überlin

Category: Expat Life

  • The GIF Illustrated Guide to Writing about Berlin

    by

    James Glazebrook
    Category:

    Inspired by Stuart Maconie’s excellent article “How to write about the north”, here are some pointers for journalists with their sights set on Berlin.

    First: remember that “the real Berlin” is what you make it. Your New York Times article is only going to be read by expat hipsters and friends back home living vicariously through them, and neither group would know how to pronounce “das echte Berlin”, let alone where to find it. Get in touch with that friend-of-a-friend who moved here last year, ask them to show you around “their Berlin” (the square mile around their apartment), and then start drawing conclusions. Try to include as many of the following ideas as you can:

    “Poor but sexy”
    This soundbite has been keeping journalists in copy for nearly a decade, and shows no sign of losing popularity. It’s a neat shorthand for everything you’re going to write, about a city full of creative people seeking refuge from the rising rents of East London, Williamsburg, or wherever they should really be living – a place so international that its (gay!) mayor threw an English word into its unofficial slogan. If you want to sound really authentic, use the German “arm, aber Sexy”, or, if you’re penning a particularly visionary piece, flip it on its head: “Berlin is still sexy… but not so poor!” [insert image of George Clooney stepping out of the Hotel Adlon]

    Mention the war
    Whatever you write will reach five times as many readers if it has either the word “Hitler” or “Nazis” in the title. As far as you and your audience are concerned, German history starts in 1933 and ends in 1945 – and everything that’s happened since can be traced back to then. If you’re writing about Hitler’s toilet, his Nazi brides or some other “new” “important” discovery, then lucky for you: guaranteed hits. If not, you’ll still probably want to mention whether Berliners do or don’t deal with their “dark past”, note your surprise that the city now welcomes people from all over the world, or concentrate on the city’s outer districts, where neo-Nazis still “run rampant”. As a rule of thumb, you can’t use the N-word enough.

    Life’s a Cabaret
    Amateur historians will want to reach further back into Berlin’s past, to the hedonistic years of the Weimar Republic. It’s fun to draw parallels between the nightlife of the 20s and 30s and today’s weekend-long parties, and, as long as you have a DVD of Cabaret (research), a sockful of class As and a spare 72 hours, it’s easy too. Depending on whether you’re pitching to The Mail or The Guardian, you’ll want to portray the modern-day Isherwoods you meet as either “lost” or “liberated” – or, if you’re on a particularly bad one (busted, Sunday Times), as mindlessly fucking their way into the gaping mouth of Hell.

    Forever blowing bubbles
    Tech journalists: ignore what we’ve previously written and turn the crank on the Berlin startup hype machine. Before you land at TXL, you should have already decided whether the German capital is Europe’s answer to Silicon Valley, or just a tech bubble full of hipsters (hardly) working on innovative ideas that are doomed to fail. Your headline should be something like “Forget ___ – ___ is Europe’s hottest tech hub”, with one of the blanks reading “Berlin” and the other “London”, “Paris”, “Tel Aviv”, or wherever you would like the expense account to take you next. Oh, and mention SoundCloud.

    Kreuzberg and Neukölln are over
    Unfold the map from the middle of your Rough Guide, take out a pen, and draw concentric circles of “over” emanating from the TV Tower. Forget all the places where all the people you know live – the very fact that you know someone with an apartment there means that the district is now too bourgeois to bother with. Mitte might as well be Frankfurt, Kreuzberg and Neukölln are long gone (especially that “Kreuzkölln” your editor told you about) and even outlying areas like Wedding are well on their way. Look a little further afield and you might be able to find an expat artist squatting in Lichtenburg to use as evidence of the district’s “renaissance”.

    BERLIN is SO over
    Feeling bold? Forget Berlin altogether, and visit either Leipzig (the next Berlin) or Dresden (the next Leipzig). Or, if you want to really stir shit up, dismiss both “Hypezig” and “Dregsden” (“Doucheden”? You might have to come up with your own…) and simply pick any city from the former Eastern Bloc to nominate as Europe’s next “capital of cool”. Why not find out if you can get a decent flat white in Zwickau?

    Have we forgotten anything? Leave your tips for journalists thinking of covering Berlin in the comments below!

    Tags:

  • Video: überlin in 140 seconds

    by

    James and Zoe
    Category:

    Here’s an interview we did recently for both German TV channel ZDFinfo and the web series 140 Sekunden (140 Seconds). We’re pretty mortified by our shifty eyes, the sound of our voices and the weird solitary “….yeah” that James says right at the end of the segment, but we’re still glad we did it! Check it if you want to learn a little bit more about us, our thoughts on gentrification and the Give Something Back to Berlin project, and – more importantly – SEE RARE FOOTAGE OF OLIVE. And, for the Germans, here it is auf Deutsch – just scroll through the guy in the orange shirt and the Nazis.

