Month: April 2007

In 1970, I lived in Sausalito, which is the town that’s at the other end of the Golden Gate Bridge. Despite what the town is now, back then there were still little enclaves of funk, and my apartment, needless to say, was one of them. It was set on a steep hill, so that although it was technically a basement, there was still a nice view of Richardson Bay, the fishing fleet (yes, there was still a fishing fleet), and Mt. Tamalpais.

One person I’d always inevitably get to know would be my mailman, because back then I was inundated with free records, and, less frequently, books. The records would come sometimes in outrageous boxes with promo trinkets in them, the books were always heavy, and so there was always a lot of mail at my house. At one point, my mailman was a jolly young guy with wire-framed glasses, who seemed too smart to be in this for a career — you saw a lot of folks like that working in the Post Office in those days. This one’s name was Jim, and sometimes he’d stop to chat for a moment. Nice guy.

But one day he showed up and announced that he was quitting. “Yup. I’ve saved up enough money and me and my girlfriend are going to do something we’ve always wanted to do: go to Africa.” Now, this was a surprise, especially since Jim was white (and I presumed his girlfriend was, too). There was something of a vogue for middle-class black Americans to visit Africa back then, but you didn’t get many white tourists from the States. It was also a surprise because I’d gotten a book in the mail called Bright Continent, by Susan Blumenthal, an American woman who’d done the same thing and published a guidebook to sub-Saharan Africa. Remember, this was in the days before Lonely Planet and so on — it was 1974 or so, and books like this just didn’t exist. I’d taken a look in it and gotten hooked; it was not only useful as a guide, but it was fun to read.

So I mentioned this to Jim, and he said sure, he’d love to look at it. “Take it with you,” I suggested. “Bring it back when you get back.”

And he did. It remains one of my treasures: beat up, bookmarked with odd bus tickets and harissa-can labels, annotated with corrections and amplifications. I’ve never been to sub-Saharan (or super-Saharan, for that matter) Africa, but I’ve got a book that has.

I’m not sure what happened next, but I lost track of Jim and eventually moved to Texas.

Fast forward.

Last year, I heard from Jim again. He’d found this blog, and was bemoaning the fact that he’d been in Berlin some months earlier, and hadn’t known I was here. He was in Portland, Oregon now, selling real estate and hoping to find something else to do, but loving Oregon and hoping I could visit. Well, that was sort of out of the question, but it sure was good to hear from him, and yes, it was too bad that he hadn’t known I was here. But, I said in my e-mail back to him, I had a friend in Eugene, Oregon, who constantly fantasized about moving to Portland but didn’t seem to be doing anything about it. Not only that, I figured Jim would like this guy and maybe he could kick his butt gently enough so that he’d move and realize his dream while putting a couple of bucks in Jim’s pocket.

And that’s just what happened: Brett and his wife Carole had dinner with Jim one evening when they were in town for some musical event and Jim wound up showing them a place that they wound up buying. Everybody’s happy: Brett’s doing a lot more good work and is much happier being out of the decaying hippie/university surroundings he was in, Carole’s doing fine with her artwork and other innumerable projects, and Jim’s got a couple of people he likes to hang out with.

I like happy endings, myself, but there’s more. To thank me for sending him customers, Jim sent me a gift. It’s a €200 gift certificate redeemable at the restaurant Quarré or the “gourmet restaurant” Lorenz Adlon at the Hotel Adlon. It expires on April 19 and cannot be renewed.

And when I saw it, my heart sank. I knew he meant well, and yet the Adlon pretty much represents a huge hunk of what I don’t like about this city. It’s got a horrible reputation as a place to stay: I once helped an editor for Conde Nast Traveller research a story on Berlin, and he was staying there, went for a walk, and was refused re-entry because he wasn’t wearing a jacket. He finally convinced the doorman to accompany him to the front desk, where they conceded that he was, indeed, a guest. Then there was the young African woman who was fired for wearing her hair in an “unconventional” style, albeit one traditional to her people — and hardly outrageous. The stories go on and on; the high-end travellers I know avoid the place.

The idea that I could get into one of their restaurants without a jacket and tie, too, is ludicrous. That’s not the way I dresss, nor is it the way you have to dress in most restaurants here. One nice thing about Berlin is that, outside of government circles, anyway, it’s very informal. I don’t want to eat where the Bonners eat anyway, so they can have their jackets and ties.

