Hot chocolate, new bears and in-bus pensioner fights...or, How to not spend money in KaDeWe

October 2016 in "the most exciting city on the planet": grey, cold, damp and miserable. Sometimes, just to mix things up a little, Berlin has added in fog or relentless rain. It's true there has been the odd beautiful sunny day, and the autumn colours have been spectacular, when you can see them, but mainly, the world has been "fridge crossed with swimming pool" as Bridget Jones so excellently describes it in her Diary. And like Bridget, we've been reluctant to go out into any of it. Mel even went so far, in desperation, as to catch a cold, which served as an excellent excuse for spending all day on the warm sofa interspersed with naps in bed.

However, even a cosy sofa can become tedious after a while, and although we're willing to be boring, being bored is not the same thing at all. We consider our options. Exhibitions? No, too full of wet people in steaming anoraks, trying to do culture while getting annoyed with each other. Cinema? Maybe, but we can't do that every day, too expensive! Visiting friends? It's a weekday, and our friends, unlike us, are all doing necessary and important things, like going to work, or picking up their children, or looking after their own incipient colds. Anyway, we need to go out.

Pondering our choices, knowing we have to be careful with our cash, Mel hesitantly suggests, "Why don't we go to KaDeWe? I've never been there!"

"You've never been there???"

KaDeWe, the Kaufhaus Des Westens (Department Store of the West), the Harrods of Berlin, and an institution. Like Harrods, it is expensive, but unlike Harrods, people who live in the city and aren't Saudi millionaires actually shop here. Comfortably-off people, of course. But if feeling poor, cold and miserable...why not pretend to be rich in the warmth and bright lights of a department store?

"That's an amazing idea," I say."We don't have to, you know, actually buy anything."

"Absolutely not," says Mel firmly.

So we wrap ourselves up ("But not too many layers, it'll be hot in there!") and embark on our rainy journey. The bus that goes from outside our house also goes nearly all the way into town, so we grab places on it. But not by the door of course. We wouldn't dare. You have to be very careful on this bus; every day, between around 8 in the morning and 2 in the afternoon, it is the scene of a fierce and - I was going to say silent, but it's actually quite noisy - struggle between feisty Berlin "Senioren", who crowd on to the bus with a calculating, competitive light in their eyes, mobility aids at the ready, to fight their way towards "The Seat By the Door". In their modish berets, snappy wool coats, careful make-up and occasional wigs, the elderly ladies of Zehlendorf instantly assess their chance and go for it...and if they can't get the Seat by the Door, then they will force their way through to an aisle seat, where they can take up their position for the remainder of the journey, their territory over two whole seats assured; try to get them to move over if you dare!

I speculate that this is the result of a particular kind of anxiety, which becomes more and more vocal as a stop approaches - or rather, as soon as the bus departs from one stop, however far it still is to the next one. "Are you getting off here?" they will ask aggressively, should you by any unlikely chance be the one on the aisle. On one particularly memorable occasion, one tiny, wrinkled woman wearing bright pink actually got up from her own seat and sat down on another, younger woman's lap in order to achieve a few inches' improved access to the door. The younger woman was either too polite or too amazed to say anything; but I know who this woman is now, and I stay well away.

Mel has another theory, which she explains to me as we travel along. "They've been through everything, these ladies...war, the Russians, the Cold War, the Wall coming down, reunification, David Hasselhoff...and now they've got their pensioners' passes and their seat on the bus, they're damn well not going to let any young whippersnappers take it away!"

Today, however, a revolution has occurred and the seat by the door is occupied by a podgy, disgruntled looking boy of about thirteen or so. He furtively sweeps the bus with a glance, trying to figure out if anyone is going to dislodge him, but he is so heavily and determinedly sat in this seat that not even the elderly ladies ask him to move.  Perhaps because he looks foreign. But there are whispers all down the bus...until he gets off at the S-Bahn station. Maybe he couldn't take the pressure after all. Anyway, these ladies are, really, the target audience for KaDeWe, as we are most definitely not. "They can be our role models!" Mel whispers and she's not wrong; I have always wanted to be an old lady in Berlin, as unlike English old ladies, they are not often held back by undue politeness or consideration for others. Maybe their often radical politics, underneath that conservative veneer, have something to do with it.