    Tags: , , ,

  • Signs that Summer is Coming to Berlin

    by

    James Glazebrook
    Category:

    With GIFs curated by When You Live in Berlin.

    Finally – winter is over! Now that we’re well into April, we seem to have survived the darkest winter on record, as the last ice thaws on the pavements and the sun has started burning through the uniform grey of the Berlin sky. But it’s not all blue skies from here on in – we’re hearing rumours of everything from 20°C heatwaves to even more snow. So while we wait for the all-clear from Mr Sun, click on that SAD lamp and study these signs that summer is indeed coming to Berlin.

    Berliners show off their “summer outfits”

    Forget shorts and flip-flops, that’s not going to fly in Germany. You might find the natives donning their sensible sandals (with socks), summer edition breathable dayglo Jack Wolfskin anoraks and parasol-cum-umbrellas – because it could still rain at any minute. Neukölln hipsters’ beanies will rise with the temperature, to let the warm breeze caress their pretty heads, and they’ll pull on pastel socks and deck shoes or whatever yacht rock bullshit Williamsburg is exporting this season. But don’t despair – while annoying, this is a sign that summer is just around the corner.

    You have to queue for ice cream

    Our nth sublet was above an ice cream stand and I shit you not, as soon as the temperature inched above zero and the year’s first sun-rays hit the street, there was a line across it of eager Berliners waiting for their first taste of summer. While this may not be an indicator of what Australians or Brazilians would recognise as summer, this is a sure-fire sign that Germany’s pale imitation is on its way.

    People appear at table tennis tables…

    You’d be forgiven for thinking that football is Germany’s national sport, but it’s not; that would be table tennis. Did you know that there are more Tischtennis tables than football pitches in Berlin? FACT.* Because, while football requires a certain amount of agility and stamina, literally everyone can play table tennis. It’s the kind of sport that can be mastered on a series of quiet, constructive, not-too-cold Sundays.

    *not a fact.

    …and tables appear outside cafés and restaurants

    Ice cream isn’t the only food Berliners like to consume in unseasonably chilly conditions. If there’s a sliver of sunshine burning through the heavy clouds above the city, you can bet that every square metre of direct daylight will feature a table full of food, and a huddle of locals each wearing a winter coat, pashmina and a wistful pair of shades. Because they know, as soon as summer proper hits in a few weeks, all the good tables will be taken up by verdammten Touristen…

    Tourists start flooding in

    How do they know? We Berliners have all spent the month or so fearing that the whole of 2013 will be one long winter – but at some point during our darkest days, some tourist somewhere was like, “Oh yeah, by the middle of April Berlin will be glorious” *books Ryanair ticket*. Now we have to spend the next few months being confused for tourists, with everyone in our Kiez speaking resentful English to us and forgetting that we hate the invading hordes as much as they do. (Joke.)

    Open Airs

    As soon as you start getting Facebook invites for open air parties in abandoned amusement parks/Cold War monuments/meat separation plants, you know the weather’s going to improve any day. Because, with the exception of the mentalists who organised Berlin’s first winter open air this January, promoters of sun-dependent parties have a better handle on local weather systems than the Met Office.

    Dog shit.

    The sight of months-old Hundescheisse thawing on the street outside your apartment might just have you wishing for more snow.

    Balkon envy

    Summer is the time of year when you stop mocking your friend with the 20m² apartment, whose balcony accounts for half of the total floor space… and start wondering whether you could get away with pushing them off said Balkon. Now that the ground isn’t covered with snow, someone’s bound to notice – it would take a hell of a lot of dog shit to cover the body. But it can’t be that often that Berliners plunge to their death from their own balconies, and in the time it takes the local police to work out what happened, you could be working on your tan. 

    So… can you spot any signs that summer is slowly sneaking up on Berlin?

  • “Wie, bitte?” Ranting back at Exberliner

    by

    Guest Blogger
    Category:

    Lauren Oyler responds to an Exberliner rant about the lack of German fluency among Berlin’s expat community.

    I moved to Berlin for myriad reasons, all of which are, seven months later, still difficult to articulate. I had spent two weeks here in May 2011, and while I was certainly technically aware that the city is the capital of Germany, the things I associated it with were tangentially German at best. Instead of sausage and Spätzle, I remembered picnics at an abandoned airport; the first bicycle that didn’t give me flashbacks to the traumatic handlebar accident at age eight; a laid back, noncompetitive atmosphere in which you can live happily on little income and people are generally accepting of whatever weird artsy soul-searching you’re there to do. Obviously not everyone in Berlin does these things, but not everyone in New York wants to be an actor, either. Both are massive cities with many different realities.

