Not Going To Exhibitions

U-Bahnhof Leopoldplatz, Wedding

In the past week I visited one exhibition, half-visited another and entirely failed to visit a third, in a typically Berlin kind of way. Then again, who needs an art exhibition when you've got department stores in Wedding?

I hadn't been to Wedding for many years. It's a poor district in the north of Berlin, synonymous with working class consciousness and during the Weimar Republic, violent street fighting between the Nazi and Communist parties. Nowadays, it's still poor but it's known too for its ethnic diversity, with Turkish families and many people of African descent living here. It's become a centre for a new kind of class consciousness (new to Berlin) that is as much to do with ethnicity, race and difference as it is with money. 

Photo: erratik-institut

I lived in Wedding in the Brüsseler Straße in 1995. In the depths of winter, I moved into the flat of a delicate and refined Bulgarian lady, a tiny woman who could only have been in her forties, I suppose, but then seemed to me to have stepped out of time altogether; a stocky, small person with a thick black fringe cut dead across her anxiously wrinkled forehead, a distressed bob and a selection of florally embroidered thick white woollen jumpers. She lived in an overheated room with a number of cats, scented candles, embroidered doilies and bookshelves heavy with the weight of Bulgarian, German and Russian tomes, often poetry, which, as I later discovered, she had annotated and underlined heavily at verses which she found particularly moving. These tended to be the verses which I found particularly irritating, but by then we both knew that I was a mistake as a lodger anyway. One day I came home to find her pacing the floor after she discovered a book in my room called Lesbian Passion: "I thought your friend was just a friend, even though she does have short hair...but now..."

This experience, together with my exodus from the house shortly afterwards, had an unfortunate effect on my relationship to Wedding. But I found afterwards that I could not forget it so easily. Wedding, with its broad streets and looming tenements, built for the thousands of workers that came to live there, is the home of migrants from all over the world, and it's also just north of Berlin's only real port. Close by, at Westhafen, a huge industrial area spreads around docks where men, cranes and winches load and unload ships and smoke rises from enormous chimneys beyond the deep basins where the ships lie at anchor. It's a mysterious place, a place that's easy to see but hard to get to from the huge road, full of roaring traffic, that heads up from Moabit and on past Plötzensee to Wedding, trams competing with buses and cars for attention amidst the din and a slender cycle track weaving dangerously between the edge of the road and the edge of the bridge. This is where I used to stand and look out over the docks into the evening sky, feeling at home as much as in Southampton or Dover. I never understood why I loved it so much until an old lady said, "People who emigrate like to live near water. It's as if they feel it connects them with where they've come from. They can be migrants for ever." She was right, at least as far as I'm concerned.

Behala Port Building at Westhafen. Photo: de.wikipedia.org

 Wedding is full of migrants, and many of them are now African, or of African descent. African cafes have opened, African shops appeared amidst the department stores and Turkish markets. Rather than try to become assimilated, as many people tend to assume migrants ought to want to do, some people prefer to keep a complex and complicated identity, rather than papering over the cracks.  And a new arts centre has also opened, with a focus on people of colour and their interactions with Germany and migration generally. At least, this is what the website says. So I decided to take a look. It's time to do something new and to look at what is happening in Berlin, in Wedding, right now, I decide, not to eternally think of small Bulgarian landladies and vast cold streets covered in snow.

U9 towards Leopoldplatz. Photo: flickr.com

So on a freezing cold day I embark on the adventure, getting on the U9 at Zoo to head up to Leopoldplatz. I soon realise that it might be cold outside, but my woolly tights and high boots are causing me to nearly pass out in the heat of the Underground. Commuters are crowding on to the train with packed bags and mobile phones, exhausted men and women are going back up to their homes and families. Everyone looks grey and tired, and I remember what's it's like to actually live here, to work here. The train gets more and more crowded at each stop, until at Leopoldplatz, we all flood out and I climb the stairs up to the surface with a sense of familiar weariness . To be greeted by my favourite department store in Berlin...Karstadt! It gleams and glows in the dusk, where rain is starting to fall, tempting me in....but no, I have an exhibition to go to! I realise that it may be a long way to the arts centre and remember, again, how long the streets of Berlin can be, especially in winter, in the rain. I decide to walk through, just walk through Karstadt to the exit on the other side of the store, which takes me about fifty metres further towards my destination. Then I walk on. Getting wetter and wetter, but also with a sense of pride. This is what to do in Berlin! And so I walk. And walk...

