The bug on the wall

My former tenth grade English teacher, David Emory, wrote me and asked whether I intend to stay within the relatively safe format of observation and private reflection. Will I remain the quiet spy, known to you readers only as a narrative voice with opinions, or will I become a character in the scenes I report on, interacting extensively with the people there?
To be quite honest, I walk around Berlin kind of like a quiet spy, a detached voice, an alien or a bug on the wall. I have a vivid imagination that evokes fears of the city and myself: flash images of pickpockets’ hands, bullish men, skinheads, people just looking at me funny like I am from Mars (and not in that really nice way some people greet Martians). Sometimes it is the eyes in the city, catching glances, darting looks, thousands of them. Sometimes it is the mass of bodies passing – streams of them. I begin to imagine people imagining me as some sort of thief, vagabond or sexual predator. What do I look like to all these people? Who am I?
In part this goes back to two posts on Larissa Chace-Smith’s blog about fear and stepping out of one’s comfort zone. I am very aware of people here and the closer I get to them, the more things matter in my mind like my appearance or my accent. It also makes me think about my post on Heinrich Mann’s character Diederich Hessling, who imagines his surroundings through his fears of specific people. Hessling’s name, by the way, refers to him as the ugly one. He worries about his appearance as a gentleman in the eyes of his town's society. He is dominated by the older men and war veterans and he is aggressive in his actions toward his employees and women. I am also reminded of the more obvious reference to Kafka’s Metamorphosis, that sense of one’s ugliness and alienation in relation to the world and one's self. Reading Emerson's essay "Experience" also raises the issues of the person and his or her relationship with the world around them.
As I initially thought out this post, I was riding the tram. A Muslim woman sat down next to me. I imagined this veiled person and thought about exploding. The image of the threatening Muslim has affected my consciousness and more importantly, the American consciousness. I am paranoid. We are paranoid. So we seek comfort and safety - a lot of it, if possible (see the designs for the US embassy in Berlin or the one in the Green Zone in Baghdad).
Much of this is my imagination; in part a collection of old fears from notions of the city, run-ins with Nazi skinheads and experiencing the sense of not belonging. My imagination can run wild, but things are not that bad – my German is pretty good and I really do not look like some horrible creature (except at night when I am tired). Plus, I have learned not to let some of the actual experiences get to me so easily - like watching a baker turn her face into a grimace when she looked up and saw me after having just acted so friendly toward another customer. What appearance did I express with such thoughts active in my mind? This is part of learning how to deal with the fear we confront in our everyday lives. I cannot control what anyone thinks of me nor do I always know what is really going on with that other person. Who knows what that baker saw or what she intended with her facial expressions. In the process of navigating Berlin through this mix of experiences, I have been encouraged to just be comfortable with the ever changing me and not worry so much about my bug-like self (I have clad myself as a yellow bug today).
I often relate the humorous side of this to friends: people here do not necessarily know what to make of me. I heard an old man describe me to his wife as a “real Indian”. So I began to walk as if I was some proud Indian I had only seen in movies. A vendor at a street market started talking to me in Spanish and wanted to know if I were from her home country of Peru. It gave me the chance to practice some Spanish and meet a person from another world. In Magdeburg, a man did a double take and then turned to me in the street with a Russian-accented German. He begged his pardon and told me that at first he thought I looked like Chuck Norris. Chuck Norris?!? Not knowing what to make of myself makes it interesting. Yet what were to happen, if enough people began making an environment hostile because of one reason or another, and then focus that hostility in law and policy? Why should we even notice? How would we respond to the presence of such widespread fear, intolerance, hatred, violence and terror? Would we defend a more liberal vision of society, when there appear to be enemies all around us? These are key questions underlying my own work on Germany in the wake of the First World, but I also think that we should consider them in our own world too.
But back to Berlin: I love walking through this city and interacting with people. I lived here for three years. So I feel at home here.
I also think I sense a mood swing among people here in Berlin from my last visit less than a year ago. Granted the weather is turning colder. That oppressive ceiling of leaden grey has hung low over the city much of the day. The air becomes thick and clammy. In the afternoon, the clouds break and the air becomes crisp. Also keep in mind that Germans have been making their moods an issue of late (more on that in a later book review). The government has even made uplifting Germans’ moods, no matter how absurd that might sound, a point for national initiative.
That said, business on the streets and in the corner markets looks robust. Large international realtors are buying up apartment properties and renovating many more, speculating that this relatively cheap market is going to appreciate quite well in the next years. Moreover, the people I see ranging about the city are quite diverse, and more and more, Berlin has that kind of energy I get from places like London and New York City. This place has interesting things going on and can inspire. People seem friendlier too in passing, on the tram or in line. My friend, Stefanie, thinks that children are taking over the city, whole hordes of them in the playgrounds and parks spreading throughout the city, influencing marketing campaigns, business and social life. From the archive windows in east Kreuzberg I can hear children laughing outside. Maybe that is just Berlin on a good day or maybe I have been catching the city at the right moments when I miss the grumpy, racist, lonely, sad and sick or stark mad.
One last note on the recent national holiday that marks German Reunification: I get the sense from talking to Germans that they do not know what to make of this day. My friend, Stefanie, wanted to celebrate and called up her East and West German friends and family. Her father complained about the money that West Germany had spent on the East (Stefanie partially agreed). Her friend Ollie likes to refer to the day as the “Day of the Imperialist Annexation). He was just joking, but he also asked what exactly should one celebrate on this day and how? Stefanie shot back that the wall is gone; well, at least Ollie agreed to that. Most East Germans do not want to go back, although we hear those voices too. From the smells in the inner courtyards of the old apartment blocks, it appears that people slept in on their national holiday, cooked big breakfasts and had afternoon cake and coffee almost like any Sunday in some parts of Germany.