    I came back in August of last year, and before I did, countless sources — and the existence of several English-language newspapers, blogs and other publications — told me my lack of German skills would be no big deal. This is true and, apparently, infuriating, particularly so for the people who landed here before me.

    Julie Colthorpe, who wrote “Sorry, no German!” in this month’s Exberliner, came to Berlin 12 years ago and longs for the days when expats would get kicked out of supermarkets for confusing their datives and accusatives. Calling out an unnamed but obvious brunch-serving Australian restaurant in Neukölln, she argues that all-English businesses and expats with no German skills have no place in the city. Although her complaints weren’t directed towards me — I dutifully brave the umlaut to save myself from accidentally ordering anything pickled — I feel attacked nevertheless. I’m American, I live in Neukölln, and German fluency is almost as fathomable to me as paying more than 1.30€ for a beer. I’ve been to Melbourne Canteen and breathed a sigh of relief when I realized I didn’t have to furrow my eyebrows in despair at the thought of trying to convey a dropped fork.

    By contrast, Colthorpe’s clearly proud of her German, so it’s likely she’s unaware that getting a blunt “WIE, BITTE?” in response to a valiant attempt at communication is a cultural tradition alive and well here in the capital city. Add to this the sense that your best accent only comes out when you’re drunk or transforming into your parodic German alter ego, Frau Schadenfreude, and you understand why expats everywhere struggle to learn the languages of the countries they live in. It’s scary and hard. Here, you can avoid that if you want to, but people — usually non-native German speakers — will scold you for it.

    Should English speakers take the bait, be ashamed? As Colthorpe says, a German-only restaurant would fail in Melbourne (or New York, or Vancouver)… but not because English speakers are too stupid to grapple with café-level German — or even because they would be unwilling to do so in a reasonable circumstance. But knowing German in Australia will do you about as much good as a first-edition copy of Jane Eyre — nice if you’re into that kind of thing, but otherwise kind of useless. It’s a paradox, sure, that being constantly abused for speaking little to no German can make a potential Berliner less willing to stick around and learn it, but the harsh economic reality is this: it’s just not necessary.

    by Josh Bauman

    by Josh Bauman

    English, on the other hand, kind of is. A series of historical events — uncontrolled by the well-meaning people at Melbourne Canteen, überlin and any given Sameheads party — has made English the lingua franca among the people in Berlin who are here because it’s Berlin, not because it’s Germany. Colthorpe says she spent her New Year’s Eve with a group of people from Italy, France, Spain, Russia, America, and Germany, and instead of appreciating the cosmopolitanism, cooperation and progress that has allowed them to share any common language, she cries “HIPSTER BULLSHIT!” in the face of more than a half-century of diplomacy. If only we could have shown her piece to someone living in 1941. The irony that it’s published in an English-language magazine that caters to the exact audience she risks alienating is apparently completely lost on her; even funnier is that Exberliner suggested going to the Melbourne Canteen in its January 2013 issue (“Where to go in Neukölln,” pg. 50).

    The exclusively-English-speaking expat population may indeed be “missing out” on one kind of Berlin experience, but anyone who can read a Wikipedia entry and memorize some definite articles is not some kind of Culture Crusader making the world a better place, one well-pronounced “CH”-sound at a time. The idea that culture consists of an immutable combination of foods, sayings, and historical anecdotes is a perfect definition for those who want to assimilate for the chance to say they have. Expat culture is a part of Berlin’s culture. You can’t praise the city’s international draw in one breath and condemn expatriates as tourist scum the next. If you’re disturbed by the Melbourne Canteen, you’ll have to get over it.

    I don’t think learning German is pointless, and as I improve, however slowly, I feel better about whatever it is I’m doing here. More than once I’ve been embarrassed when an American or British friend forgoes even the barest minimum of effort, skipping the regretful-but-polite, “Sprechen Sie Englisch, bitte?” in favor of an unfathomably lazy, “Can I get a Berliner?” That sucks. It’s rude to go into a German restaurant, bar, café or terrifying governmental bureau and speak English to the people there because, despite the way Colthorpe writes about it, the vast majority of cafes, bars, restaurants, and performance/coworking/women’s-only gym spaces in Berlin function fully in Deutsch.

