Two and a half days in Berlin (July 30th-August 2nd, 2014)

If someone challenged me to set a novel in an unfamiliar city of my choice, and then paid for me to live in said city for a year or two while I conducted my research (a less than likely scenario, but such is the aspiring-writer's fantasy life), then I might well choose Berlin. You don't need to be there for many hours, or delve too deeply, to be aware of the bruising it's had from the hands of history - twentieth century history in particular. Look, for example, at the books available in English at the Berlin Historiale Museum shop: Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood, Alone in Berlin by Hans Fallada, A Woman in Berlin April-June 1945 by an anonymous diarist, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold by John le Carré, A biography of Eva Braun, several accounts of Hitler's final days...all very different books, I know, but you must admit they have a certain hard-boiled quality in common. There's a definite lack of rom-com.

On our first afternoon we went on an open top bus tour round all the classic sights: the Reichstag, the Brandenburg gate, Checkpoint Charlie etc. We'd been negotiating airports since six o'clock, which is why I kept nodding off and jolting awake as the bus trundled with a soporific sort of sway through the July streets. As a result my initial impressions were broad-brush, rather startled and almost entirely lacking in factual information. "My impressions of the city after being here four hours or so," I reported dozily to my diary later on. "Heavy & megalithic rather than charming or pretty, still a strong sense of Damage despite (or because of) all the new, shiny buildings. Painfully steeped in history, so many resonant names (Potsdamer Platz, Unter den Linden, Spandau, Wannsee...), resonant buildings, resonant gaps between buildings, resonant ruins. There was a clap of thunder at one point. The bells in the bomb-damaged Gedächtniskirche rang at half-five sounding deep and mournful (I was going to say resonant again but think I need a new word)."

Queen Sophie Charlotte and her interesting chin

When we visited the Charlottenburg palace a couple of days later it was a relief to leave the twentieth century for a while. (I don't suppose the eighteenth century felt particularly innocent for the people who lived in it but it looks that way from a 2014 perspective, for obvious reasons). As a fan of stories and a foe of Information Boards, I do like to have a good audio-guide pressed to my ear when I'm traipsing round a palace, and the Charlottenburg palace audio-guides were really, really engaging. I've just consulted my diary to see what choice pieces of historical information I might share as a result but, aside from a long gush about the quality of the audio-guide, the only pertinent reflection I seem to have made is this: "Queen Sophie Charlotte was considered a great beauty in her day and she does in fact have a pleasant and kindly face, but she also has a big, fat double-chin. Isn't it funny (as in 'interesting') that a chubby face was considered the height of beauty in the 1700s?"

Our Isherwood-esque sitting-room

I am not usually organised enough to read location-specific books when I'm on holiday, but on this occasion I bought a copy of Goodbye to Berlin at the aforementioned museum shop. I had difficulty choosing between that and A Woman in Berlin, but after running my eye over the contents page I plumped for Isherwood because his protagonist's journey from Berlin to Ruegen Island mirrored, rather eerily, our own plans. And it wasn't just the chapter headings that chimed with our holiday. Goodbye to Berlin opens with a description of the narrator's lodgings in an apartment block on a "deep, solemn, massive street," rather like the one we'd rented above a bakery on Windscheidstrasse. We too had a "tall tiled stove, gorgeously coloured, like an altar" in the corner of our bedroom. I kept looking up from the page and feeling a frisson along my spine at the thought that this room had existed (and probably looked much the same) in Christopher Isherwood's day, and inevitably this led me to wonder who had lived here over the last hundred years or so, while Berlin was the epicentre of world history, and what they'd seen and done and undergone.

I'm glad we stayed in that characterful flat and not a could-be-anywhere-in-the-world hotel. It was kitted out with all sorts of odds and ends of furniture - some antique, some plain, some just strange (the non-functioning Bakelite television). Its proportions were big-going-on-majestic compared to most modern flats, as were the double doors that led from room to room, and the ornate mouldings on the ceiling, but there was a vertiginous flight of stairs inside the bathroom door, which made me a bit uneasy about nocturnal trips to the loo, and the walls were papered with woodchip.

The Toothpick

We had both children with us, aged 7 and 10, so while I may have given the impression that I wandered round Berlin ruminating about the eighteenth century feminine ideal and existential questions arising from the Cold War, I spent much more time nagging the kids to eat up their bratwurst and go to the toilet even if they don't feel like it because there won't be any toilets on the bus. My memory of the first full day, which official records state was spent at the Berlin Historiale museum, the Friederichshain park and the DDR museum, was actually spent luring our ten year old out of a very bad mood. First thing in the morning, you see, we'd persuaded her not to squander 18 Euros of her limited pocket money on a whoppingly over-priced  I love Berlin T-Shirt. "We will find a cheaper one somewhere else," we told her, "and you will thank us then". For the next five hours or so (until, at long last, we were vindicated) Berlin passed her by in a dismal blur as the desirability of that relinquished T-Shirt swelled to mythological proportions.Why even try to have fun when you're lumbered for life with bossy, spendthrift, kill-joy parents? Meanwhile the seven year old had forked out 9 Euros on a toy tram and was desperate to get back to the flat so he could run it around on the floor.
Me: Look, that's the television tower, the tallest structure in Germany!
S: Mmm. Can we go back now?
Me: 368 metres high. Wow. It's nicknamed 'the Toothpick.'
S: You do still have my tram safe in your handbag, don't you? Can I just look at it for a teensy second?