Creak open the door to Clärchens Ballhaus. Can’t you hear the jazz band playing? It’s calling out to you all the way from the 1920s, barely audible through the din of Nazism and the Cold War (those tyrants sure made a lot of clatter!). As you dip inside, the clarinet’s louder. Slip on your dancing shoes and pan the crowded dance floor. You’re packed between people of all ages. The 96-year-old has a flicker of recognition in her eyes. Don’t be surprised, it’s one of the few places left in Berlin where the roaring decade keeps its heart beating. You see someone else. A young beauty, born decades later, has a different flicker in the eyes––and it’s for you.  Clärchens is the perfect place to meet someone, this is where your eyes meet.

Clärchens is by now a tourist destination in every guidebook, an institution, a cliché of Berlin, but one that both tourists and Berliners embrace. The reason is that it provides a glimmer of nostalgia that we all hanker for in a city that’s seen too many hard times. This still-functioning 1920s ballroom is evidence of the glorious decade of sex, falling inhibitions, the explosion of creative energy amidst the instability and strife of Weimar. It’s a story Berlin actually enjoys telling about itself!

The Gründerzeit building in Auguststr., in Berlin’s Mitte, opened as a Ballhaus in 1913 under the management of Fritz Bühler. When he passed away, it was taken over by his widow Clara Habermann. She gave it her diminutive, ‘little Clara’, or ‘Clärchen’. It was in the 1920s that the dance hall made an enduring reputation for itself.  It appeared in Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz. Its sign (still in use) was painted by New Objectivity bad-boy Otto Dix  and there’s an equivocal story circulating about a Georg Grosz mural hiding under all the paint and tinsel in the downstairs main room. There the hoi polloi of Berlin gathered while the upstairs Spiegelsaal, or ‘mirror room’, catered to high society (and to powerful Nazis who later turned it into an officers’ casino). This ambiance was seized upon by Quentin Tarantino who used Clärchens as a location for his film Inglorious Bastards.

During WW2 the building was badly damaged. One of the most impressive aspects of Clärchens is its enormous florid front garden, where the Vorderhaus, or street-front building, once stood. Only the rear building survived the air raids, and the doors and hallways which once connected the two are visibly bricked up as you stare up the many floors of shambolic façade. The Spiegelsaal became a storeroom until it was (recently) reclaimed––the mirrors and walls left cracked, clouded and distressed, so one really does feel like one has waltzed into the past. With top hat, white tie and tails!

The story of Clärchen’s ownership is almost as eventful as its structural history. Astoundingly, the institution remained under family management for 91 years. In East German times, it was passed on to Clara’s step daughter, and then on to her son, Stefan Wolff, who took it over in 1979. Throughout the GDR period it continued to be a dance hall and point of meeting between East and West Germans. With the restitution of property to pre-war owners after reunification, Clärchens Ballhaus was returned to Clara’s blood-daughter. But when she died in 2003, the building went up for sale. New management sent Stefan Wolff, and the Clärchen dynasty, packing. This left Wolff with a ”Scheißgefühl”, or so he said in an interview. He no doubt needed more than one Nante-Knaller (the dance hall’s signature drink of 2 parts whiskey, 1 part Curaçao, topped with Sekt) to swallow the bitter changes in the system.

But while many feared it was the end of an era, they must give a certain amount of credit to the new owners Christian Schulz and David Regehr. Clärchens is not over-renovated, it has remained a historic dance hall, and it is as popular as ever. It has moody old-world waiters who seem like they’ve always been there (maybe they have), period furnishings, a mismatched menu of Neapolitan pizza and German sausages that prevents this place from becoming a ‘theme restaurant’. Each night of the week has different old-world dance music: Tango, Swing or Chacha, with live bands on the weekends. You can even take a cheap dance class earlier in the evening so that you can better impress your potential partners once the floor is packed with stiff-dancing clients (I must admit the stereotype is often true here, these Northern Europeans can be very serious about the right steps! But accuracy thankfully deteriorates with the course of the evening’s alcohol consumption).

Clärchens is, more than anything, now known as a respectable place to meet a tall dark law student across a crowded room. Something about all that history and nostalgia induces perfect strangers to ask each other to dance. They get pushed up against one another by the romping crowd, there are giggles, stray hands, and soon enough they are making babies. It’s become a cliché to say you met your husband in Clärchens.

