engl699readingjournal-blog

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ENGL699 Course Reflection

In each of the three texts with which I engaged throughout the semester, I recognized something that I wanted to evoke in my own navigation of the early thesis-writing process. In Christopher Isherwood’s The Berlin Stories I saw a balance in meditation on space, time, and people, where Isherwood’s “I” can very much be found as a character who moves through and interacts with his surroundings. In Isherwood’s writing I found a sort of permission to assert that “I” myself, a sense that it was alright to partially make my thesis a study on myself as a character in the same way that “nobody was more fascinated by Christopher Isherwood than Christopher Isherwood.” I felt weird about that at first; I was a nobody, did it seem self-important to reflect on a city with myself at the center in a way that many already have? But in reading Isherwood, in talking with Professor Casey, I realized it was okay to be present on the page, to be engaged and engaging, to “take myself seriously as a writer” – words from Professor Casey about something that seems so simple, but for me I realized it really wasn’t. I wasn’t really taking myself seriously as a writer in the sense that I put up defense mechanisms in my rendering of difficult topics: sarcasm, my capitalization crutch, my tendency to over-assert my opinions and judgments into the text when it suffices to step back and allow myself and my thoughts to become evident simply by the way in which these spaces, ideas, and people filter through me and onto the page. The revision process has been extremely valuable in the sense that, as Professor Casey mentioned (in a nutshell), once I remove that layer of pre-determined judgment that sort of makes me over-present or steering the reader too much in a desired direction, there I actually am. It’s a variation on an old theme, but in revision I always re-discover the art of achieving much more by saying much less, or by altering phrasing, order, emphasis, subtle things.

In the same way that Isherwood’s The Berlin Stories gave me the permission to use “I,” Joseph Roth’s The Hotel Years revealed to me a brilliant way in which to engage with space while still being present as an observer who passes through that space (while the space also passes through you – said by Professor Casey during a conversation). My burgeoning thesis argument is essentially that Berlin’s history defines its space in that every square meter of that city is loaded with the past. In Berlin, one cannot exist in the present without “the past punching through” at all times, thanks both to the city’s history and its tendency toward radical politically-charged (often queer, or queered) social movements that push back against capitalist and neoliberal influences over the usage of “burdened” (to use urban sociologist Claire Colomb’s term) and spaces. The liminality and transience of Berlin have therefore informed its attractiveness to people whose identities – as queer people, as expatriates – parallel the city itself. At this point we have a “chicken or egg” sort of conversation: did the space of the city inform and attract the people first, or did the city’s people shape the city? Or both? Roth’s meditations on spaces in collapsed post-World-War-One empires, where “hyphenated” and hybrid spaces are suddenly shifted in some way although the people for the moment remain the same, has greatly influenced my own meditations on space and my determining where I intervene – in the space, in the narrative, in the community. Sometimes, again, stripping away that first layer of your voice (the anger written-out, the verbose frustration, whatever it is) in revision reveals an even purer version of yourself situated within the narrative. Josh Weiner’s Berlin Notebook and his ongoing dialogues with both the city and its people achieved much the same impression for me. Placing yourself into a narrative about space and other people and time requires striking a balance, one that I have still to achieve and may never do perfectly, but I am definitely working toward it in the revision process.

Moving forward, I intend to continue revising and shuffling sub-sections between or within chapters, poring over every word and sentence and paragraph to ensure that every stylistic or formal choice I make is a clear and evident result of the argument I pose in my thesis. The hybrid nature of my thesis – a creative nonfictional personal narrative that nevertheless must meet the criteria for an academically and theoretically-grounded work – is the next big thing for me to tackle in the coming months, although I think through Professor Casey and I’s conversations we have achieved a decent amount of that road-mapping already. In our final conversation of the semester, Dr. Baer and I agreed that endnotes or footnotes elaborating upon the theoretical background I’m working with would be the best way to theoretically ground my thesis without ripping the reader out of the narrative. I feel as though, thanks to the work we’ve accomplished this semester, going back and inserting that theory will have been made easier because the places in which theory comes into play have already been pulled forth. I’m not saying it will be a piece of cake at all, but I feel like the way in which we structured the independent study was conducive to my constant looking back at my writing choices and thinking: “Okay, how does this contribute to my overarching goal in writing all of this?” In constantly asking and answering that question, I have not only pulled out several overarching themes and determined several narrative undercurrents (all of which I still need to work on, but I feel very positively about where I am), I have come so much closer to finally putting my thesis into the exact words I want. At the epicenter of all these little ley lines is my thesis.

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Revision:

Bringing Bowie more to the forefront of this chapter was a priority of mine in the revision process. During my first round of writing, I still hadn’t really processed the way I felt when I learned that one of my heroes was dead, nor did I know how to put it into words. It seemed strange to write so intimately about someone I wasn’t personally close with, yet had influenced me so greatly. As a young trans kid (and I mean before I even realized this about myself – at age ten, wondering why I was so compelled by how Queen looked in the 1970s but wasn’t attracted to them, what did it mean that I wanted to be them?), looking for examples of men who somehow existed outside of the normative male mold my older brothers were comfortably growing into. I became aware of RuPaul and Divine, I watched drag queens and cross-dressers on trashy-ass talk shows throughout middle school, I joined rock-music-fan message boards as an eleven-year-old and discovered Bowie. I had heard his music, but I hadn’t seen much of him. It took me many years to realize that these men fascinated me because they were the types of men I wanted to be. Masculinity was not compulsory, conformity to gender norms could be opted out of, I became aware of the word androgyny. Bowie was a part of my own path to understanding what the hell was going on with me, he was the common interest that brought some of my closest friends and me together, I don’t know what I would have been if it hadn’t been for my exposure to Bowie & Co as a kid. I’m still not convinced that in my revision I’ve really hit on that cylinder the way I want to, or at all, but I think I’ve brought it out a little more.

One thing glaringly missing from this revision is my section on shattered empires, hyphenation, the section where I wanted to get more into the journey into Austria to see Iggy Pop perform. This section is very much still a part of this chapter and hasn’t been eliminated, but I found myself revisiting it again and again in the revision process and not knowing how to navigate it. I know what I need to do with it – especially regarding tone, what I choose to leave in and what I take out, making sure readers are firmly rooted in some kind of setting or place (or non-place) before I go on. The way it is currently written, I think it’s entirely too inundated with me being a sort of hypercritical, frenetic, messy first-drafter. I want to walk really far away from it for a while and come back and disembowel it and rewrite the entire thing from scratch. I kept going back through it, knowing where to start but still trying to figure out where to start, and kept saying: I don’t like any of this. I like the core points I’m making in many areas, and those will go on to be the skeleton for what I continue to work on, but I think a lot of this section will be scrapped entirely and rewritten. Even if I write about the same shit, it has to be rewritten, not tweaked. I like the points, don’t like much re: how I went about getting to the points.

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Serafin came to Austria or Bavaria from Spain in the 1970s and had worked in a factory. He spoke German with a distinctly southern German dialect; the Spanish accent added a comical layer to the greetings he threw around at every shift and volunteer meeting: Grüß Gott when he entered, Servus when he left. He could not be considered bald, necessarily, because a vaporous atmosphere of hair, or the suggestion of hair, surrounded his entirely-visible scalp, like dandelion puffs. His eyebrows were penciled-in and his lashes caked in mascara, his cheeks and lips rouged. When we worked shifts together I found myself thinking of Aschenbach in Tod in Venedig, watching the old man with wooden teeth flirt brazenly with the youths aboard the vaporetto with undisguised disgust. Later, of course, Aschenbach would himself become this man in his pursuit of Tadzio through the evil-smelling choleric streets, across the medieval bridges, swept along by the sirocco winds to his inevitable death in a beach chair. What did that make me, then?

The museum had no air conditioning. We often left the door propped open to the quiet foot and vehicle traffic of Lützowstraße, as well as the doors to the outdoor café seating in a back garden shared with several new apartment buildings. The heat wave had hit Berlin with great gusto by the beginning of August and our latest exhibition, Homosexualität_en, had been well underway since the end of June. After a month of complete quiet in the exhibition space while the new displays were being constructed, our partnership endeavor with the Deutsches Historisches Museum had been kicked off with a tour exclusive to staff, administration, and friends of the SM and the DHM alike, along with the ceremonial cuttings of three different cakes in one afternoon: one for the SM exhibition itself, one for the SM’s partnership with the DHM, one for the SM’s partnership with the Pink Pillow Project, which promoted LGBTQIA+ friendly tourism. Although no food was usually allowed in the exhibition, it seemed senseless to serve us all heaps of cake and then tell us we couldn’t bring along on the walkthrough with us, so I took my first tour of what I would soon get to know as my personal hell with a mountain of yellow cake piled with brightly-colored fondant testing the physical limits of my flimsy paper plate. One room, the most dimly-lit, would end up being my dungeon for the duration of my time in Berlin, because my position as Aufsicht translated to “make sure people don’t touch the shit,” and the shit that was especially not-to-be-touched was in the darkroom. In the corner, a glass dildo on a lit pedestal about half my height that I would be constantly telling people they could not touch or pick up; on the other side of the room, a modified bunk bed with the top bunk flipped upside-down that I would be constantly telling people they could not sit on.

