City of ladies guide: Berlin
feminist city guide to Berlin (/my weekend alone in Berlin) (/Audre Lorde's Berlin)
On my second morning in Berlin I woke up completely hungover. I’ve only felt that hungover a handful of times in my life. I needed to take something, ibuprofen or anything really, so I started looking through the homeowner’s things. A mutual friend I had never met. He was a native Berliner and young-looking in his WhatsApp picture. His apartment was immaculate and stocked with everything to the brim.
He had five extra Listerine bottles under his sink, seven extra toothbrushes, fifteen mini boxes of floss. Everything was stocked in its place and then stowed away behind it was stocked some more as if his apartment was the neighborhood bunker for a future apocalypse. Being such a prepared and responsible tenant, I figured he'd have something for my splitting headache.
First, hoping I wouldn’t have to get up, I looked in the drawer next to his bed. Six giant bottles of lotion. Twenty packs of tissue. A pill bottle. I google-translated the words from German to find out what it was. It was to treat HIV.
I opened the drawer below. Boxes of condoms and bottles of lube arranged neatly with the labels showing like a cereal aisle. I was entering into his private life, drawer by drawer.
I got up and looked in the bathroom cabinets and the hallway drawers only to find rows and rows of face wash and deodorant, a sports store drawer’s fill of running shoes in boxes and tubes of tennis balls. I checked his bedroom closet and found a tall cardboard box full of medicine. Was he a doctor? A drug dealer’s apprentice? More plausibly, OCD? Maybe his mom was a doctor, for this was a lot of different medicine, a hospital closet of it. But out of all things you could stock up on for WIII, medicine did make the most sense.
I sat on the floor and googled the German names on bottles one by one. One for period cramps (what a gentleman), one for IBS, a cream for yeast infections, but nothing for headaches or nausea. Sixteen boxes of emtricitabine, twelve boxes of metronidazole, five boxes of buscopan. I found vomacur, which sounds promising to a native English speaker that doesn’t know any official drug terms. Google said it was for nausea but not to be taken as a sole medication. I put it back, stocked it with the rest of his fears.
There were so many preventative measures and provisions in this apartment, yet everything was neatly tucked away, like lies you tell yourself about your life. Like if Kim Kardashian during her minimalist spaceship home tour opened closets and secret doors in walls only for piles and piles of plastic neon packages to fall out and interrupt the aEsthEtiC. I was amazed each time I opened a new drawer to find it filled with backups of backups. Even next to the medicine, there were seventeen honey-filled plastic bears and eleven strawberry jams.
I looked around his room again. Ikea neutral. Ikea organized. Ikea showroom. Save for the wall space above his computer where an A4 hung with a chart about the make up of a happy life. Health and Happiness Factors, it said above nine boxes. Exercise, Mindfulness, Experience. Nutrition, Healthy relationships, Savoring. Time affluence, Flow experiences, Random acts of kindness. I still hadn’t opened the bedside drawers on the left side of the bed. They were full of more medicine. I began to google again. There were all types of painkillers. Ibuflam seemed the most promising based on sloppy internet skimming. I wished I knew the medical terms. It’s annoying that as Americans we always call everything buy the brand name (Aleve, Kleenex) instead of what it actually is (naproxen sodium, tissues). It’s either really dark and capitalist or some damn good branding. (both?)
Ibuflam can cause driving impairment and drowsiness.
But I needed the day, I couldn’t afford to be drowsy. I was behind on all my self-made writing deadlines. I didn’t have time to be both hungover and unable to control a machine. At that moment, a wave of nausea washed over me and I left my dictionary (phone) on the floor and ran to the bathroom where I kneeled over the toilet. I felt it rise in me, then settle, then rise again.