And how wonderful, astounding and uplifting! In a city where the past is usually terrifyingly depressing, a place imbued with the past has the effect of making people fall in love! Just like in 1913, or 1929, or 1989, or all those other 99 years since Clärchens opened her doors and put on her dancing shoes. Now shouldn’t you?

One of the most obvious signs of changing times in Kreuzberg is the emergence of a new generation of tea and coffee shops.

Kasuka, which opened last week on Boppstraße, on the south side of Hohenstaufenplatz, just off of Berlin’s main Turkish’ shopping street, Kottbusser Damm, is just about everything you would want in a local hangout. The coffee shop is named after the owner. ‘Kasuka’ is in fact a Japanese diminutive which means ‘faintly’ or ‘slightly’. The place is eponymously intimate small, subtly decked with fresh-cut flowers.  The pastries are freshly made on site, like the Donauwelle, with cherries in vanilla-butter creme and chocolate. It packs a not so slight punch.

The arrival of Kasuka follows on the opening on the corner last year of the English tea shop Hudson’s, and the elegant Kaffeebar on Graefestr. where Macbook airs outnumber coffee cups.

(I am embarrassed to return to Kaffeebar because I have successfully started two fires because of their atmospheric low candles. Once my cotton bag burst into flame, and another time a book. Both incidents required heavy ventilation and emergency measures, once in mid-winter which brought the temperature of the already cool interior to uncomfortable new lows.)

Meanwhile, across Kottbusser Damm in Kreuzkölln, the number of cool new places makes you buy even more shares in Apple. I can’t even begin to describe what has happened to Weserstraße. Everytime I walk down that street, around the corner of Reuterstraße, there is a new opening. Many nearby locales cater to a growing North American and English-speaking population, like Katie’s Blue Cat which calls itself a ‘Kreuz-English’ café, or Sing Blackbird on Sanderstraße whose cosy tea shop run by a New Yorker is an extension of a clothes-design workshop. Meanwhile, the old Arbeiter-Samariter Bund Neukölln office (a solidarity organisation to help the weak) on Friedelstraße has closed to make way for Bullys Bakery.

Now what you are expecting me to write now is that these cool hangouts are forcing out local business and ruining the neighbourhood, the way the housing boom here is. Do they come at the expense of traditional Turkish eateries closing down? No, this is not the case.

Imren, an institution of a Turkish grill, also on Boppstraße like Kasuka, recently moved a few doors down the street to open in a much larger space. It’s a fantastic eatery with much longer lines for soups and kebab and durüm than you can find in any of the coffee shops. I am happy to wait in line here and just hope I can get a table.

The same can be said, for example, across the street at La Femme, which recently opened a Pide take-away extension, along with its shisha bar next door. The take-out is a godsend, because the lunch hall is so packed it’s a relief sometimes to cross the street and eat their excellent simits or milk rice in the park instead.

These businesses are flourishing.

In fact, many of the clients of the Turkish eateries are the hipsters who are the would-be clients of the new generation of coffee shops. At most of the new coffee places with their obligatory vintage furniture, wallpaper, candlelit interiors, and retro lamps, it’s not at all difficult to find a table. An unexpected story of gentrification in this corner of Kreuzberg and Neukölln is whether new hipster business will be able to compete with the low prices, lack of self-conscious pretension, and good food, of the traditional eateries of Turkish Berlin that have attracted so many people here in the first place.

Your baklava and revani might not need to make way for your scones with clotted cream after all.

There are two faces to the International Workers Day protests in Berlin. There are the street parties, with DJs setting whole streets alight with thumping electronica. But more famous is the violence. 1 May in Kreuzberg is famous for: riots, blazing supermarkets, protesters throwing paving stones, tear gas to disperse the anger, and arsonist strikes against cars, dumpsters, and banks.

‘Are you coming to the Myfest street festival on Oranienstraße?’,  I ask a friend with children. No way, is her answer. ‘What kind of parent do you think I am?’

Everyone’s a little nervous this year. It’s the 25th anniversary of the original 1987 protests, against the ‘bourgeois’ 750-year anniversary celebrations of the founding of Berlin. Today’s protests are during a financial crisis. Countries are rolling back benefits all over Europe. There are rumours that we’re in for something BIG. It’s wise to stay well away, but of course we’re all attracted like flies to a flaming Molotov.