The heat wave made the dildo-room feel like a coffin. It had no windows and therefore no cross-breeze, it smelled of whoever was passing through and wearing deodorant on any given day, and it had no WiFi. I spent four hours at a time perched on a chair next to the dildo pedestal, reading a book with what light I did have. Serafin flitted in and out of the rooms, aerating himself with a starchy paper fan that he twirled between his fingers. He did not know that I spoke German and addressed me in English, always exclaiming that he kept finding me in the darkest and most hard-to-access corners. I triangulated between three chairs in the museum and went nowhere else, so this must have been a mythological nocturnal me he was constructing.

Once, during an especially quiet shift we shared, he referenced me to another staff member (in German) using “she,” quickly switching back over to “he.” This happened about five times over the course of an hour before I finally asked him, in German, why he kept doing that. The first response was one of shock; he’d had no idea I spoke German at all. Doch. We weren’t going to change the subject here, though. Why do you keep doing that – calling me sie and then switching to er?

He snapped the fan open, flustered, began beating away at his face with it, as ineffective as a moth’s wing. He reiterated that he didn’t know I spoke German. Doch. Why do you keep calling me sie?

I think it is your face.

My face?

Yes! It is very – you know what I mean?

No, I don’t.

Like David Bowie.

Androgynous?

Yes! He snaps the fan closed and points at me with it. Like both a man and a woman at once.

Well, I’m not a man and a woman and once. I’m a man.

But you are trans, oder?

This bothers me deeply. When I had applied to work at the SM, I had never indicated my status as a trans person. I indicated that I had done extensive queer leadership work on campus, that I had a finger in pretty much every queer pie in the DC Metro area, that my scholarship project for the Gilman involved documenting the experience of being queer and abroad, but I never once mentioned that I was specifically trans. I don’t know who told you that, I ventured, but they were wrong. They assumed that I was.

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A Dazed article comes across your Facebook newsfeed: “Photo Gallery Captures Berlin’s Booming Underground Queer Scene.” The photo gallery comprises 700 photos of thin cis white gays with shaved heads and stick-and-poke tattoos, dancing in runners and jockstraps. "In Berlin you can always expect the underground to be at the vanguard of European nightlife, especially in the queer community.” Some of the gays have on chest harnesses. No one has ever worn fetish gear before the men in these photos have. “This photo gallery of 8,000 identical thin cis white gays with shaved heads and stick-and-pokes and chest harnesses on Special K, dancing in an abandoned East Berlin S-Bahn station, wearing only runners and jockstraps, shows you just how dynamic the Berlin party scene is. Here you see four of them making out as a form of rebellion. Here you see six leather daddies tag-teaming a seventh leather daddy in a sling.” Your acquaintance, a permanent fixture in the DC club scene who doesn’t care about what pronouns you use in reference to him because he has smashed the gender binary by wearing lipstick, has shared the link, and that’s why you see it. “So who’s going to Berlin with me?” he asks. Vice has done it! Dazed has done it! It has captured the spirit of big-middle-finger queerness! It is thin, it is white, it got into Berghain, it is being penetrated at the glory-hole-wall.

“Queer” is a verb now, an action, something done unto, a process. It has been for some time. Spaces are queered, revolutions are queered, ideologies (or lack thereof) are queered, bodies are queered. It is also a gerund, implying a sort of peristalsis that indicates an ongoing undertaking. It is a participle adjective, implying that the done-unto noun has arrived at queer. It has been queered. Who is doing the queering? How is the queering being done? When has something been queered? Passive voice. In Berlin it often feels like a sticker slapped onto an electrical box by a bicyclist who pedals on without looking back. To queer is an infinitive applied to infinite done-untos, it is punk, to queer is a home-run sales pitch, to queer is a tourist attraction. A queered space – a museum, a bar, a club, a party, a café – can be queered in the same way that you can wake up one day and decide to go around telling people you’re an entrepreneur or a venture capitalist. Or a communist, or an opportunist, or a classical violinist. You repeat it until you’re convinced you’re understood, you’re believed. There is nothing different about you except that you are now this thing because you said you were. So let it be written, so it shall be queered.

This is the problem with many spaces in Berlin. Perhaps a fundamental difference in understanding of language is the core issue here, that many native-German-speaking peoples’ understanding of queer goes as far as “not gay as in happy but queer as in fuck you,” that queer sounds better than gay now because queer is the gritty anti-pride parade in Kreuzberg and gay is the ungainly lurching caravan of commercial excess that slogs down the Kurfürstendamm while blotto tourist twinks in sparkling fairy wings and assless underwear lie passed-out on the sidewalk. Christopher Street Day on the Kurfürstendamm. Me late for my shift at the Schwules Museum because I gave up on waiting for a bus from Zoo Station and sprinted to Lützowstraße, charging straight through the parade the twink in assless underwear and fairy wings having a pils dumped over him. A conspicuously sanitized funeral procession for politicized radical queer anything that plods past Nollendorfplatz and heads for the Siegessäule, a giant memorial penis a straight shot down the Straße des 17. Juni from the Brandenburger Tor, where the whole affair finally comes to an end. Straight through the Tiergarten, where you can still spot the cruisers strolling nude between the trees from the windows of a bus. Wraiths of cigarette smoke from the patrons of the Eldorado curl up into the sweltering blue sky as the apparitions of bygone Berlin look on, pink triangles, shaved heads, rough-hewn tattoos. Are they asking if this is what they were sent to Sachsenhausen for, to Dachau?

Over aluminum containers packed with basmati rice and Vietnamese curry, Tanno and I sat on the floor of the dining room and flipped through an issue of Siegessäule magazine, probably picked up from the counter at Silver Future, a dive we frequented on Weserstraße “for Kings and Queens and Criminal Queers.” Siegessäule is a monthly report on what all of the same people are up to: where is Alexander Geist performing tonight and which cultural costume will they be appropriating this time? Yony Leyser is making a new film. Any updates since we last spoke with him four weeks ago? Let’s see! Oh, look, he’s making a new documentary about what makes queer punk, or what makes punk queer, in which he interviews the same group of people he interviewed for his Burroughs documentary. Peaches was spotted going into the bathroom at veganz. Mika Risiko was at Berghain again, sauntering across the steaming pulsing dance floor in a rather aggressive faux-fur coat. “WE ARE QUEER BERLIN,” its audacious slogan, adorned the cover (are we?), as did the artwork of Stefan Fähler, a Berlin-based artist whose obsession with gaping mouths, anuses, staticky-surrealism-meets-confetti-butt-plug-themed-pop-art, made him a perennial figure in the scenesterkreis. He did artwork for all of GEGEN’s promotional materials, for Ficken 3000’s ICKY party. Wherever a phallus was needed, Stefan was summoned to render it in hues of in-your-face pink and radioactive green, erupting neon yellow and blue polka dots. Everything he drew, from dildos to tits, had a blood-red yelling mouth. Presumably yelling that we were queer Berlin. At the Schwules Museum I would perch on the stool at the cash register and flip through the latest issue, which was stacked alongside Exberliner and other Denglisch publications intended for the consumption of German-speakers and English-speakers alike, tourists or permanent fixtures of the city who could somehow navigate the bureaucracy without needing to speak any German. Every month the same cast of characters paraded across the pages: this one DJ’ing at Schokoladen, that one premiering a five-minute film at Villa Neukölln, another one grabbing a drink at Gelegenheiten. Some of my friends’ bands and art installations made it into the “shit you might be interested in doing instead if you can’t catch Mika slinking through Berghain this weekend, if you make it into Berghain at all” – Tanno’s band performing at Urban Spree, Nika’s show in Kreuzberg. They had made it to the fringe of the scenesterkreis.

