Finally Spring in Berlin

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.