Approaching the erstwhile radical SO36 neighbourhood from the South, I encounter a street full of armoured cars near Hermannplatz. There are hundreds of men in riot gear. Banks and businesses have metal screens I’ve never seen before pulled down over their windows. Traffic is blocked.

I decide on taking the U-Bahn to Kottbusser Tor to avoid the police checkpoints. Coming up to street level is a fight against a tide of people. The streets are packed. I’ve never seen so many riot police. 7108 of them total, I later learn. One for every five of the 35-40 000 Myfest participants. They stand above peering at the packed streets from terrace of the Kreuzberg Zentrum. A friend asks if he can take a picture with them next to an armoured car, and is stared down.

The police make lines controlling the movement of people, segmenting the street into manageable morsels. I notice that in the public parks, where there are jugglers and folk musicians, there are friendly ‘Anti-conflict’ teams instead. It’s on the edges, ready, that there’s the grimmer face of the riot squad, which looks as eager for a fight as some of the protesters.

And so was 1 May 2012 violent, destructive… the ‘big one’ everyone anticipated?

Decidedly not.

In front of the Jewish Museum there is the habitual rock throwing by the 10 000 demonstrators gathered there. They have taken to the streets for a grab-bag of causes, from the fight against rising rents to calls for the end of capitalism. But their demonstrations are kept short by the police. A single dumpster is set on fire. A supermarket on Ritterstr. is vandalised, and also a bank on Skalitzerstr. More than 125 riot police are injured, a quarter more than last year, although the Mayor and Police call the atmosphere more peaceful and ‘an improvement’ over previous May Days. They state they are closer than ever to their goal of complete pacification of the 1 May demonstrations.

I see a few dejected protesters with red flags walking towards the U-bahn, their banners trailing through the plastic beer cups and paper plates smeared with mustard. There’s no smoke from tear gas, just from the barbecues.

I wince. I am glad that there has been little senseless violence, but I know that right now we need effective protest. In a time like now, when the achievements of the welfare state are being rolled back, we need to stand up for societies that protect the weak. But the messages of May Day are uncoordinated. Without a single cause to unite them, it’s not clear what the demonstrations are for. The riot police are much more effective at sending their message: that the power of the state to squash dissent is omnipotent.

Meanwhile, for most people visiting Kreuzberg on 1 May, neither peaceful nor violent demonstration is the destination. Rather they’re here for the incredible electronic music scene which unfolds late into the night in front of bars like Luzia. Thousands of revellers dance. The sight is amazing. It’s great to be in Berlin. I cannot believe the energy. There is, for a brief moment, a glimpse of the power of the crowd.

‘All the streets around here were named after South American countries, so that when their soldiering grandfathers return from exile, they’ll feel right at home’, jokes James. On Limastraße, there is an immense residence in a faux-medieval alpine style, that might appear in the dreams of an errant SS-officer slumbering in the Andes. There are plenty more villas on Argentinische Allee, in a part of Berlin where many high-level Nazi officials lived, like Göring. World War Two is on my mind, because I am waiting to be picked up to give a history lecture, and because I just rewatched Eytan Fox‘s film, Walk on Water, where a Mossad Agent infiltrates a German family to eliminate an aged SS Officer hidden in a home in nearby Wannsee.

But when I look up, waiting in the train station of Mexikoplatz, I see a 1904 art-nouveau dome, and feel it’s a mistake to reduce neighbourhood life to a couple of its infamous inhabitants. German history is longer than the 13 years of National Socialism. This station existed decades before. The S-bahn train rushes upstairs, past the now verdant lakes and comfortable bourgeois avenues of Berlin’s Old West. I have a little time  for musing around the flower kiosk, to visit the greengrocer whose produce, placed directly under the dome, seems to illuminate it with its oranges and strawberry reds.

There are details easily missed here: around the dome are a series of shops: a baker, a butcher, a wine shop, the florist, and pub. I wander around the fruits and vegetables and feel ignored as their keeper busies himself with his mobile phone. In the butcher’s, I discover a small canteen, where house painters and carpenters, perhaps with jobs in the neighbourhood, are loading up on calorific breakfasts in their overalls for the hard day ahead. They consume plates of sausages and Schweinbraten, with boiled potatoes and brown sauce, and, since it is only 8:30 am, they wash it all down with cups of black coffee. I’ve still some time to wait, so I order a plate of hot Wieners, hope the workmen don’t think I’m checking them out, and wonder if  I’ve smeared mustard all over my face.