Eventually, at a complicated crossing of several streets at once, I realise this must be my destination. A large white brick building, obviously a former factory, stands at the crossroads, with an A-frame sign outside. Savvy Berlin! Hurrah! I am here! But where am I exactly?

I walk around the building. No doors. No signs. Okay, a large factory-type door that seems resolutely shut. Then a student turns up who only speaks English. We walk around the building again, together. Eventually, I try the factory door again, and to my surprise, it opens. On to an empty courtyard surrounded by empty project rooms. Hmm. Abandoned stepladders, old desks and cardboard boxes are stacked in some of the rooms. Then I see a light. At the end of the courtyard, one room is actually inhabited. By young people sitting at architects' desks, drawing something or other, and drinking coffee. We stare in at them. They stare back. Then turn away, back to their drawing boards.

To the right of this office is a long flight of stairs descending into a basement. At the bottom of the stairs, on the basement door, is a sign, the same one as on the A-frame outside. But the door is locked and it is dark. There is no-one here at all.

"Well, I guess I'm gonna wait for my tutor," the young girl declares who has accompanied me dubiously on this voyage into the creative heart of Wedding. "Good luck with that," I reply. "I'm off to Karstadt."

She looks puzzled. But I am already on my way. As I return to the mizzly streets, I laugh. This reminds me of all my former lives in Berlin. Not going to things – because you couldn't find them, because they had decided to close early, because the bus had been cancelled, or because you suddenly realised that number 222 was in an entirely other district to number 17, even if they were both on the same street, and your feet hurt too much to walk another two miles –  was a continual feature of my life back then. Maybe doing new things has to be this way. It demands the ability to cope with things not happening as much as of them happening. I can laugh about it now, but back then, I used to cry.

Back at Karstadt, I almost run up the escalator to the gradually quietening second floor where Home Textiles are sold. It is getting late and soon everyone will be going home, but I still have an hour or so. I wander around the bright displays of blankets and throws as darkness falls outside, looking for something to make our home a little cosier now that the Berlin winter is on its way.  Approaching the area where fabrics are measured and cut, I see that the assistant working there is already advising another woman who seems to have endless questions about some fleecy material that misguidedly, she wants to make into a skirt. In typical Berlin fashion, the assistant refuses to flatter her: "Just you wait, it might look nice now, but once you wear it, it'll ride up and everyone will be able to see your knickers." The young woman – blonde, glasses, short-sightedly peering at the material – is not to be put off: "But are you really sure? What if I cut it on the bias?" "Trust me," I cut in cheerfully, "she's right, it'll just stick to everything else you're wearing." "Uh-huh," the young woman nods gloomily, a stock German answer to any remark that they can't decide how to categorise. "Jaja," the assistant agrees with me, "Sie kennen das, nicht?" I do know all about it, from sorry experience, and I also know that no-one here will mind me butting in with a remark. It's Wedding, not the Ku'damm, and one thing I love about these poorer districts in Berlin – like Neukölln – is that anyone can say anything to anyone, just about, as long as it's well meant. 

The assistant, like a busy hedgehog with her spiky haircut and stocky little figure, is now bustling back to the counter to help a young Turkish woman who is anxiously trying to choose some gauze material. "That's wedding nerves!" the assistant chuckles as the young woman dithers between buying two, four or five metres. The assistant isn't German after all, I realise, but maybe Eastern European, maybe even Bulgarian. "I must ring my mum!" the young woman insists, treading from one foot to another and turning round to yell at her boyfriend, "Where are you going? What shall I buy?" Then back to the assistant: "I'll take two metres. No, four of that one and two of the other. No...I'll just take it all. Whatever you've got!" Her Smartphone vibrates. "Mum! I'm buying it!" 

Then another assistant appears – kindly, blonde – and cuts my fabric for me. "It's more than a metre, but you can take it all anyway." Off I go to the check-out, where another Turkish woman puts through the sale, and I depart for the U-Bahn via the basement cafe, where couples are still sitting drinking coffee as the store empties around them. My journey back to Zehlendorf will take a while, and as I sit on the overheated train, passing through Wedding, Tiergarten, Wilmersdorf and eventually Steglitz, my fellow passengers become increasingly middle class, but all just as interesting. At least, they are to me.

Who needs an exhibition, I think, when you've got Karstadt and Berlin? 

Photo: golocal.de

Leopoldplatz - Photo: berlinwedding.de