    No one’s forcing anyone to go to The Bird, and we all know too well how interchangeable the bars in Neukölln are; if you find one unpleasantly Anglophonic, go to the one next door. Enclaves of English — and French, and German and etc. — exist in any semi-significant city; that’s called globalisation. It’s not going away, and a misguided rant about one of its fairly harmless symptoms accomplishes nothing but animosity. Explicitly English businesses hurt no one, and Colthorpe’s piece is as unthinking, boring, and selfish as an American who lives in Germany for six months without bothering to learn how to order a multi-grain roll. You’d think the constipation would eventually drive her to Google Translate, but that’s her Kreuz to Berg.

    For more from Lauren, check out her website laurenoyler.com or follow her on Twitter: @laurenoyler. For tips on learning German, read “Ask überlin – Do I need to learn German?”

  • How to Survive a Berlin Winter

    by

    James Glazebrook
    Category:

    We’ve said it before: Berlin only has two seasons, summer and winter. As soon as it’s too cold to spend whole weekends in a beer garden or barbecue every meal, Berliners start ominously whispering “winter is coming”, as if they were Ned bloody Stark. Sometimes this is meant as a hint – “time to go back to your tropical homeland, sunboy” – but some of us are genuinely concerned for the wellbeing of Berlinoobs. If you’ve only been to the city during one of its long, blissful summers, and you come from a hot country – one that doesn’t even have winters – then you’re going to need all the help you can get.

    So here’s our handy guide to surviving a Berlin winter, illustrated by Josh Bauman, the talented bastard behind Caffeinated Toothpaste:
    Layer up! by Josh Bauman

    Layer up!
    You’re going to need a killer winter wardrobe of fur, capes, long johns and serious boots. For inspiration, look to this outfit Zoë put together, or, well, Ned Stark. But until those fleamarket trips pay off, you’ll have to make do with what you have. Upend that single suitcase you brought when you moved here, and lay out all those bikinis, bermuda shorts and belly tops. Now put them all on. As soon as you find a cape or a Jack Wolfskin coat big enough to cover all that shit, you’re set!

    Stay inside! by Josh Bauman
    Stay inside!
    Even though we get out more now than when we lived in London, we’re still complete homebodies next to most Berlin party people. Here are some tips to help you stay warm by replicating our shut-in lifestyle:

    • Quit your job! Or freelance from home. Travelling to work is for suckers
    • Rearrange your apartment. Cluster all your furniture so you can live within a square metre of the one radiator that really works, or failing that, the oven. While you’re there, preheat it to 200°C for your underwear
    • If you do work from home, forget any pretence of getting out of bed and drag your coffee machine, fridge – and an empty 2 litre bottle ;) –  into your Schlafzimmer
    • Buy a Beamer. Fuck travelling to a cinema to see whatever Christmassy crap has just been released – just hold your own film screenings
    • Live on takeaway. Services like pizza.de and lieferando (or bloomsburys for the Yukis) let you order online, without even attempting to speak German. Also, the extra fat is great insulation if you do decide to go outside…

    Get outside! by Josh Bauman
    Get outside!
    The only way to avoid cabin fever is to break up time spent indoors with brief spells of outdoor awesomeness. We’ve found that spending just 5% of your time outside is enough to avoid becoming Jack from The Shining. Here’s how to inject some strategic outside into your life:

    • Do it in the daytime! Going outside while it’s dark is more depressing than staying indoors
    • Walk on a frozen canal, or even the Spree. Best thing you’ll do all winter
    • Geek out at awesome indoor attractions like the Computer Games Museum or Loxx – this miniature railway version of Berlin is the best way to see the city without having to be out in it!
    • Glühwein. I could ride out a life sentence in a Siberian labour camp if they gave me a mug of mulled wine every couple of hours

    Grow a beard!
    Like you need a reason…

    Trust science!
    Don’t panic, but this is about to get scientific. Having spent the second half of the year predicting the worst winter on record, Berliners *always* say, “That was nothing – last winter was much worse.” So either global warming is working in our favour, and pretty soon we’ll spend our winters complaining about the sunburn and mosquitos, or these harsh winters are something you just get used to. Either way, good news. Thanks science!

    Summerfy it!
    Speaking of science, I can’t believe no one’s offered to buy the patented technology behind our Summerfy app. Summerfy uses augmented reality to layer summery sunshine over the grimmest winter scenes, and even turns Berliners’ frowns upside down. As soon as startup founders start gravitating here from Brazil instead of London and Scandinavia, we expect this to be snapped up. Look out for it in the app stores!

    Remember: it’s not forever!
    Berlin winters last for four-and-a-half months – six at most. Half a year of blistering cold and near constant pitch-blackness is a small price to pay for living in the greatest city in the world… right? Before you know it, you’ll be shaking your shit on a faked-up beach bar with a cocktail in each hand. Maintain.