I see the pub owner is putting out chairs on the square in front of the station. I ask him how long the pub, with its extremely narrow curving interior, has been there. He explains gruffly that the space was originally used as storage for rail cars, which accounts for its narrow width, but that it’s been a bar since 1978, and he’s the seventh owner. An old man sits alone at the curved wooden counter, a large beer glass empty in front of him. I order a coffee from the baker and sit in a wicker chair and think I’ve entertained myself too successfully and for way too long in this little train station. And what is more worrying is that I could easily spend the whole day here, busying myself between the different spaces under the dome, with breaks to read my book in the sun.

Maybe I want to stay here, because I find all these details of everyday life comforting. The man eating his worker’s breakfast isn’t thinking about Göring. The pile of lemons doesn’t know about what the neighbours did. No one around me was probably even born before the war. It’s all wonderfully normal and oblivious to the horrors of the 20th Century. I like it because it reminds me not to reduce Zehlendorf, Wannsee, Dahlem, and nearby neighbourhoods, in 2012, to their history as the erstwhile commuter residences of the Nazi oligarchy. In fact, life is pretty nice in Mexikoplatz.

Then I hear again the squeal of the rail line upstairs, and can’t help but think who might have stood on those platforms. I am haunted. What is wrong with me? There’s the beep from an arriving van, they are my hosts who are picking me up to speak to high-school students about National Socialism, the Rise of Hitler and the Holocaust. I can’t stay in Mexikoplatz, sitting in my chair in the sun, still in this place of passage, however much I’d like to keep my eyes fixed on the vegetables.

I am obliged to give a lecture.

Getting a glass of water in a German restaurant is not an easy task. Unless you are willing to pay for it.

After dining at the Fischerhütte at Schlachtensee, and having spent a pretty penny for lunch, I innocently asked for a glass of tap water. The waiter looked at me as if I were very uncouth and replied that water was not provided for free, even though I had just dropped 35 euros. I suggested that it might be against the law for them to refuse me, and this created a scene. I came away feeling like breaking their Flaschen of San Pellegrino.

I admit there’s a cultural issue here. If you’re North American, you are used to having your glass constantly filled with mouth-numbingly cold tap water. It seems ridiculous, especially given the high quality of Berlin’s water, to pay around 5 Euros for a litre instead (more expensive sometimes than beer!). And my suggestion that there might be a law against refusing customers water is not so outlandish, considering that in France, tap water (along with salt, pepper and bread) must be provided for free in restaurants. I believe water is also free in Italy. Brits, on the other hand, are generally unsurprised. The Consumer Council for Water in the UK reports that nine out of ten restaurants there don’t provide free water, even though it’s in pubs’ licenses to do so in some localities.

I’ve adjusted my expectations for Germany. I’m no longer surprised when waiters respond by pretending not to hear that you asked for ‘Leitungswasser’, or tap water, and reply ‘still or sparkling?’ instead. Or if the free water is brought in the tiniest of cups. I’ve learned to swallow my paracetamols dry.  I have learned to lower my voice, wink, cajole, and flirt, as if I’m asking for a dirty favour, just in order to have a simple glass from the tap.  And I am genuinely surprised and grateful if a waiter replies ‘no problem’, like in a Thai restaurant I go to in the Bergmannkiez, or in Hudson’s teahouse where there are actually bottles of free tap water on all the tables.

Still I am baffled. In America you are offered so much free water on the presumption that it makes you hungrier and you will consume more: the free bar-snack theory of marketing. And in Germany, where there is so much claimed environmental awareness, there is little recognition of the true environmental cost of bottled water:  it takes three litres of water to make one litre of bottled water, it produces millions of tons of carbon dioxide, and the production of the bottles and their disposal requires huge amounts of energy and creates vast amounts of waste. This is a clear case of restaurant profit coming first. In Berlin, tap water is excellent, and chlorine and ozone free, so there’s no argument on quality differences.

