The Dorotheenstädtischen Cemetery houses the graves of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Bertolt Brecht and Herbert Marcuse, among many other not as famous people. Overgrown and modestly tended, the Germany cemetery is the closest thing that Berlin has to Paris’ Père Lachaise. Coincidentally, the French cemetery, the Huguenot, adjacent to Dorotheenstädtischen, is often confused for the Dorotheenstädtischen. The dead of different nationalities can’t cohabite a necropolis. I strolled the grounds for a few hours before my Easyjet flight back to Graz. The cemetery itself was as much of a landmark of what was preserved, as much had been erased. Many headstones and precious metals were stolen from Dorotheenstädtischen and sold during the 1920/30s economic crises, forever gone, blotted out. A monument to a Nazi resistance fighters who attempted to assassinate Hitler in 1944 bears the name Klaus Bonhoeffer, Hans John, Richard Kuenzer, Carl Adolf Marks, Wilhelm zur Nieden, Friedrich Justus Perels, Rüdiger Schleicher and Hans Ludwig Sierks; heroes of a parallel universe in which the tides of history crashed on different shores. On the side of one monument, I saw the patterned destruction of bullet holes or shrapnel, possibly from the second world war. Dead people were not only buried here, some people died there.
I stopped at my favorite bakery in Berlin, Freundliche Bäckerei, on my way to Tegel airport. Easyjet is located in Terminal C, a European interpretation of a FEMA shelter, with enough seating for 20 people and crowds of children and travelers sitting on the floor and passageways. In contrast to Terminal A, which houses all the non-budget airlines, this section is where pride goes to die, where the struggle to be part of the traveling class continues, and where all the corners have been cut so thoroughly that only a circle of self-hatred and pity exists. Personally, this manifested in my lower back, which I aggravated by squatting on the floor too long and almost fell over in pain when I stood up. I was happy to return to Graz, to say the least, which was a culture shock coming from a the city that I had previously highly revered: Berlin was a shithole.
During the last four days, I had stayed in the absolute worst airbnb and likely the worst habitation of any city or country in my life. Located Moabit, just west of the Mitte, this student apartment had never been cleaned since the lease was signed. Staying inside, sleeping there, was something of a culture shock because it made me suspicious of the interior of every apartment building I saw in Berlin. Could these too be the absolute squalor in which I’ve slept? I originally had searched for a private apartment in Berlin, but was surprised by the prices for a city that was allegedly “cheaper” than New York. Then I looked at hotels, but it was difficult to separate youth hostels from hotels from the search results. I went back to airbnb after having mistakenly believed I had found a private apartment in Prenzlauer Berg. In a follow-up email, I learned it was not a private apartment, but a private room. When I conducted a new search for a private room, I found my final room for a third of the price 12€/night. Indeed that was cheap. But the struggle to cancel the original reservation, which I had made a day before, wasn’t so easy and in the end, because I had reserved the first room four days before my trip and a five-day cancellation policy was in place, I wasn’t refunded my entire original reservation price. In the end I was paying 25€/night for an absolute heroin den, which should be demolished as a gift to humanity.
Four students from China inhabited the flat. All had separate rooms, which were relatively clean from my vantage point in the hallway. The room which I inhabited, Bao’s, was the smallest. A mattress on a board on a mattress on the floor occupied precisely half of the floor. Dead plants lined the windowsill. Two ikea bookcases bookended the bed, and the top of a desk that was disconnected and laid against the wall functioned as a small shelf. The rooms weren’t the problem. The shared area was. The floor of the hallway was sticky and an intense smell of cheap cooking oil greeted you at the door. The kitchen was so dirty that I avoided entering it at all, except once, and the bathroom was so dirty that even the cleaning supplies, which were covered in dusty, looked ironically unsanitary. A fraying polyester string held up the shower curtain, the shower head lay in the tub, as the support unit which held it was completely non-functional. During the four days there I developed a liking for seated showers, partially because I feared slipping and touching the floor. The toilet was filth metastasized.
The entire building smelled bad, like the oil one tries to wash off after visiting a 99¢ dumplings restaurant after a night of binging; the entrance was in the courtyard, or hof (?) of the block. Construction within the block made me realize that Berlin could become significantly more dense before getting much taller, simply by constructing in this internal open area within the blocks. They could also densify by mandating that each group of students to house and employ a cleaning crew.