As we get to Wittenbergplatz, the U-Bahn station for KaDeWe, we are almost swept away in the crowd of people making their way up to the shops. But as we exit the station, we stop. A huge, black cloud of smoke is coming from the roof of the Europa Centre, the enormous, and enormously tacky shopping and business centre built in 1965 to prove West Berlin's economic and ideological superiority. We may not have the TV Tower...but hey, look what we've got instead! seems to have been the motto. What we have instead,at least now, seems to be an Irish Pub in the basement and endless shops selling mass-produced teddy bears in Berlin hoodies. Nonetheless, I realise, I would be distressed if it burnt down, for no other reason than nostalgia; it was the first place I found on my very first, too-bright morning in Berlin that was actually open and where I could buy a cup of coffee, go up in the lift and look out, through my hung-over eyes, over the whole of the shiny, glittering city, away out into the place where the buildings blurred into clouds at the distant horizon. And I still love Wittenbergplatz, the most elegant of all the U-Bahn stations.


With that sense of underlying unease that any unexplained event requiring the emergency services now awakens in many Americans and Europeans, we, like everyone else, stand around taking photographs and wondering if a bomb has gone off.  "Nah," decides Mel. "It's just a fire. Who would bomb the Europa Centre?" Sad, but true. So we make our way to KaDeWe, hurrying through the perfumed, golden, mirrored make-up and Chanel handbag section where the crowds are at their height. "Lifts! We have to go up in the lifts!" Lifts in department stores are always cool. Mel wants to see the "whole floor where they just sell shoes." This turns out to be not entirely true, but the shoes they do sell are exciting enough: Jimmy Choos, Manolo Blahniks, DMs and a whole array of designers I have never heard of.  But excitement, like being boring, is relative; a desperate sales girl stands, face carefully blank, surrounded by about fifty boxes and single shoes littering the rug where her customer is demanding to try on yet another pair. In other, quieter sub-departments, the wares glitter on the racks while the shop assistants, with no customers, stand and talk.  I realise I am already feeling slightly sick. "Let's go up and do the food," I urge. Food is always good.

We wander around the floor; no aisles here, but mini-sections for bread, oil, whisky, wine, meat, vegetables, tea and coffee, chocolate, patisserie..Serrano hams hang from strings with huge bowls of olives beneath them. The entire whisky resources of Scotland appear to have made their way here. There is a whole bar that just sells Veuve Clicquot, my favourite champagne (well, the only one I really know, as we kept getting given it at our wedding). The oyster bar is just across the way. We keep moving; no oysters and champagne for us, not today anyway! But here, unlike in Harrods, the food hall is full of Berliners. Berliners having business meetings (female lawyers in shiny heels with sharp haircuts and bright white shirts, eating sausages and potato salad; cautious, grey-looking men with lined faces, comb-overs, briefcases and suits that seem to be drifting apart on waves of alcohol, who may have been coming here since before the Europa Centre was even built); middle-aged couples, he in a rock-star T-shirt, jeans and leather jacket, she with blonde highlights, trouser-suit and more foundation than the Rockefellers; but also young Berliners out for a treat, young Turkish couples, young white couples, Indian families, middle-aged respectable Zehlendorfer couples with hand-knitted jumpers and ecologically sound leather shoes, buying rolls and cakes for the weekend. Somehow, I feel at home.

Moving on from the long lines of porcelain jars that contain any type of tea you could possibly want, I see, around the corner, a giant chocolate bear and a marzipan Brandenburger Tor.  Social observation be blowed. It's time for our treat. "But can we afford a treat?" we wonder. We move cautiously around the patisserie and coffee bars, but they are packed. "There's a space at the hot chocolate bar!" Mel has spotted it, and we are in there. The other guests smile and move over, offering us space to hang our coats. They don't look too intimidating: a couple from out of town with a small boy, a middle-aged lady, probably from our bus. I am right. It is not intimidating. Hot chocolate is only 3 euros a cup and coffee is less. And when it arrives, it is the best hot chocolate we have ever drunk. We all sit in a line, the family, the lady, us, all thrilled to be sitting in KaDeWe, in the middle of Berlin, drinking hot chocolate while outside winter is on its way.

On the way out we check out the prices of a few things, but we really don't need to pay 700 euros for a blanket. We do, however, end up spending something...I buy Mel a bear to help her over the first difficult times of winter in Berlin, and her sadness at a family bereavement, and to celebrate the fact that we are here. KaDeWe is all part of the circus. And now, so are we.