Next time I’m going to ask if I can just pay for a glass of tap water, saying truthfully I don’t believe in the environmental cost of water from the bottle. Presumably, they’ll just bring me a free glass of what should be everyone’s right, no matter where it’s consumed, instead.

Asparagus season makes me uneasy. This is a problem living in Germany, because Spargelzeit* is unavoidable. The alien fern crops up in every menu for two months in the spring. Wiener Schnizel, with Spargel. Cheesecake, with Spargel. Soup of Spargel. There’s even asparagus ice cream. I pity those allergic. But my condition is psycho-sexual.

Perhaps it has something to do with their slender tips, the tapering from the stalks, the perfumed urine, or the fact that the etymology of the word in Greek is ‘young drive’ or ‘young shoot’. The form is undeniably penile, but not quite human. Cats have barbed members. Imagine the asparagus springing open, catching you unaware, and not letting go until it has had its feline way with you. But I am not convinced that my anxiety is cross-species. I know from my taxonomy that asparagus is not from the Kingdom Animalia. It is the vegetable mimicry of the male package.

Vertumnus is the Roman god of plant growth, and so the god of asparagus. A tricky fellow, he seduced Pomona in the guise of an old woman. Ovid describes the salacious, shapeshifting-geriatric-lesbian, entrapment in his Metamorphoses. I wonder how the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II (1552-1612) felt about being depicted as Vertumnus. The Mannerist painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo, known for his vegetative portraits, where human figures are composed entirely of pieces of fruit, blossoms, gourds and bramble, thought the comparison appropriate… perhaps because Rudolf was notoriously bisexual and promiscuous. In fact, many portraits of the emperor are exceedingly erotic. Recently, a joint effort of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie brought Arcimboldo’s portrait of Rudolf II as Vertumnus to the German capital as part of an exhibit called ‘Renaissance Faces’. Tactfully, Arcimboldo does not portray the viridian monarch below the midriff, but we can guess what vegetable he’d use to depict the contents of the royal codpiece.

In Germany, it’s not green asparagus, popular in North America, which is on the menus from mid April to the 24th of June every year. The 118 000 tons of asparagus produced is for the most part white, because it is grown in the dark, and requires peeling before eating. So much asparagus has a cult following. I have seen restaurants, in the traditionally queer neighbourhood of Schoeneberg, serve up what they self-deridingly call ‘gay food’ in honour of Spargelzeit. A plate of Beetlizer Spargel, traditionally with young potatoes and hollandaise sauce, is suggestively arranged with a happy ending. Take a fork and knife to this culinary presentation and ask yourself whether you emerge psychologically unscathed. Perhaps I worry about how the pallid asparagus is being cultivated.

The best of what’s eaten in Berlin comes from little towns in former East Germany, to the south of the city, where the perennial grows thickly along the river edges, or so we’re told. Here a ceremony opens Spargelzeit, and the season ends with a festival and election of a Spargel Queen, who is named Pomona. She is very angry with Vertumnus and willing to use all the powers of the growers’ association to get even.

Perhaps I should blame Ovid for the following image, but I imagine Rudolf shackled in the dark, in a forlorn Brandenburg barn, his Arcimboldesque visage turned albino. I imagine thousands of his herbaceous offshoots chained there too, forced to grow their pallid members in the gloom. They are cultivated, as some Dantesque contrapasso, or punishment that fits the crime, for their collective misdeeds. Now imagine crowned Pomona reveling in the May sunshine and her revenge. She offers you a spoonful of a delicately perfumed ice cream.

*Spargel=asparagus, Zeit=time or season

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This entry was first published in space | time

New York in the seventies without the crime? New York with a type-B personality? The way ‘the East Village used to be’?

How many times have I used New York comparisons to orient my visitors around Berlin. More than I can count. It’s short-hand, expedient, it does neither city justice, but it’s kind of fun.

click on the image above to see the neighbourhood parallels in detail!

New Yorkers have moved in droves to the ‘Sixth Borough’ of Berlin, and these days the hipsters in parts of the city, like Kreuzkölln, seem predominantly English-speaking. As I mentioned in another post, a friend who has taught visual art in New York for three decades watched the geography of the art scene move through her graduating seniors. In the eighties they moved to SoHo, in 1990 they were in the East Village, later they were living in Brooklyn. In the last years, every single student dedicated to pursuing a career in visual art moved to Berlin. Agents and scouts for galleries have followed, as have plenty of art students who don’t want to wait until they graduate. New York University has even opened a campus in the Kulturbrauerei specialising in studio art.