Jim was, understandably, distressed that I was upset by this gift. Why, he said, he’d been to the Adlon and it didn’t seem like that kind of place. And couldn’t I borrow a jacket and tie? (Answer: no. From whom? Nobody I know has one either!)

I’ve tried not thinking about this for a while, but it occurred to me recently that the clock was ticking on this gift, so I took it down the other day and saw the date. I honestly don’t know what to do. I don’t think they check ID when you cash it in, so maybe I should sell it. But I don’t know anyone who’d want to buy it, either. Should I hit Craigslist? Just let it expire quietly in its folder here by my desk? It’s only eight days away.

Some day, I hope, I’ll visit Portland. I also hope I’ll have enough money to take Jim out to dinner and explain the cultural nuance behind all of this. Meanwhile, I’ve got a white elephant with a Quadriga on it making me feel guilty.

The other day, I made a hasty decision to leave the S-Bahn at the Wedding station due to an expired ticket, and figured that, since it was almost a nice day, I’d just walk home. Reaching the former East-West border, I was gratified to see that one of my favorite bits of unknown Berlin was still intact. The last time I was around it, the sidewalk was under construction, and I figured that, being unauthorized, this delightful installation was probably long gone.

But no. And since it’s Easter weekend, I went back to shoot it today.

This little fellow is set in the pavement just beyond this familiar marker:

In fact, that’s why he’s there. He and his brothers and sisters decorate a swath of sidewalk where Chausseestr. meets Liesenstr. — a pretty obscure corner of town occupied by not much:

This patch of earth was a no-man’s land. Now, as all Berliners know, and few outside of town do, there were two Walls. There was the big, thick one with the rounded bits stuck on top, and, some dozens of meters away, there was a thinner one with less fortification. Inbetween was no-man’s land, with a path down its middle. This area was filled with all manner of impediments, with the aim of making an escape over the thin wall, across the bare area, and over the big wall to West Berlin, impossible. As we know, it was pretty effective, and it not only sealed Berliners out, but it sealed the no-man’s land in.

And that’s where the rabbits come in. I remember my first visit to Berlin in 1988, and climbing one of those observation towers at the edge of the Tiergarten, from which I could see the area which had once held Potsdamer Platz, the lonely scrap of a once-grand hotel the sole witness to what had stood there before the War. Inbetween, dust, rocks, scraggly shrubs and weeds, and rabbits. Lots of rabbits.

Given that I saw the Wall as a symbol of terror, as a structure which had added immeasurably to world tensions, as a (literally) concrete representation of the Communist Threat back then, it was unnerving to look over it and see…cute.

“Oh, yeah,” said one of the friends who were showing me around, “they got in there somehow, and since there’s nothing to threaten them, they, well, they did what rabbits do.”

The Berlin Wall. And lots of rabbits. Apparently they were everywhere.

It’s not that there were no threats, though. There were trip-wires attached to automatic firing devices. Hip hop hip trip, KABOOM. One less bunny.

And what about the guard dogs who patrolled with the guards? They must not have had a lot of fun: if they caught a skinny East German trying to defect, they had to give him to the humans. And since Germans love dogs — even the brutal youth who were conscripted for guard duty on this extremely unpopular assignment must have loved dogs, being German — who could begrudge faithful Odin a rabbit now and again?

Mmmmm! Bunny sushi!

And that’s how the rabbits got in the sidewalk. After discovering them for the first time, I mentioned them to a friend who told me that an artist — an American woman, as I remember — had installed them in memory of the rabbits who used to live between the Walls, and who, of course, vanished as soon as the Wall was dismantled. When I first saw them, they were a bright coppery color, but as you can see, they’ve tarnished. There’s no signature, no tag, no nothing. Just rabbits. (And just today, this friend said she had no knowledge of the rabbits or the artist, so my information may not be correct, although it’s what I remember from four or five years ago). I love that this group exists in a place almost nobody has any reason to visit, on the edge of a garbage-strewn lot, on the corner of a street nobody lives on.

Not that Liesenstr. is without interest: maybe nobody lives there, but there are a bunch of graveyards, one of which has a French chapel, a French war memorial for soldiers who died in defense of the “King of Paris,” and the gravestone of Theodor Fontane. I once collected some big pieces of Wall in this graveyard, and still have them in storage in Texas.

And, at the end of Liesenstr., where it stops at Gartenstr., there are two rotten railroad bridges and, recently stripped of its protective coating of vegetation, a rather large remnant of the Wall:

And, at night, rabbits. Maybe.