I flipped to the back of Siegessäule, which included a large map of the city with an old-fashioned coordinate system and corresponding key below. Each queer establishment in the city was sub-divided into categories: bars, clubs, museums and cultural spaces, bath houses, darkrooms, sex clubs, cafés. I was struck upon realizing for the first time that many of the nightlife spaces were annotated with the Mars symbol, the Venus symbol, or both – demarcating which spaces were strictly male, which were strictly female, and which were open to both. I pointed this out to Tanno, who had also never noticed this: “I don’t even look at this part of the magazine. I flip through it and then just leave it on a table somewhere.” I reached into my bag and pulled out a pen and proceeded to circle each establishment that allowed only men; I marked the establishments that allowed only women with asterisks and underlined the ones that claimed to allow both. Most importantly, I squiggly-underlined the ones that claimed to allow both, but where I had personally felt uncomfortable or had heard from non-cis-male friends was an unwelcome space (Fran, a Canadian artist who had arrived in Berlin around the same time I did and returned to Canada earlier this year, told me that apparently Ficken’s resident rock-out-with-your-cock-out regular who sat at a corner booth stroking his erect cock the entire night was paid to do so in order to ward off unwanted visitors to the bar.

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Mateja was from Nürnberg and had been scouted as a model in her mid-teens. Like most slim male models with androgynous faces and slender figures, her entire career had been from the very beginning sculpted by her agency as informed by the archetypes she could already be placed into, prefabricated and predestined, as laid out for her as the clothing items themselves. She had done H&M campaigns in effete floral blouses, clad in bell-bottom pants and donning Quentin-Crisp-esque scarves and broad-brimmed hats, round sunglasses, ethereal photoshoots standing in meadows, wreathed in lavender. Tresses intertwined with leaves and open shirts slipping off of pale bony shoulders, a glamorous pastoral in which a certain suspended belief in the existence of masculinity was engineered by an industry presently dominated by Andreja Pejić pre-transition. At the height of Mateja’s career, the industry had only just realized that androgyny was lucrative, apparently, because even before I had met her I knew her. Pictures of her crossed my Tumblr dashboard from time to time. She blended in with the other thousands of models being styled exactly as she was, but she was there nonetheless, a part of this bizarre vision someone was curating, the ultra-wispy waifish male model clothed in these strange Little Lord Fauntleroy outfits as if he had himself been dressed by some Victorian nanny, given dissolute-1920s-schoolboy floppy haircuts. At one point I felt like a day couldn’t pass by without me seeing someone reblog a picture of one of these models in a sheer button down that showcased his ribs and collarbones, one blue eye peeking at the camera because the other was covered by the hair flop, a boater hat perched on top of that, cultivating the kind of gossamer construct Thomas Mann might have chased through Venice in a 1913 fantasy. Spindly hands, hollow cheeks, emphasized undereye circles that reiterated the eternal toxic marriage between the anemic image and the marketable queer one. The only way to be androgynous: rail thin, white as Christmas in Finland, consumptive. Models were scouted, packaged this way, then disposed of once they had aged out of the fey aesthetic. Something about seeing them years later on Instagram, sloppy, weird, greasy, chainsmoking, partying, was satisfying, the shedding of the artificial skin and the assumption of the unmarketable identity, the inundation of the Instagram account with memes instead of photoshoot outtakes, the gaining of weight and the growing of patchy beards, the eschewing of the sheer blouse in favor of kitschy t-shirts with stock photos of European-Union-themed nail art silkscreened across the front. High-waters paired with dirty running shoes. If Thomas Mann had seen them all now he may never have written Der Tod in Venedig. This is what his Tadzio would become? A smelly Prenzlauer Berg hipster in Dahmer glasses? Good.

Mateja was of a slightly different variety of industry pariahs, though. Once she left her representing agency, she grew her hair out, started wearing PVC skirts over black leotards, changed her name, started her own modeling agency for trans, genderqueer, nonbinary, and otherwise non-cisgender people. That was how we met. “The agency is called Das Modell,” she said as we sat at Südblock, casually inhaling an entire Flammkuchen while we talked about her work. “With two L’s. You know, like a concept, a theory, not like a person. And das, because it’s neutrisch. So is das Model, but the meanings are not quite the same.” I thought about the song by Kraftwerk and its rudimentary lyrics – “she is a model and she’s looking good / I’d like to take her home, that’s understood” – and how I had seen the German title of that song spelled both ways, with and without the extra L at the end. Of course, obsessed with all things robotic and scientific as they were, it would have made sense if the same wordplay had been intended there. “I just got sick of many things in this mainstream fashion industry,” she went on. “I left this agency because I told them I was not a male and they didn’t know what to do about that. They wanted to make me like Andreja, but I wasn’t like her. She knew she was a woman for many years, you know. She just didn’t come out because she knew she could make more money as a male model who looked like a woman than she could doing the same thing but identifying as a woman. Her whole career was relying on this one difference. I told them I was not this. They had no use for me. So I started my own agency.”

We had done a few photoshoots, all of which involved me in all black with my silver-blond hair, gaunt face, and crooked left ear front-and-center. I was not shaping up to be a Tadzio. I was 5’6”, my personal brand of androgyny was more evocative of clear and present illness than of foppish wastrel, my head was the size of a jovian planet, I had tattoos that I didn’t feel like showing, I wore drapey clothing that managed to convey the suggestion that I had a body somewhere without actually having to show it. My hair, which had held the same side-part for my entire life, would not do anything except lay exactly the way it wanted to. Mateja had been putting me in all-black turtlenecks for our shoots because they apparently emphasized my jawline. I hated turtlenecks enthusiastically, but I liked Mateja, so I endured. By the time we were halfway through one of our photoshoots, a roll of film in an empty room at the Neue Schule für Fotografie, filled with cracked mirrors that refracted the late-afternoon sunlight across the distinctly DDR parquet flooring, I was ready to shave my hair off and go around for the next months wearing a scarf-wig, Little Edie in Grey Gardens style, clad in a monk’s robe. I had seen myself standing in every unflattering angle I could possibly achieve in every cracked mirror that shot beams of Minority Report lighting across my face and washed out my nose. I sat on a dinosaur of a desk that had been pushed to the wall while Mateja changed a film roll, squinting out at the sunset over a particularly dingy part of Mitte. I had shown up to the photoshoot with only the clothes I was wearing, an attempt to avoid the bringing-up of a tight black turtleneck. The shirt I had chosen had a band collar and was loose. She did not express disapproval of it, but it was most likely not what she would have chosen, either.

“I think what we concentrate on the most is your face and your hands,” Mateja said. She began to take photos of me as I sat on the desk. “These are your best features.” My hands? They were German Expressionist monstrosities disproportionate to the rest of my body, but I did like them. My face, though? At times I was at peace with it, at other times I wanted to take my fingernails and gore it into unrecognizability. I had strong bone structure because I was sick, not because I was effortlessly beautiful like the Tadzios. None of this would have been interesting to Mateja, who simply commented on how good I was at sitting still and catching the best light with the slightest inclinations of my head. I was just trying to hide that damn ear.

Later that summer, Mateja asked me if I was interested in doing a group photo series for a fashion publication called Achtung, shot by a Köln-based photographer named Eva, centered around Mateja’s fashion endeavor and showcasing some of the agency’s talent. As it happened, the photoshoot was to be the day Sam and I left Berlin for our overnight through-the-whole-Czech-Republic odyssey to Vienna. “Eva says she wants to do some shots of us individually, then as groups, just in the apartment, then at night to go out and photograph us at some bars,” Mateja said. “I explained to her and the magazine what we expected of pronouns, proper language, things like this. They told us to bring several pieces of clothing that we feel the most comfortable in, our favorite things to wear.” I agreed to the daytime photoshoot, noting that I would not make the evening half of the project because I had a bus to catch with a friend.

It was July and a massive heat-wave was preparing to seize all of Germany by the throat and hold it fast all the way until the end of August. It was already smoldering in Bavaria and Austria, but had not yet crept up to Berlin. I could still comfortably spend a day outdoors in black shitkicker Docs, heavy black knee-socks, black schoolboy shorts, a white collared button-down, a crust punk neckerchief, and a black blazer with the lapels covered in buttons and brooches, inspired by Rik Mayall’s moody anarchist character from The Young Ones. In Berlin nobody looks twice if you wear the same outfit for a month. It felt only right that this should be the ensemble I brought along.

I think I was the most difficult to style. In attendance were Mateja, a young transwoman from München named Kim, Mateja’s genderqueer roommate whose name I don’t remember, a model and fashion designer named Leni with a look and backstory very similar to Mateja’s, and myself. The two stylists from the magazine looked at what I was wearing, evaluated my face, and made an executive decision: turtlenecks. Put him in turtlenecks. I wanted to scream. My foray into modeling was shaping up to be one backless infinite wardrobe filled with Hermès turtlenecks. “These make your face look incredible,” said the stylists to me in German. “Much more masculine jawline.” I didn’t want a masculine jawline. “Was für ein Gesicht,” Eva said as she snapped photos.