I threw up four times, a thin, fizzy yellow, like the two whiskey sours I had the night prior, but no sign of the three glasses of Primitivo. My body must have only wanted to rid of the whiskey because it has a refined palette and appreciates Italian wine. I still felt bad but better enough to brush my teeth and put on my coat and shoes. I wanted to eat something. I wasn’t one to drink that much or get hungover often, but I knew people ate brunch when they were hungover, and that was what I wanted. Anyway, I like eating in restaurants alone.
The night prior I had met up with my friend K. from Russia. We first met in Milan, and would catch up every once in a while over drinks. She usually wanted to continue drinking for longer than I did. I almost always stopped it, saying I’m good after one, and sometimes two.
She had since moved to Berlin and was the only person I knew in the city so I asked her to meet me for dinner. We hadn’t seen each other since before the summer, and now it was after summer.
K. sat down across from me after we exchanged greetings. “I have to say something,” she said. “I was mad at you. I’m not anymore, but.” The waiter came to take our order.
Although thrown off by her comment I still followed the internal plan I had made which was to order a bottle of wine. For some reason I wanted to drink more, and I didn’t care about money. Not because I had any more than usual, I just decided not to care.
“When I texted you last to hang out in July,” she said, “You were like, Yeah we’ll see each other in September. Which yeah, maybe if you’re a celebrity. But you’re not. You’re not a celebrity.” Well. It wasn’t an offensive statement in itself, but the way she said it hurt a little.
“Haha. I meant I was away and not coming back until after the summer. I was in California.”
K. rolled her eyes. “Still.”
Noticing the lack of a return ‘haha’ (which is very important to Californians), I then clarified, “I didn’t mean I was busy, I just wasn’t in Europe. I was in California all summer. I got back in September.”
“I’m not mad anymore,” she said.
I tried to explain again that I wasn’t even around to hang out.
“It’s fine.”
We ordered cake for dessert, and they brought us a whole one. I picked up my knife and cut it right down the middle, in perfect halves.
After dinner, she asked if I wanted to go to a cocktail bar she knew.
I got back to my apartment around 1 a.m. and I saw a group of men huddled together in the middle of the street. That particular street was otherwise quiet and residential, no businesses in sight, so we were alone. They had bulging back pockets and puffy black jackets.
As I approached, I saw that they were all standing in someone’s mini garden, facing each other, peeing, each one with bottles of beer in their jacket and pants pockets. They laughed quietly in a way that disturbed me. I passed them, continuing my walk back to the apartment alone. I closed the door behind me and felt strange: to be alone in the middle of the night in a foreign city, and feel safe.
In 1979 in Dahlem’s Thielpark in Berlin, just after her first diagnosis of cancer, Audre Lorde wrote this in her journal: “For the first time I really feel that my writing has a substance and stature that will survive me. There is a hell of a lot more I have to do. And sitting here tonight in this lovely green park in Berlin…I feel I still have enough moxie to do it all.” She was right. And after writing this, she decided to move to Berlin. The Berlin years (1984-1992) proved to be her most creatively fruitful chapter before her life ended too soon. But as she intuited, her work and wisdom certainly survived her.
In the essay “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action”, Lorde said this upon facing an impending death:
“…what I most regretted were my silences. Of what had I ever been afraid? To question or to speak as I believed could have meant pain, or death. But we all hurt in so many different ways, all the time, and pain will either change or end. Death, on the other hand, is the final silence…And of course I am afraid, because the transformation of silence into language and action is an act of self-revelation, and that always seems fraught with danger.
But my daughter, when I told her of our topic and my difficulty with it, said, ‘Tell them about how you're never really a whole person if you remain silent because there's always that one little piece inside you that wants to be spoken out, and if you keep ignoring it, it gets madder and madder and hotter and hotter, and if you don’t speak it out one day it will just up and punch you in the mouth from the inside.’”