Yes, I know there are plenty of differences between the two cities… Chinatown is denser and more chaotic than Hermannplatz. Kottbusser Tor’s immigrants have less upward mobility than the Lower East Side’s, and Kreuzkölln is affordable and truly funky, while the East Village is no longer. Tribeca’s got more theatres and bistros than Rosa Luxemburg Platz and its Volksbühne.  Zoo and Potsdamer Platz aren’t nearly as vertical and awe-inspiring as Midtown. Dahlem’s village atmosphere isn’t like Morningside Heights, even if it’s got the university and some of the weirdness. And just because Nollendorf Platz is full of gay guys doesn’t mean it’s just like Chelsea. Sure, the asshole quotient is higher on Wall Street than in Frankfurt.  And on the whole Berlin is less cosmopolitan and diverse than New York City. Only in New York can you arrive and the next day call yourself a ‘New Yorker’. The definition of a Berliner is narrower, and born-Berliners are increasingly worried that their city is changing too quickly due to visitors, tourists, immigrants, expats. I find grumbling against tourists and the English-language here to be xenophobia disguised as activism.

On Sunday in the wee hours clocks go forward one hour, the days are longer, and it’s official: spring. That extra hour of sunlight makes all the difference. Our seasonally-affected eyes, skin and brains suck in the sun. Because Berlin is north, and far east in the timezone, we enjoy especially long summer evenings. But we get punished for them with a dark winter. Berliners are notoriously moody winter sufferers, and the schizophrenia is visible the moment the sun shines and the warmth seeps in. Berlin explodes into colour, and everyone suddenly wants to get laid.

I’ve been waiting, asking some days, is it here, is it almost here? And today, for the first time, there is the feeling of the irreversible, the light on the curtains seems that much stronger, it’s 18 degrees celsius. I pull open the windows and leave them like that all day. The heating is decidedly off, even last night. And walking outside, there are the telltale signs of a city that is transforming.

You no longer need to look for the green buds, they are everywhere, waiting. The ground is patched with green, and darted with yellow of daffodils and violet of crocuses. Flower sellers now have bundles of tulips, and small 1 Euro bundles of closed narcissi.

I pass the pharmacy and there is a new display: a silk sun, a pool of fish, and anticipatory bottles of sunblock. For now, grown men sit down in the street outside against sun soaked walls, their eyes closed, absorbing, waiting for the change.

Then along the canal in Kreuzberg, the willows are weighed with green buds, you can even see the verdant reflection in the water where the ducks and swans seem already to move more languidly.

For the first time today, along the opposite bank of the canal, I saw Berliners, in shorts, in short sleeves, stretched out along the sunlit bank, and very still.

And to the dismay of the neighbours, the season on the Admiralbrücke begins.

There feels nothing gradual about this embrace of the outdoors, in Berlin it is as sudden as a reward, as a door opening letting in the light.

The streets all at once are full of tables and people eating, drinking, and licking ice cream outside. Children are in the playgrounds and old men sit outside their shops smoking nargila, chatting and watching the variety of human life, the population multiplying in the streets, go by.

There are lounge chairs outside cafés with blankets, and you can lie in the sun in your sunglasses and feel like you are on vacation.

Because it is the relief, the sense of renewal, the different intensity of the sun, the suddenly presence of birdsong, of children’s voices outside, the slightly fragrant smell in the air, the way people will stand in the street without moving, all these things which signal the change, as if it were some collective decision, and not that of the sun.

On Hobrechtstraße in Neukölln, that corner of Kreuzkölln between the Lebanese community on Sonnenallee and the canal, there is a new work of street art. It looks like a window cut into a wall. Through it we see people so far away that they appear caricatures. Heartbreaking events are reduced to a limited number of colours and etched cartoon figures. The TV cameras survey at safe distance.

I am no expert on the Middle East, but I have travelled the region, speak some Arabic, and made an extended stay in Syria. Even with this exposure, it is uncanny to think of familiar places gripped by crippling violence. I try to imagine places in Syria today, cities I know like Hama, and find the pictures on the internet render them wholly unfamiliar. Violent scenes online are always replaced by the more durable impressions of my actual visit there: conversations, dinners with local people, and the reigning, tense, peace in the streets. This sense of removal is of course enhanced by now being physically in Berlin, with its wealth, detachment and stability.