Exactly none of the clothes I was put into were clothes I would wear in any setting ever. Giant 1970s flared pants with platform-heel boots and turtlenecks, awful leather pants and Gucci jean jackets and turtlenecks, everything shot from the front to avoid acknowledging that Sam and I had cut my hair the night before with what could have been a chainsaw and a cheese knife, the crooked ear front-and-center again. I wanted to demand to know why my own clothes didn’t suffice. No, it wasn’t sleek, but neither was punk, neither was queer. I thought about the crust punks who hung out around Warschauer Straße with their dogs and their witty cardboard signs, about the squatters who tromped around Kreuzberg in their boots and bandannas. Did the people from this magazine know nothing about this?

After the main shoot began wrapping up, I got back into my clothes while Mateja and everyone else suited up for their night out, choosing other clothes to bring along for wardrobe changes. Mateja’s first outfit was a slim-cut suit with no shirt underneath, and Leni put on a matching ensemble. Together they put on music and danced while Eva snapped photos, them waiting for it to get dark enough for phase two, me waiting for the right time to leave. They moved like cats, tossing their hair about and embracing each other. I stood to the side, watching and holding my backpack which held enough CLIF bars to last Sam and I through our entire Austrian trek in the coming 36 hours. At some point Eva noticed me, my buttons, my boots, and called me over to snap a picture of me, just standing there, still holding my backpack, in front of this wall, dance music still blaring. Somewhere out there that picture exists. Months later, when Mateja met up with me to give me a hard copy of the magazine, she sighed and simply said, “I don’t know if I’m happy with this series. Eva did very well shooting us, but I think the magazine missed the point.”

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notes on revisions for second chapter:

rethink things that you decide not to mention because you don’t think they are important – sometimes you know things so well that you don’t consider how relevant they are to what you’re trying to accomplish in writing this, not until you bring them up to someone who has never heard them.

as Roth does, try to begin these sub-sections with more meditations on space. the strange monument in the IKEA parking lot, the tattoo parlor, ground the reader in these places before necessarily placing yourself in them

transitioning from one chapter to another: revisit earlier themes and ideas from previous section, make sure that there are threads running through the narrative that can be traced but don’t bang people over the head with stuff (like cactuses). do less in some places, people will get it

Iggy and Bowie. let your readers know what they were doing in Berlin, why it’s relevant to what you’re writing. bring Bowiemas more to the forefront of this narrative. you saw it fit to just kind of leave it fragmented because you took that death pretty hard but better to put it into works, I think

Iggy Pop show in the middle of the mountains where Sam and I had to sit through an entire day’s worth of shows we were indifferent towards until we finally got to see Iggy, in the middle of freakin Austria

Ruhrgebiet - how does place pass through you and how do you pass through place? don’t just rail on these spaces, develop this into discourse that has narrative relevance in its discussion of space. I think this would be the best time to bring up the provincial nature of the people Audre Lorde spoke with when introducing the “Afro-Deutsch” concept. bring in your own family and your idea of the Prussian Empire falling not one time but four times in your family: the actual fall or the empire, the DDR, the escape from Mecklenburg, the marriage of grandmother and great-aunt with men of decidedly non-Prussian lineage.

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many of my notes on The Hotel Years were hand-written or in-text annotations, but here are the most notable “red threads” I have seen and which really struck chords with me especially in the framework of my own project

most prominently the complete collapse of Europe as it was once known post-WWI. not only was the geographical landscape changed in terms of country names, the names of cities and countries and empires, but the political landscape shifted drastically. even as a German scholar I sometimes don’t consider the fact that it was not only the German Empire that fell as a result of the war’s end, but Austria-Hungary and later the Ottoman Empire as well. Roth’s and consequently my own interest in Austria-Hungary led me to pay the closest attention to where things are hyphenated, where hyphens once existed but no longer do. how does that change the people, who have not moved? people who were once hyphenated but are not, people who were once not hyphenated but now are, this complete rupture in Europe – the same one that T.S. Eliot needed to write a 434-line poem about – spreads from London to the far reaches of Galicia, where peasants whose lives should otherwise not feel any different at all in the grander schemes of kaisers and archdukes suddenly must choose a national identity over a regional or ethnic one, all because of shifting borders and greedy motherfuckers. 

the post-WWII separation of Germany (and by extension, of course, of Berlin) is not unlike this post-WWI rupture, unsurprisingly, considering that the first world war led to the second one. the holocaust sought to abolish the hyphenated identity altogether, failed to do so but took a sizable chunk of the fucking European population shamelessly. the inherent hybridity of the hyphen is something that I think lends itself well to a study of Berlin in the 1970s as well, when at this time East Berliners and West Berliners really had established their separate identities, ideologies, preferences, lifestyles. at this time a pronounced expatriate subculture of punks, squatters, queers, and artists was thriving, new identities being forged that weren’t ones assigned by a government or a monarchy. Afro-Deutsch. thus spake Audre Lorde and suddenly thousands of young Black German women had an identity with which to identify themselves. the hyphen is not dead, but it has been repurposed. 

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for reference: the Gedenktafel near the Tempelhof IKEA as it must have looked in 2011, found on this Flickr account, versus the way it looked when I saw it in early 2015

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The first time I sat down and ate what still very few people would consider to be a “full meal” was at an IKEA on the Sachsendamm in Tempelhof. It had been a full three days since I had arrived at my apartment, and until then I’d been eating leftover complimentary bagels from Aerorflot and half-stale rolls from the discount Aldi. I had already enrolled as a student at the Frei-Universität Berlin, I had already registered my new address of residence at the Bürgeramt Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf, but I had not eaten a full meal. Priorities.

Like most IKEAs do, this one rose out up out of a barren wasteland dominated by enormous furniture, lifestyle, homeware, and home-improvement stores like Bauhaus and Möbel-Kraft, all overlooking a particularly dismal snarl of highways that convened at this one central point, seemed to tumble over one another like clashing rattlesnakes, then went on in their differing but equally cheerless ways toward the suburbs. Out to Brandenburg, where I had really only set foot when I went in and out of Schönefeld Airpot and when I went on a class field trip to KZ Sachsenhausen in Oranienburg. The closest S-Bahn station was Südkreuz; like Westkreuz and Ostkreuz it was a frontier station where nothing substantial actually seemed to exist. It was a point on the Ringbahn where nobody got off to go home, but rather to transfer lines or catch a bus or go to IKEA. What could have been Nordkreuz is actually S-Bahnhof Gesundbrunnen, translating to something like the fountain of health or even the fountain of youth. Not only an unasked-for disruption in an otherwise orderly method of demarcating the four frontiers of the city proper, but a lie as well. I never felt healthy or youthful on the Ringbahn, only this sense of the unceasing and the all-consuming like two nestled ourobori eating themselves in opposite directions. The stops on the Ringbahn are more spaced out than the stops on the U-Bahn, so if you weren’t careful and didn’t pay attention to when your stop was coming up you were suddenly at Messe Nord, Westend, hurtling toward Jungfernheide and being harassed with advertisements for family vacations to the middle of the woods. All because you fell asleep with your face in your hands or got too lost in a single Joanna Newsom song. Now your dumb ass has to go back in the opposite direction. That’s an extra thirty minutes at least, eaten by the Ringbahn, vanished, nothing to show for it. There was no non-stupid way to explain away having your time swallowed by the Ringbahn.

The IKEA also overlooked train tracks that rumbled into Südkreuz from points south, a vast expanse of land that featured allotment gardens and a large cemetery, and of course its own massive parking lot over which a series of massive colorful flags flapped invitingly under a dishwater-colored windy March sky. Since there is no convenient way to get to any IKEA via public transportation, much less leave the IKEA with all the shit you bought, I arrived on foot from Südkreuz after sprinting across what felt like five fatally busy thoroughfares and reaching that life-after-people parking lot, half-empty perhaps because it was the middle of a weekday in March, perhaps because this was Berlin and what percentage of people even had a car? Did this IKEA even want people to shop there? To my right, at the furthest corner of the parking lot, was a criminally ugly stone structure about my height, presented to whoever was willing to stop and notice like a middle-schooler’s tri-fold science fair board. The black letters looked as if they had been nailed in by a drunken gas-station attendant, poorly-spaced and crooked, half were missing with only context and an outline of the lost letter remaining to fill in the full meaning. From left to right, the panels of this strange triptych declared:

Von unseren befragten Werkangehörigen waren folgende Verluste durch den letzten Krieg zu verzeichnen

Todesopfer: 1[??]

Körperbeschädigte: 62

Ausgebombte: 280

Umsiedler: 11

Vermisste: 61

The middle panel, bearing larger letters, admonishing you:

Die Tote  es  o  enkrieges ma  en u s!  

