with one another as bodies, hard and tactile, not as algorithm, un-platformed.
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This is part one of his two-part personal essay.īerlin’s queer nightlife is inherently political. In the inaugural piece, writer Geoffrey Mak searches for himself within a helix of self-destruction and enlightenment during his first year in a new city. Each personal essay reveals how the party scene is as much about hedonism and celebration as it is about coming of age.
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Our newest series Ode to the Night captures the rave as a rite of passage.