‘Arab Spring’ appears here as an ubiquitous buzz phrase, not just on Youtube or in the news, but also in art and photo exhibits, usually alongside references to Twitter or the universal presence of Facebook. ‘Arab Spring’ is used in claims of how electronic media connects all of us and makes worldwide revolution possible.

Meanwhile, I remember an image of crowds in Tahrir Square, clamouring around one television set for information, and think that while we have the wealth for the gear, the IPads, the Macbooks and the broadband, to consume the revolution, the popular base of the protest is decidedly low-tech.

So, where in Berlin can I get a better sense of how the protests that continue to sweep the Middle East, and their uncertain outcomes, are unfolding on the ground? I turned recently to the curation of film programs. Last month, during the Transmediale and Berlin Film Festival (the Berlinale), there was plenty of opportunity to meet filmmakers from the region.

But if I wanted to talk about revolution, Transmediale was a frustrating venue. The Egyptian curators of the Arab Shorts program had a point to make: they showed films that were only obliquely political, such as the disquieting images of Cairo’s Giza Zoo, by Solmaz Shahbazi. The 19th Century zoo is shown empty of visitors, creating a timelessness focusing on the natural environment, well removed from today’s civil strife. The curators in discussion later stated that, overloaded by the revolution, they purposefully put forward a program stripped of overt references to the struggle. They could neither handle it psychologically, living in Egypt, nor would they satisfy the demand that they be messengers providing an emotive testimony.

Fair enough. Let’s go elsewhere.

The Berlinale (the Berlin Film Festival), just a week later in February, claimed to be infused by the theme of ‘upheaval’, inspired by the Arab Spring, or so said the festival’s director. I thought: now, here, there will be an opportunity for greater discussion. But highly publicised films such as ‘Farewell My Queen‘ (about the French Revolution) or Angelina Jolie’s ‘In the Land of Blood and Honey‘ (about Bosnia) seemed forced into service of the buzz phrase. Eventually, I found actual filmmaking from Tahrir Square  in lower profile, more informal, events. I attended one such panel discussion, of short films responding to the events in Egypt, called ‘Cairo: The City, the Images, the Archives’, moderated by Transmediale curator Marcel Schwierin. It did not shirk from showing video pieces from the protests themselves.

A presentation by the Mosireen Collective, an ongoing online video archive documenting police, army and government abuses during Egypt’s revolution, was graphically violent enough to reduce one of the Egyptian presenters to tears. She had to leave the room.

Is this what I came for? For my voyeurism to be satisfied? For an expression of ‘true emotion’? I was ashamed. The event only served to highlight the disconnect between the polished and corporate surroundings of Potsdamer Platz and events that remain distant. How to explain them when, as one presenter said, ‘they dominate our sleep’. She went on to recount a series of Cairo dreams invaded by family, protesters, blood, police, and Hosni Mubarak. After the presentation I spoke with another filmmaker who explained the difficulty of communicating the concentration of emotion and protest, to people who have not been there.

The scenes online are affecting and our gestures of support meaningful. But if I think I am truly participating emotionally in the ‘online’ revolution through the medium of the internet, I’m mistaken. Shouldn’t we question our vicariousness more, or wonder whether the videos have the effect of creating emotional distance rather than proximity. Then there is the question of whether online participation substitutes real action. We may lend our voices of support, but I am made nervous by the idea that clicking ‘like’ after viewing a Mosireen video is enough, whether it simply allows us to feel political from a comfortable chair. And then there are people who simply wish to profit from the buzz words of Facebook protest. There are many things we can do for Egypt, for Syria. But really to do something requires much more  than watching protest online and feigning participation.

I appreciate the way that I stumbled on the poster pictured above by surprise in a Neukölln street, that it is low-tech, that I do not know who the artist is. And I like how it suggests, in its purposeful style of the caricature, ours and the media’s, that we reconsider the Arab Spring’s emotional imprint, our physical and virtual connectedness to it: if we remain bystanders, if we do not write our politicians, if we don’t get out on the streets ourselves, if we are not there.