And lastly, the right panel, reading like a distant relative’s illegible comment on your politically-charged Facebook status:

Darumkäm fem tuns für den Frieden

The mere brutal presence of this forgotten landmark in an IKEA parking lot was reason enough to make anybody uncomfortable; on March 12th, 2015, I photographed it and posted the photo on Instagram with the caption: “a war memorial in the, uh, IKEA parking lot.” After some research I found a photo of the same monument just four years before, in much better condition – all letters present, all words spaced reasonably. Berlin is not a city that falls easily to the elements, it is built to withstand Baltic cold, Prussian cold. Wind did not blow those letters off and out of alignment. Will someone have restored it by the time I’m in Berlin again? I won’t know unless I go out of my way to check. Berlin I intend to visit again, the IKEA in Tempelhof not so much. Ultimately I had a shopping list to attend to and could not spend the entire day pondering this wretched memorial rock jammed into the IKEA parking lot pavement. Capitalism was calling and my lips were turning blue. I had a house to turn into a home.

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as a person who occupies themselves with Germanophone literatures and the history of the German-speaking world, I have to admit that in my consideration of Germanic Studies I neglect Austria, Switzerland, and Luxembourg quite a bit. my mind at this point has shrunk Germany down to Berlin because it’s the only city I really care to look closely at. that’s a really strange statement coming from a Germanic Studies scholar, but it’s true - I spent had my time with family in Baden-Württemberg and was bored to tears, my impression of Frankfurt am Main involved a lot of Hugo Boss suits and sports cars, as soon as I entered Köln I was ready to leave, Trier was miserable, Koblenz felt like 700 other small cities I had already been to, Hannover could have been literally anywhere, the most notable thing about Bremen was that I had a vegetarian cheeseburger at a McDonalds there, Bielefeld doesn’t even exist in the eyes of the general German population. I have reduced my perception of Germany to Berlin because I don’t care about any of those other places. maybe it’s because Berlin is where my friends are – my family members are elsewhere in Germany but I have met them and we probably silently agreed that we didn’t like each other because no one seems to be in a hurry to meet again. the only other cities I could see myself in are Hamburg, another off-beat city but in a very different way, Leipzig, with its burgeoning art scene, Dresden for the same reason as Leipzig, and that’s it. Munich? girl.......

but this seems like a pattern with people who presently do or have ever considered themselves Berliners in some way. the rest of Germany seems insignificant. what’s there for a queer weirdo who left somewhere else to come here in the first place? my Berlin friends who migrated to Berlin from elsewhere in Germany or Austria all say the same thing when I ask them what other German city they would live in if they had to leave Berlin: they simply name a city that isn’t even in Germany. Warsaw, Krakow, Copenhagen, Oslo, Stockholm, London, Montreal, New York, Portland, Tel Aviv, Melbourne. but Bremen? what in fuckin tarnation is there to do in Bremen? literally anywhere else in the world if not Berlin.

in this mindset I do not detect a sense of superiority or of profound disdain for Germany as a whole, but rather a real attempt made to ask if one sees oneself anywhere in Germany except Berlin, and the answer has so often been no. the reason is that Berlin is like no other city in Germany, the communities that have been formed here have not been formed elsewhere in the German-speaking world – Köln and Vienna may be catching up in their conception of queer spaces and queer communities, but they are still very much white-cis-gay-oriented and we have already enough of those issues in Berlin to deal with. the difference is, Berlin has other options, Köln hardly does. so when I ask my Berliner friends where they would go if they couldn’t live in Berlin anymore (aside from the very clever “Potsdam, because that way I’d still be an hour away from Berlin and in a big city”), they name cities that have been for some time considered similar to Berlin in various ways. often they learn this from the very people who come from these cities, having left because they got bored and wanted to check out the terrain of another city that has similar vibes. “Montreal felt like a dead-end for me, so I picked up and relocated to Berlin because I was told it was a lot like Montreal.” it is understood that these people will not be in Berlin forever; they do not attempt to learn German, they befriend only English-speakers, in six months they will move on to Tel Aviv. 

it is interesting how my perception of the Germanophone world is informed by my preference for Berlin, as if somehow the space and the experiences and the people have informed how I compartmentalize the German-speaking world in my head. when I traveled outside of Berlin I carried a pre-existing impression of these other places before I even arrived there, I now realize. I hated Luxembourg enthusiastically; my most-cited reasons are that I had to pay 10 Euro for a mediocre panini when I came to a point where I needed to eat something or else pass out, my hostel was at the very bottom of the Bock or the enormous promontory that forms a natural city wall and separation between ville haute and ville basse up and down which I had to haul my carcass daily if I wanted to get to the middle of the “city” and do literally anything. it was too clean and yet also too dusty because the entire city was under construction all the time, it was bound to some kind of UNESCO decree that houses could only ever be this nauseating taupe color with a greyish-blue roof, the shade your fingertips get when you’re cold. sports cars, clean suits, a Gucci store in the middle of the medieval city center. what was there to do here besides walk, as I had already been doing everywhere else? there was nothing to buy except a 10-dollar panini. my hostel had no wifi. I spent most of my time in the Luxembourg City History Museum, which for some reason had eduroam wifi access. thank god I could Instagram all the dumb photos I took paired with idiotic captions. thank god I had access to the internet so I could do that! the most special part of my time there was the antique market in the city center, which I stumbled onto by chance and bought a beautiful blue owl brooch from a jewelry seller. all was not horrible in Luxembourg, then, I guess.

anyway, reading Roth’s narrative as he goes from post-WWI Germany to post-WWI Austria and then deep into the regions we only know of now in history books – Galicia, Bohemia – I am almost reconfiguring my conception of the extent to which the German-speaking world once reached. Lemberg, the birthplace of Sacher-Masoch, is now Lviv. you remember that Kafka, a Czech Jew, lived in Prague and wrote in German. this was not the German Empire, but rather the Austro-Hungarian, something that I have always had surface knowledge of but never cared to explore to the extent that I have explored German history and culture. I didn’t necessarily forget that the German Empire was not the only major empire to collapse post-WWI, I just sort of wasn’t interested. yes, of course the Austro-Hungarian Empire also collapsed. yes, the Ottoman Empire did shortly after. these are things I know, but not things I feel drawn to enough to pursue. why? it’s history. I’m supposed to like history.

this is why Roth’s reflection on Bruck-Kiralhyda (now Bruckneudorf), a city literally separated post-war by a bridge on which one side sits Austria and on the other sits Hungary, is so mindblowing to me. Roth, an Austrian Jew, does not lament the collapse of the dual monarchy. instead he speaks of the marked discomfort present in the city, the palpable disjointedness of a city that once was exactly the city that it presently was with the exception of the hyphen. Austro-Hungarian, Bruck-Kiralhyda, with the collapse of the hyphen the political and monarchical link is gone, but there is the city still, and it has not changed but for this void created by the downfall of a political giant. it is the only reason the city feels different, the only reason Roth never wants to go back. what about this change in political and geographical designation on paper changes the city? what about the separation of Berlin by a wall changes the perception of the East Berliner or the West Berliner? surely there was none at the beginning of the Soviet occupation, although one certainly did develop as a result of propaganda and physical separation. how do these physical spaces – walls, bridges, border crossings – inform our perception of a space that once was one way and is not that way any longer? how has it really changed? 

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this passage really blew me away, considering how I’ve already described my own impression of the S7 between Nikolassee and Grünewald (which I discovered, during a conversation with my thesis advisor, was disrupted and replaced with buses due to track work for a good portion of the summer while she was there. where do the souls in purgatory go when purgatory is undergoing major construction? would riding the bus through the Grünewald have the same effect that riding a train did? I was not there to find out.)

In this particular entry, as well as a few others, Roth describes the Ruhrgebiet – the Rust Belt of Germany, essentially – as a godforsaken non-place split between Rheinland and Westfalen, where there is no point to the attempts at distinguishing between individual towns, let alone larger regions, when the endless bleary expanse of urban sprawl is oppressive in its uniformity and might as well exist as a single blob of an entity. In Berlin I made friends from the Ruhrgebiet; they didn’t like to talk about it. Really. They weren’t used to being asked about it, come to think of it. For so long they had run in circles where nobody asked anybody else where they were from. You were a Berliner. Dortmund? Bochum? Where the fuck were they? Then came me, asking that question with genuine curiosity the way any foreigner whose fascination with the language and culture of a country that led them to that very country might ask it. And it seemed like a great chore for them to pronounce the syllables that made up the name of the village outside Essen where they grew up, they admitted the name of some unknown miserable provincial town to you as if you’d caught them being from somewhere else and not from Berlin. What was I going to do? Chastise them about it? I wasn’t even from Germany.

One thing I learned very quickly: nobody likes being from the Ruhrgebiet. Beware asking a Berliner where they’re originally from.