From dusk 'til dawn...where the wild things are

Living in this part of the city, right on the very edge, makes me somehow more aware of those times at the edge of night or day. Dusk and dawn are the times – at least now in autumn – when your senses seem to be at their sharpest, not yet dulled by work or commuting or the need to do the shopping. And for animals and birds, they are times that send an imperative signal: Time to get up. Time to hunt. Time to be on the move. Time to sleep. They can't turn over and hit the snooze button, or force themselves awake with a cup of tea.  Sun, moon and stars tell them what they need to be doing. So dawn and dusk are a time to keep your eyes open. You never know what you might see.

Especially here in Berlin, where there are a number of creatures out and about that you would be very surprised to see in England. The most beautiful and most remote are the cranes that at dawn often pass over our house en route to their feeding grounds out in Brandenburg. Most people love the cranes. Why wouldn't you? They are graceful, agile, wild, calling to each other as they pass in their huge flocks through the sunrise, doing no harm. But other creatures are...well, to put it mildly, not quite so graceful. And their relationship with the human race is a little more complicated.

Where the wild things live

A couple of weeks ago I went out at a relatively civilised hour, but not very late, to buy some rolls for breakfast. Cycling down to the track that (apparently) used to be a favourite place for spies to hang out, I got to the reedbeds and was surprised to see the edges of the paths – in fact any green spaces at all – were no longer green. Instead, it looked as though a giant rotovator had made a clean sweep of the entire area. The earth was turned over in huge chunks, all greenery subsumed or – well, eaten, I presume. Even the path itself had disappeared in some places. Everything was quiet, no sound but the birds chirping in the trees, and a disgruntled elderly couple poking at the ground with sticks. What had happened?

The Wildschwein were back. 

Don't worry, I didn't get this close (Photo: wildschweine.net)

Wild boar – not an exotic sight here, but an often invisible force. They move by night and sleep by day...but in spring, you might see them trotting along with a herd of little boar behind them. If you do – watch out! It's best to keep quite still and if you have a dog – pretend you haven't. The dog will probably try and pretend it's not with you, either. 

In autumn, Wildschwein become particularly active, moving around Berlin and Brandenburg in search of food, ignoring any borders, rooting up lawns and gardens, passing invisibly (well, mostly) over huge distances. Once I saw one in summer, which practically never happens. Katharina and I had gone for a swim at the lake. It was a hot day, and the banks of the lake were crowded with trippers and sun-worshippers. Suddenly, out of the hedge exploded a young boar. It was evidently a teenager that had lost its way, and at the sight of us all, froze. The human teenagers around us froze too, sun-cream in hand or towel at their knees, mouths gaping in surprise. No-one moved. Time seemed to stand still while the young boar wobbled desperately on its gangly legs, head turning from side to side, looking for an escape – then dashed back into the bushes again. A buzz of excitement arose. Where had it come from? Where did it go? Luckily, no enormous mother sow had followed it...

These animals really are wild, and it was exciting to realise they were living their wild lives just out of sight while we bathed in the lake. There have been mutterings and mutiny against this force of nature, though. Especially in Spandau, to the north-west of Berlin, and in Stahnsdorf, our neighbouring district in former East Germany. Spandauers – well, they would complain, wouldn't they? Spandau may be officially part of Berlin, but to most Berliners, it's a middle-class, snooty villlage that just happens to have a medieval fortress in the middle of it, where people do uncool things like hold jousting events. Not that Mel or I would ever attend such an event, or that I have any prejudices at all against Spandau, you understand. But Stahnsdorf...Stahnsdorf is different.

Stahnsdorf Cemetery

Photos: http://www.suedwestkirchhof.de/bildergalerie.html

Stahnsdorf is a little-known district between Kleinmachnow, Teltow and Potsdam. But like many little-known districts, it hides beauties, stories and secrets. Its best-known claim to fame – which is not nearly as famous as it should be – is its incredible graveyard, the South-West Cemetery (http://www.suedwestkirchhof.de/kirchhof.html). It's not just a cemetery. It's a secret garden with acres of tumbling vines and flowers, pinewoods and formal gardens, with the burial-places of many Berlin luminaries like industrialist Werner Siemens, the dictionary creator Carl Langenscheidt and the painter Lovis Corinth half-hidden along its dusky pathways. Among them is Mel's favourite, F.W.Murnau, creator of the 1920s Dracula movies...

Grrr.Aaagh

But it's an international place, too. At its heart is a beautiful wooden chapel, the Norwegian Chapel, where concerts and services are held, and at its edges are two special graveyards for English and Italian soldiers from the First World War, still maintained in manicured, military splendour. It's a place where many people belong: Jews, Protestants, Catholics, and about 15,000 interlopers, who were brought here from Schoeneberg in 1939 after Albert Speer, Hitler's architect, ordered that their original burial places be rooted up to make way for the gigantic "North-South Axis" he had planned for Hitler's Berlin.  