Audre Lorde’s Berlin years were made up of revision, of making sure she was saying what she wanted to say with her work and with her life. It was a place of healing and major productivity, a place of evolving and editing, of letting both herself and her writing break and heal into new forms. Lorde’s multiple identities in Berlin (black, lesbian, poet, American, etc.) were reason for her feeling Other in Berlin, but also as one who belonged to the divided city, her years there punctuated by the fall of the Berlin wall (1989) and the reunification of Germany (1990), and throughout dotted with many important relationships. She seemed to find herself at home in the city writing that, “The women who sustained me through that period were Black and white, old and young, lesbian, bisexual, and heterosexual, and we all shared a war against the tyrannies of silence.”
In the same essay she continues,
“And where the words of women are crying to be heard, we must each of us recognize our responsibility to seek those words out, to read them and share them and examine them in their pertinence to our lives. That we not hide behind the mockeries of separations that have been imposed upon us and which so often we accept as our own.
For instance, "I can't possibly teach Black women's writing - their experience is so different from mine." Yet how many years have you spent teaching Plato and Shakespeare and Proust? Or another, "She's a white woman and what could she possibly have to say to me?" Or, "She's a lesbian, what would my husband say, or my chairman?" Or again, "This woman writes of her sons and I have no children." And all the other endless ways in which we rob ourselves of ourselves and each other.”
Lorde gives light to a similar subject in a different essay (“The Uses of Anger”):
Berlin’s insistence on freedom and using your voice resonated with Audre Lorde, subjects she wrote about many times. She believed that the divided parts of our world can come together if we only approach them with creativity: if we see our differences as drafts to revise, just as she saw being done in Berlin.
I’m far from the right person to comment at length on this city’s history and how its character has been shaped, but I do know that even with deep scars Berlin is now a place where many people feel a palpable sense of freedom, just as Audre Lorde did. And now many are spurred by that freedom to become artists and activists, and to enjoy the past work done by artists and activists: the space and safety they created.
On a given day of travel, the visitor will by default support the economy of men.
The City of Ladies exists as a new map to intentionally support historical & modern women in the cities to which we travel by creating a map of female-owned businesses and telling the stories of women.
Where to Eat
Melchiorstraße 6
This absolutely lovely and delicious cafe I stumbled upon. I had a giant meatball that I ate while walking. I still don’t know if it was a meatball. I think it was actually a meatball-shaped meatloaf. Putting the address here because it doesn’t seem to have a name on google (underground Berlin much?): Melchiorstraße 6, Mitte, 10179.
Fine thai dining by Dalad Kambhu as featured in Vogue.
Owner/founder/chef Sarah Durante (who also teaches pie workshops) runs a food truck specializing in American southern food.
Where to drink (coffee):
Owned by Sari Haavisto and her husband.
Humble Coffee (same owner as Humble Pie)
Where to drink (other stuff)
A wine bar dedicated to female winemakers (reminds me of the one in London)
Owned by Nadine Michelberger and her partner. Originally built as a pharmacy in 1860.
Where to stay (where I would’ve stayed if I could’ve)
Yesterday a women’s prison, today a boutique hotel. Owned by Almut Grüntuch-Ernst and her partner.
Boutique hotel owned by Sandra Weinert and her husband.
What to do
Go to She Said Bookstore
Ceramic shelves and famous cinnamon rolls (+ specialty coffee). Owner Emilia von Senger created a bookshop that sells books only by female and queer authors. It’s run by cis females and queer people.
Shop at this cool furniture store owned by Evelyn Lang and her partner.
A tiny glimpse of history etc.
Visit Ravensbrück, which was a predominately female concentration camp just outside of Berlin.
Go to an event at the cultural center Begine created by and for creative women. Right next to Audre Lorde’s house, and also a place she used to frequent herself. Speaking of Audre Lorde,
tour Audre Lorde’s Berlin ← an amazing resource created by Audre Lorde’s friend Dagmar Schultz in whose home Lorde conducted her very last reading (below) “East Berlin 1989” just two months before her death.
Read something by Audre Lorde before you go (You should at least consider reading Silence into Action. It’s only 3 pages!)