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revision notes for part I:

my initial intention for the lack of capitalization involved the way I use social media (tumblr, twitter, instagram, facebook) and have at some point eschewed all conventions of proper punctuation and capitalization. this is a decidedly millennial thing to do, especially the part about not ending sentences with periods (nowadays people think you’re angry at them if you text them “Okay.” as a stylistic choice I should think carefully about the line between how I write on social media and how I write to produce art, and whether that stylistic choice is necessary – probably would be a good idea and not take anything away from the writing if I just used proper capitalization rules.

on capitalization, I think this connects very closely with the previous point: I often Capitalize Silly Things to distance myself from the gravity of the topic I’m approaching. I picked this up back in seventh grade, when we read Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson; the protagonist’s voice had a huge impact on me, her sarcasm and her constant observing, constant judging. but I realize that I use this kind of capitalization as a way to hide behind a sort of light-hearted façade, or an I-couldn’t-possibly-give-a-shit-because-I’m-being-snarky-here sort of attitude that needs to be done away with. if I’m going to talk about anorexia, mental illness, then I need to let myself tell the story without these sorts of “crutches.” it’s deeply personal stuff, it needs to have that impact.

also related, certain little phrases and word choice that weigh down the prose and voice and reveal a sort of me-behind-the-scenes “pre-determining” the course of thought and steering the narrative where it’s going with my language, which isn’t necessary, as the prose will go that way without this interference. just little things like “even,” “certainly,” “maybe,” “perhaps,” they do too much and should be edited.

certain things I touch upon are not delved into deeply enough: regarding the S7 stretch of hell, I talk about how I tweeted that it was a place proving that god had abandoned the earth, rather than just outright stating it. it would have more impact as a standalone statement. however, if social media played a large role in my experience of being abroad, then make it a subject.

places on which I should linger: the art I made with my friends, my time at the Schwules Museum, being a student at the FU, seeing folks like Peaches in passing all the time. scene-ify more, bring the people I talk about into the story and animate them a little bit. chronological order of these little vignettes is not yet decided, but whatever I choose to put in the first chapter, it is necessary to make sure everything I will later expand upon is introduced at the beginning.

the core of this chapter is the S7 Potsdam to Ahrensfelde hell stretch. it pretty much embodies everything I want to say about time, space, and identity in the city. this is the heart of the chapter, hands down. is there a way to bring it in even more, make it the central location or non-location in which the reader of the thesis situates themselves as they “navigate” the narrative?

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Weimar Berlin: important spaces

- the streets

- the bars: especially the Salomé, the Alexander Casino, the Troika

- the flats: the boarding houses, the tenements, the homes of the wealthy on the outskirts of the city (”West End”), in general other people’s intimate living quarters

- the trains, the taxis, the cars, the trams

- the hotels, the restaurants

- Rügen Island

- Grünewald

- the theater, the cabaret (The Lady Windermere)

- political spaces: the “communist” café, Ludwig Bayer’s building, eventually the entire city

- the spaces in-between: country villa, Bernhard’s Wannsee mansion of depressing memories, the train on which Bradshaw & Norris meet, the Nowaks’ attic, the police chambers

important parts where time pushes through space:

- Bernhard’s mansion by the lake

- the Nowaks’ flat, where Herr u. Frau Nowak reminisce over the Kaiser and resignedly accept the new regime

- same goes for Frl. Schröder’s boarding house, which she claims used to be leased only to only the finest of society

- the Grünewald; its existence as a sort of wealthy Jewish ghetto before Jewish ghettos became a real thing under the Nazis (happened before in Venice I think because I read The Merchant of Venice once and we had to stop and clarify that these were a thing long before the Nazis recycled it

- urban sociologist Dr. Claire Colomb once referred to the space of Berlin as a “burdened landscape” because of the way its history comes through to an overwhelming extent simply by existing with its loaded past

- Berlin is existing constantly as a place defined with the prefixes “post-” or “inter-” it seems; post-WWI, interwar, post-WWII, post-Holocaust, post-wall – it is always a city delineated by what it is in-between or what it has just experienced, there is not a lot of space for the present sometimes, one feels

what does that have to do with identity? specifically the identity of the expatriate, the queer expatriate from the English-speaking country?

- I think that, in the case of Weimar Berlin, the attractiveness of the city to gay English expatriates and hedonistic young English people in general who like to live the pauper chic life comprises a few elements: it is cheap, it is lawless, it is unstable, it is exciting, precisely because of the past, precisely because of the way the space is shaped by the past. self-styled starving artists are attracted to living in squalor as long as they know they can leave it whenever they want to. there is no need to learn German in Berlin if the only other friends you make are also English-speakers, or if you assume that all of your non-native-English-speaking friends will know English better than you know German. 

- I am still wondering whether the city shapes your identity once you’re there or whether the city is attractive to people with certain identities already

I want to break the text I’m writing into smaller chunks and title each section with a Hollaender cabaret song

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after my initial time spent in Berlin, I wanted to see all the friends I had made (miraculously) again as soon as possible. the fall semester was a real special kind of dismal – at some point before studying abroad, I remember thinking how dumb it sounded to feel “culture shock” or any kind of adjustment period when coming back into your own element, your home, your comfort zone. what was the big deal? I’d go back to school the next week and catch up with my Maryland folks and pick up where I left off. I thought that anyone who felt culture shock re-immersing themselves into the culture in which they were raised, and which they only left for about six or seven months, was surely being overdramatic.

I did not pick up where I’d left off. for all intents and purposes I went on with my senior year as expected, because the academic calendar does not stop or slow down to accommodate your mental breakdowns. there was the matter of getting off the bupropion, which took seven more months to accomplish – at one breaking point I flushed all the pills down the toilet and proceeded to have an extended withdrawal period that I refused to go to the doctor and talk about precisely because I didn’t want to admit to flushing the fucking pills down the toilet. the “what are you going to do after you graduate?” question started to assault my conscience from all angles. the stories I came back with about my new friends, my experiences, some absolute disasters, felt increasingly not worth sharing. none of the people I told them to were there, they had only experienced filtered pictures of streets in Prenzlauer Berg and weird shit displayed at the Schwules Museum through my Instagram. they knew very little of the manic episodes and the hospital visit, which were things I unsurprisingly decided not to broadcast. some friends noticed my tendency to be up tweeting at times when they should have been in bed and chalked it up to my becoming some kind of Berlin night denizen. I did spend a lot of nights out late, but the fact is that most of those tweets were probably posted from my bed where I sometimes sat among enormous boxes of Aldi cereal and sacks of stale rolls and huge mineral water bottles for 36 hours at a time without moving.

there was nobody to talk about that with. talking about that would have required backstory; letting someone from home in on an inside story or anecdote that involved a Berlin friend would have involved me explaining everything from how I met this or that person up to the circumstances that got us into this or that situation and why it was funny in the first place, and that was exhausting, so I just didn’t bother. I thought the solution to this slump was to go back as soon as I could and throw myself back into the life I had created for myself there, for whatever reason not really considering that the obvious common denominator when it came to all my Big Life Issues was me. so I went back for the New Year and stayed with one of my closest friends there for the entire month of January. during the spring and summer we had spent a lot of time hanging and visited London together in July. I think to them I was sort of an interesting figure; I had sort of materialized in their life right when they were at the end of a nine-year relationship and when I guess I made it pretty clear that I was not interested in That we became friends. I think they were very intrigued by how fucking far away I lived; at the beginning, when I was invited somewhere, I showed up, having somehow found my way to the location, then just vanished when the night was over. I don’t know what kind of questions were asked about me or if anyone asked any questions at all, but I guess that superficially this strange artsy American student with sunken eyes and skin the color of white asparagus vibe was attractive. by the time I went home, we had become very close, and I was in good standing with their whole gang, I didn’t think about how shitty it is to be trans every ten minutes, I didn’t have a dining plan or a fucking RA, I felt like a God Damn Adult.