Norwegian Chapel

Back in the early 1900s, though, Stahnsdorf was almost as unknown as it is today, and far harder to get to. So the ingenious idea was born of creating a "Cemetery Railway", the Friedhofsbahn which from 1913 until 1961, carried both mourners and day-trippers from Wannsee to the graveyard. But Stahnsdorf was another place at the heart of Cold War border disputes, cut off politically from West Germany and geographically from most of the East. The East German government and the Russians closed the railway in 1961 and the station was demolished in 1976. Now, all that remains are the iron tracks and a huge stone memorial.

At first glance, approaching from the cemetery through heaps of golden autumn leaves in the fragile warmth of the October sun, we just take in the outside of the memorial. But walk around the other side, and you are suddenly brought back to the present with a half-poignant, half-bitter description of the railway's fate. The whole history of reunification is in these few words. After the Wall came down, an agreement was made as part of the reunification treaty that all railway routes that had been destroyed or blocked because of the Wall should be restored. But this particular railway was, somehow, left out. It was not seen as important enough, or perhaps its geographical position would still make it too difficult, or perhaps it would simply cost too much money. Whatever the reason, the Evangelical Church, that owns the cemetery, took the German government to court over it. And lost.

Nowadays the cemetery is looked after by volunteers, waiting for cyclists, walkers and car-drivers to arrive so that they can be given maps and tours. But today, there is only one topic of conversation: the Wildschwein. As we enter the gates, we can see that the flowerbeds have been overturned and the garden at the entrance completely dug over. We assume that some garden renovation is going on...but no. "No, no, no," the moustachioed volunteer at the gate mourns, "it's the Wildschwein. They're back. We can't keep them out." He explains that a normal fence won't stop them, "and we haven't got enough money to properly fence the whole cemetery." As we cycle round the quiet pathways, we can see why. The cemetery is vast, the jungle of trees and bushes the perfect place for a Wildschwein to hang out. We don't see one, of course. Not in the daytime. 

On our way out again, the volunteers and visitors are still discussing the boar and their ways. It's true it's annoying, although they seem to have kept, so far, respectfully to the more decorative areas of the cemetery. I feel sympathy for the people who manage the graveyard. Yet underneath, I also feel a sneaking sense of respect for the boar.  When we get back to Zehlendorf, and darkness falls, it's nice to know they're out there, doing their wild things, invisible, but real. 

And I did get the rolls, in the end

Gordon Parks. Outside Looking In.

Gordon Parks

I am you . Selected Works . 1942 – 1978

Gordon Parks. Outside Looking In.  Mobile, Alabama, 1956

There is a whole world of difference between choosing to be an outsider and being forced to be. But what makes someone an outsider? This can be an abstract cultural kind of question; or a life or death consideration. My own experience is pretty banal. In Somerset, I was British, I was white, I worked, I had enough money. But I was also gay, had lived abroad and could speak more than one language. This alone was enough to make some people exclude me from conversations, whisper about me in corners and basically, reject me as an outsider who would never fit in.  Yet, even my outsider status in Somerset meant that in a way, I was an insider. I knew what I was dealing with, and I was choosing to exclude myself as well as suffering exclusion. It hurt, yet I was also glad not to fit in. Most people never have much of an option about being glad. Being an outsider often means death, physically or spiritually.
But being an outsider also has its points. Being an outsider and an artist, for example, means you have the chance to  draw people who are on "the inside" into your own world; you can try to bring the outside and the inside together.

Amerika-Haus (Photo: (c) David Becker)

This was brought home to me forcefully when I saw an exhibition at the Amerika-Haus, in what used to be the official US cultural and information centre in Berlin. It was the site of political protests and demonstrations as well as cultural exchange, but gradually fell into disuse as reunification proceeded and Americans withdrew more and more behind armoured guards and exclusion zones. But in the heady Cold War days, the Americans were right at the spiritual centre of West Berlin, right behind Zoo Station on Hardenbergstrasse, where two universities still live in happy proximity to glamourous West Berlin cafes that seem to have been there for ever and the drunken, mad or simply poor people that come to find shelter and soup at the Berlin Stadtmission. Gentrification is making inroads, but Zoo still remains comfortingly sleazy, busy and open to all comers – as it were. 