I was not a God Damn Adult. I don’t think it was that I felt more mature than I actually was, but mental illness makes you feel that way. when you are depressed, it is sometimes hard to remember that you can’t keep a routine because you are sick, not because you expect other people to do your laundry or cook for you. when you are anorexic, it is sometimes hard to remember that you aren’t eating because you are committed to not eating, not because you are too irresponsible to go grocery shopping. when you have anxiety, it is sometimes hard to remember that you won’t go into a packed bar or board an overcrowded train out of self-preservation and not because you’re too shy or sheltered to face the Real World. I have faced many aspects of the Real World. sometimes I prefer to limit my intake of it.

something about returning to Berlin for the winter break felt like returning home after being called away by an inconvenient business trip. my friends in Berlin had seen parts of myself that my friends and even family at home did not – not really because I trusted them more, but because various illnesses manifested themselves differently while I was away, new illnesses developed, some illnesses worsened. it wasn’t so much a matter of me letting them in, but that it was all very plainly visible and impossible to avoid discussing. it was good to be back around them. the semester had been draining and I was content to sit in my friend’s apartment scowling at and defacing Siegessäule magazine, watching movies, sitting in the same two cafés within a block of the apartment. I had plans to go to museums and exhibitions, but forgot I didn’t have the money to do that. I was still using my expired student ID from the F.U. to take transit. David Bowie died that month and I spent an entire week with another close friend, sitting in Neues Ufer and moping. I bought soy milk, black bread, and mango-curry spread and ate these breakfasts with great ceremony when I woke up at noon. I contributed rent money, bought toilet paper and cleaned the apartment when I felt it was cluttered, I tried my best to leave no traces of my existence as a guest because that to me was what a good guest did. apparently it was not good enough.

two days before I left, this friend and I went to brunch at a place around the corner and shared a large Mediterranean brunch plate. I remembered this place from the summer, when the floor-to-ceiling windows opened outward and the seating overflowed onto the sidewalk. now it was perpetually slate-grey and snowing. later I learned that this friend hated Berlin in the winter, so maybe I wasn’t entirely responsible for their decision to lay out every flaw in my personality onto the tiny breakfast table like a door-to-door curtain salesman might fan out swatches of fabric for a housewife’s consideration. but that’s what happened. not five minutes into the meal, which was an obscenely large arrangement of brightly-colored fruits that felt absurd considering that we were seated against cold foggy glass through which I watched people in 35 pounds of layers bike past. a small park across the street was frozen over – I remembered eating ice cream there a few days before flying home in August. now it was littered with trash and petrified dog shit preserved under a layer of frost – my friend asked if I had enjoyed myself.

yes, definitely, I said. I had had a really awful semester, I was glad to be away from home in January. January, I explained without feeling the need to go into excessive detail, was historically the worst month of the year for me. if someone died, it was in January. if I wanted to die, it was in January. I wasn’t feeling that way this year. I felt rested. some things needed to be taken care of when I got home, like the extended bupropion withdrawal and the panic attacks, but I was nonetheless very happy to have seen everyone. I had enjoyed myself.

this didn’t seem to be the answer they were hoping for. I guess they were hoping I would say something along the lines of: “well, you know, I realized that I’m unmotivated to pull myself out of a minor funk by forcing myself to do things I don’t want to do,” or, “well, you know, I realized that I’m moody and deal with increasingly confrontational conversations with friends by going silent,” or, “well, you know, I really wish I had done more.” because that’s what I ended up learning about myself in the next thirty seconds – that I made little effort to feel better when I was down, which must have meant I didn’t want to get better in any facet of my life. that I spent days at a time content with sitting in a café instead of going to museums and theaters the way I had planned on doing before arriving.

well, I said, I didn’t realize how tired I was. I had more in mind for myself than I wanted to do.

but you really didn’t do much at all. you spent most of the time in the apartment.

no, I really don’t feel like that was all I did.

it just seems to me that you are maybe – not so independent.

this I found really odious and began raving. fuck the giant fruit plate that sat between us uncomfortably, big as a pottery wheel. not independent?

well, I remember back in July –

fucking July?

when we were in London. you said you might not have done much at all if I hadn’t initiated our days out. and this month, for example, when you had to go to the grocery store sometimes, you asked me if I wanted to come too. and if I said no, you wouldn’t go either, instead of just going by yourself.

fucking July? the grocery store? I got there eventually, didn’t I, each time? nobody ever shat without toilet paper, did they? I walked around about six cities by myself, hadn’t I? was it not clear that I meant our ideas of visiting a city were different – I took walks, they liked museums?

and that sometimes I was slow to react, as if I spent more time in my head than in reality. I did not take initiative. I drank tea but never made it. I only helped open the windows to air out the room when they were already up doing it.

I only drank the tea because it was there and I knew you weren’t going to drink two liters of hot lemon water with chunks of ginger. I never thought to open the windows myself because I thought it was a pointless exercise in making a room 7 degrees and no less stuffy than before.

not independent? I flew into a complete rage. did they know that when I spoke about how January was historically bad it was because of a high-school suicide attempt that stained the entire month for me, that when I said I was content with my January for once it was because it was the first January in five years in which I wasn’t close to doing that again? I didn’t want them to know all this, but it ended up that way. why do people not point things out to me as they happen? why compile a dossier and then present it to me like an airing of grievances or the way a court clerk reads a docket aloud to the judge at an arraignment? I told them I would never do something like this to anyone I called a friend and went silent. the still-hot cup of black tea was to be unfinished, a roll I had ripped in half was left on the heap of stupid fruit and hummus. fuck you, I thought. eat this entire ridiculous plate yourself. I wondered whether it would be a good idea to spend my last two nights in a hostel, if this whole thing was that big of a deal. they told me that they hadn’t expected my reaction and were only trying to help. I said I was done eating and started counting Euros to pay them back for half the cost of the plate. I had to walk to a friend’s nearby apartment to pick up the bike I had borrowed and ridden once and drop it off with its owner, another few blocks away. I would see them back at the apartment.

in many of the conversations between Isherwood and the two Landauer cousins – Natalia and Bernhard – I feel reverberations of the conversations I had with this friend, who is still a friend. many instances of “why are you asking me this question?” and “what are you thinking about me based on this answer I’m giving?” many small spats that end in silence that is sometimes just as explosive as the argument that should be had. many feelings that conversations were more judgment than lively discussion, comprising many topics that I didn’t feel like talking about but would have been met with a “why?” if avoided: why wasn’t my position against parents beating their kids’ asses stronger? I don’t know. my parents beat my ass on what I felt was probably the proper occasion. was it possible that I was attracted to men since I wrote stories about men who were attracted to men? no. how did I know? why wouldn’t I get a soup? I ate a Kinder bar from the fucking vending machine on the train platform and didn’t want anything. why? many whys. many back-and-forths like this. many signs that both people are carrying around too much baggage associated with the fucking month of January. at the gloomy winter excursion to the Landauers’ Wannsee country house, Isherwood enters, at Bernhard’s invitation, into a space of memory and tragic association for a reason that he does not quite himself understand. why is he the one privy to Bernhard’s entire life story? what exactly is the nature of this relationship? why do months pass before they speak again? in Isherwood’s crafted world of innuendo and suggestion, we do not know just how intimate this relationship is. at a closer look, holes open up in the narrative that could easily be filled with the obvious. as with the famous ellipsis in The Great Gatsby, one moment Isherwood is being led to Bernhard’s bedroom with Bernhard’s hand on his shoulder. the next morning they are having breakfast. I have such holes in my own memory but I am sure none of them involve sex. depression eats away at your brain cells, its effect much like that of self-censorship.

in June, during my study abroad, I went to the hospital for a panic attack. as with most panic attacks, I thought I was going to die, and when I explained to the E.R. doctor that I had a laundry list of pre-existing psychological conditions I was put into a bus and rerouted to a mental health clinic on the Wannsee (after we made a really unnecessary detour through Charlottenburg which added an entire hour to the journey). there, I spoke in English with a woman whose job was apparently to stay up all night and receive nutjobs like me at 3 AM in her small, inviting office. she asked me if I wanted to stay there. that sounded terrifying. I had work to do and nineteen credits to earn. no, I did not want to stay there. yes, I would start eating. yes, I would take care of myself. she told me I was brave for being here all alone with all of the things that I was dealing with, and that it took a great deal of strength to take all of your problems abroad with you – many people foolishly thought that going somewhere meant somehow that those problems would not come with them. I did not see myself as brave or strong. I saw myself sitting in a consultation room at a psych clinic while the sun rose. I wondered whether I would be forced to stay on some grounds, whether saying “yes” to an invitation to stay was the only right answer. but “no” was accepted. I walked out with a business card, saying goodbye to the man at the reception desk like I was leaving a Holiday Inn. I walked a few miles until I decided it was time to get on a bus.

(this was not something I tweeted about)

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I have always really taken issue with the people who romanticize the Weimar era. in New York City there is a circle of people who have created this “demi-monde” of their own into which they retreat, which in and of itself bothers me because I find it ridiculous to take to the internet and bellow about how if you’re not with The Revolution you’re against it, then throw a party where you all construct an obscene reactionary fantasy experience in your tiny Upper West Side apartment that seeks to reconstruct a period of the utter Orientierungslosigkeit and hopelessness that loomed over the entire interwar era in Berlin, to say nothing of the impending doom of fascism closing in on all sides. what’s the point in recreating an era fraught by the impending doom of fascism closing in on all sides when that’s our reality already? what’s the point of glamorizing poverty and desperation? why do you get to celebrate the sexy parts of Weimar Berlin and shy away from the ugly ones? can’t I just shut up and let you have your fun? no. I don’t have time for other queers who don’t think about some of the dumb shit they do. “educated” white queers have no business being on that foolish bullshit and ignoring reality at a time when the word “survival” actually has a question mark at the end of it for some folks. I don’t care about your need for escapism, even if it’s for a night or two. must be nice to keep your mind in the here and now only when you want it to be. I think at some point I remarked that the only accurate Weimar-Berlin-themed party these people could throw would end with them all being put on a train and getting taken to Dachau. maybe that was way harsh.

sometimes it just takes growing up at, like, 35, which is how old I think the people I’m criticizing are. that’s not to say I’m grown up, I’m probably just really bitter that I don’t have friends who throw really elaborate theme parties and am too tired to do that myself, but I also think there’s a point I’m making somewhere. Isherwood writes of the “bankrupt middle class” and their gloomy, sooty house façades that make up the cityscape of the area around Nollendorfplatz in 1930. In Mr. Norris Changes Trains and “Sally Bowles” he writes of the destitute landladies who yearn for lodgers to take up rooms in their dingy flats, heavy with medieval furniture and reeking of mold, coal dust, the stinking decay of bygone Kaiserreich. Much later in life, after the success of Mr. Norris and many other works that followed, Isherwood wrote of his portrayal of himself and of Gerald Hamilton in the novella:

“What repels me now about Mr Norris is its heartlessness. It is a heartless fairy-story about a real city in which human beings were suffering the miseries of political violence and near-starvation. The ‘wickedness’ of Berlin's night-life was of the most pitiful kind; the kisses and embraces, as always, had price-tags attached to them, but here the prices were drastically reduced in the cut-throat competition of an over-crowded market. ... As for the ‘monsters’, they were quite ordinary human beings prosiacally engaged in getting their living through illegal methods. The only genuine monster was the young foreigner who passed gaily through these scenes of desolation, misinterpreting them to suit his childish fantasy.”

this last sentence is a lot to digest for me. I polemicize a lot and somehow feel like I rewrite memories to achieve a similar effect, though one with a distinct flavor of acidity and not one necessarily of reminiscence. that’s not to say I had no good experiences in life ever, but I do tend to write better when I’m being shady. is that my childish fantasy, then? to view everything through a lens that pre-condemns it because I’ve already decided that I exist outside of everything that demarcates normal human interaction and ways of identifying oneself? do I identify strongly with the stretch of train between the Nikolassee and the Grünewald? probably

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during my first seven months in Berlin, I lived in the heart of a wealthy neighborhood that absolutely did not want me there. if that wasn’t made clear enough to me by the old people with whom I engaged in regular stare-downs on the bus toward Wannsee or on the U3 between Krumme Lanke and Wittenbergplatz, it was made clear to me when I took walks around the Schlachtensee or around the Spanische Allee in Nikolassee. especially at night. I very quickly realized that I was Scary because I wore black coats and my boots made a lot of noise on the street cobbles at night, and I took a lot of walks at night, and at one or two houses the curtains of an upstairs window never failed to twitch, once someone even put the effort into raising up those outside-the-window blinds that Germans put down over their windows at night, making their houses look like closed stores at the mall, and looking out to see what manner of ruffian was tromping down the street at 11:00PM to disturb the idyll. it was literally just me, though, three nights into another bout of not sleeping or eating because the bupropion made it hard to sit still or keep food down. if I kept moving through neighborhoods that were not mine at unacceptable hours I could at least ignore the persistent cold-sweating, the drastic weight loss, and the fact that my apartment sucked. during the daytime I walked around the Rehwiese, sometimes accidentally turning into people’s private driveways and always blatantly reading the nameplates on the front gates to their mansions as if casing the property for a robbery. really I just wanted to know what they did for a living and from there proceeded to wonder what I had to do in life to be able to afford a fucking Prussian country house with ornate Jugendstil decor. “, Arzt” and “, Rechtsanwalt” were the most common two declarations I found attached to names, unsurprisingly. “, Architekt” was another. particularly manic episodes involved the charade of me finding a bench and attempting to read a book because at least it looked like I had a purpose being there, the book and all, I looked a little more like a student than a starving unshowered piece of trash, synapses firing uncontrollably and all. this display was met with disapproval from the universal powers that be when I was shit on by a bird while reading the first sentence of Fabian by Erich Kästner over and over again. it wasn’t until later that I actually learned this meadow was called die Rehwiese, which in German means “the roe deer meadow.” in old English my name means the exact same thing. so it was my fucking meadow all along.

in Goodbye to Berlin Isherwood writes of the Grünewald as an area inhabited by most of the richest Berlin families, though “it is difficult to understand why”:

“Their villas,” he writes, “in all known styles of expensive ugliness, ranging from the eccentric-rococo folly to the cubist flat-roofed steel-and-glass box, are crowded together in this dank, dreary pinewood. Few of them can afford large gardens, for the ground is fabulously dear; their only view is of their neighbour’s backyard, each one protected by a wire fence and a savage dog. Terror of burglary and revolution has reduced these miserable people to a state of siege. They have neither privacy nor sunshine. The district is really a millionaire’s slum.” (14)

I have already talked a little bit about how I felt when I rode the S7 train from Nikolassee to the Grünewald S-Bahnhof. I have been on a lot of unnecessarily long bus- and train- and plane-journeys out of sheer cheapness and am still convinced that the stretch between those two train stations is the longest I have ever experienced in my entire life. aside from it being one of the prime stretches during which it was popular for ticket agents to slither out of the cut and start checking for proof that you were allowed to be there, because they knew you couldn’t escape during the suspension of time and civilization and molecular structure and oxygen that occurred in that really wretched sliver of misery, it was also one of those non-spaces in life where you sense that the veil is thin and someone dead from any point or place in history could just materialize across from you reading the Bild-Zeit and wearing a Jack Wolfskin half-zip. staring out the window is actually not something I remember doing much; I feel like it took a while for me to finally look and realize that the stretch was so god damn long precisely because we were going through the middle of the fucking forest. when I finally did look I realized it wasn’t even pretty. to my left I could see the Autobahn in the distance, which was especially depressing on rainy days. I tweeted, to all my friends back home who had no idea what I was talking about, that “the stretch on the S7 between Nikolassee and Grünewald is one of those places that proves God has abandoned the earth.” when I had finally made friends this was the easiest way to reach Mitte and meet them. the Grünewald was a reminder that it was a Homerian epic for me to get anywhere and that I was an idiot for choosing an apartment where I had. getting to my destinations was always like reaching Canaan because of that. for those months I think I actually spent more time engaged with the BVG somehow than I did scowling in the corner of any bar or drinking hot water with ginger and squeezed lemon (see: not “tea”) in people’s flats. later I learned that the Grünewald train station was a major hub for the deportation of Jews who lived in Berlin and its suburbs. Isherwood’s pupil was herself Jewish, as were many of the wealthy people who inhabited the dismal landscape of the cloistered Grünewald district. I wasn’t too far off about it being a place where God had abandoned the earth. a place without sunshine, definitely.

in “Sally Bowles,” Isherwood writes a close character study of a young English singer of mediocre talent and enormous ambition who puts up sexual services as collateral for opportunities to become a famous singer and actress. multiple times he uses the term “demi-monde” and describes Sally as a demimondaine at least once – its meaning as a loan word and its literal translation from the French differ slightly. the cultural meaning of the demi-monde refers to the bohemian lifestyle, transience, the eschewing of traditional morals and the running in hedonistic circles of those who do the same. in French it literally means “half-world,” or almost-world, insinuating an artificiality of the entire structure, a fragility. for the most part Isherwood considers himself outside of the influence of this phenomenon despite brushing elbows with the friends Sally makes, who make grand promises and then melt away like wet crepe paper or just dissolve away into Argentina or some shit. though he does write of an American called Clive, one of many older men who promise the nineteen-year-old Sally an audition with a film producer or other prominent show-business figure. this encounter is intriguingly different, however; Sally, who liberally calls herself a “gold-digger” and a “whore” with no reservations whatever, pulls Isherwood himself into this bizarre triangle in which sex and money are inevitably intertwined, and the “ménage-à-trois” begins making arrangements for the long term: to France and Italy, Clive promises them, then to South America, the United States, Japan, Tahiti. Sally and Isherwood have a brief moment of delusion in which they both think they’ve found someone who will lift them out of their destitution. days after this trip is planned, Clive departs for Budapest, leaving behind an envelope with 300 Marks to be split between them both (50 of which are spent on a lavish dinner that neither enjoys, 200 of which are spent on an abortion). early on, I once joked to a new friend in Berlin that my friends back home urged me not to come back from my time in the city without finding a “sugar-parent” who insisted on supporting me financially for no reason other than that they found me interesting. “everyone in Berlin is poor,” she said, “or they tell you they are, anyway.” needless to say I still have a 28K student loan.