Now CO-Berlin is a house dedicated to art and if possible, political art. Going up the steps and pushing open the 1950s glass door, I went inside with a feeling of homecoming. To my left an art bookshop, to my right a cafe full of chattering students and hipsters and art enthusiasts of all ages. There was a sense of excitement in the air, probably linked to the European Month of Photography which just opened here. Or perhaps because of the stunning exhibition that they have managed to bring to Berlin, a retrospective of Gordon Parks' photographs. Gordon Parks was the first mainstream black photographer in America and used his photography and journalism to tell Americans shocking stories of what was happening in their country, from the 1940s to the late '70s. Glamourous, theatrical shots for Life and Vogue sit alongside stories of black gangs in Harlem and police brutality in Chicago, extreme poverty in Rio and New York and the scandal of segregation in Alabama. Parks did not only photograph the people he saw. He got to know them. He lived with them. Sometimes, this could cause them problems – the family who let him photograph them in the South were chased from their home after the report came out, and Parks (and his employer, Life magazine) had to step in to pay for their new life.

The fashion shots are placed almost at the heart of the exhibition, alongside a clip from a film showing police reprisals against black drug dealers. At first, I thought this unseemly; how can Vogue sit comfortably with violence? But of course, that's the point. While all of this violence, poverty and despair was going on, other (white, rich) people were continuing to live in a poetical, fantastical world of clothes, cars and cigars. I could draw a moral and say, Just as we do today. 

Gordon Parks. Shot for Life magazine, 1959.

But it's more complex than this. Those photographs of white fashion models, actors, brides and status symbols are also exhilarating in their own right. And with their beauty comes meaning. Even the photographs that were most clearly done for advertising purposes – the shots of the models in another Zoo, not in Berlin but in America, striped dresses set amongst the stripes of the zebra enclosure, a chirpy model in a white fur coat half-hiding the white fur of a polar bear – refer to a world beyond advertising. For those with eyes to see, they indicate the contradiction at the heart of the photographs. Humans are animals too, with passions, skin and fur. But humans are nothing like animals. Instead of natural dignity, we have trappings stolen from those very animals we are pretending to be like. Our freedom to wear luxurious clothing contrasts with the animals' imprisonment in cages they don't understand. And maybe too, we live in a zoo of our own making. What does Lou Reed say?

"Remember that the city is a funny place/Something like a circus or a zoo." 

I left the exhibition completely bowled over by what I had seen, with a sense that the meaning of the photographs was continuing to resonate in the city I was walking through. And I was grateful. Before seeing this exhibition, I was beginning to feel that Berlin has turned into a playground, its darkness confined to the safely past history embalmed in memorials, guided tours and books while in the present, young people from America or the UK come here to make the most of the liberal freedoms and cheap rents (compared to London or New York) that Berlin has to offer (just as I did); and to immerse themselves in the drama of another country's history as a way of accessing their own (just as I did too). Neo-Nazis have been burning down refugee homes, yet everywhere you go, people are at play: the vegan cafes, knitting circles, pop-up craft markets, baby yoga and English-speaking bars that seem to stretch the length of some streets in Neukölln or Prenzlauer Berg; the queues of Japanese tourists waiting to sample real German beer or real Turkish kebabs, authenticity created for smartphone cameras; the sense that whole districts are turning into nothing more than circuses or zoos places for tourists to escape to; I have had the sense that Berlin was slipping away from me. But don't I play too? Of course.

I ponder on why these things distress me. Is it my age? Probably? Envy? No, I don't think so.Maybe I envy people their energy and idealism, but I hope I still have a bit of that left, too. And anyway, lots of these things are good in themselves. These people are local, and they are doing something local; they are making things happen where they live, they are not part of big corporations, they are trying to make the world a more attentive, individual place. Good for them. But I mourn for something. Sometimes I have the sensation that this is play in a different sense too, playing like playing in the theatre, a way of pretending. Where is the passion about  German life today, where is the sense of taking part in actual, lived history now? I know it's there, and on a local level, lots of people are trying to make a difference, to the refugees who have come here in their thousands and to their own friends and families. But this exhibition did something else, too. It gave me back the belief that Berlin is still a part of the bigger world, still trying to make those connections between art and society, poverty then and poverty now.  It gave me a feeling of anger – righteous anger at what is happening all over the world and gratitude that some people still bear witness to it. And a feeling of hope. 

In fact, it wasn't boring at all.

Gordon Parks. American Gothic. 1942.