Homeless in Berlin

It was almost ten at night when the train chugged into Berlin’s Hauptbahnhof from Poznan. The dingy Polish train seemed out of place in the glistening recently opened train station. I’d spent the day in Poznan and was returning back to Germany with seven hours to kill until I caught my suspiciously cheep discount train to the Czech Republic. Berlin seemed like a mirage compared to the sleepy Poznan. As the train pulls into the city you are confronted with flashing lights and office towers greeting your arrival. The station itself was one of the most impressive pieces of architecture I’d ever seen and appears to be more a modern cathedral of transportation than a train station. 

I was not quite sure how to spend my few hours in Berlin and felt a bit sad I skipped out on much of it to visit Poland. I decided to head east and work my way back west, where I would pick up my bags from luggage storage and head to the train station once again. I started in Alexander Platz, the heart of the former East Berlin. Today the area is completely remade with a large shopping mall and some office towers. The square made me feel a bit uncomfortable as its large expanse was shadowy in the dark. 

Walking down the street you could see the steady stream of party goers heading for a night out. Compared to subdued Rome where I was studying at the time, Berlin came as a bit of a shock. Teenagers piled into the S-Bahn (all the other public transport was closed because of a strike), while drinking bottles of vodka and beer.

 

By the time I was out of Alexander Platz area it was past midnight and the crowds of party goers had diminished a bit. I headed toward Peter Eisenmen’s Holocaust memorial. I’d past by it during the day on my from the station but was curious to see what the space would look like at night. The memorial is a large plaza with a grid of concrete blocks at varying heights with the elevations increasing as you enter the middle. At night the site was shadowy, with lights only adding a sense of murkiness to the site. Though it was cool to see at night, central Berlin was nearly abandoned at this time at night and walking blindly through the memorial spooked me out, especially after I realized I was not the only one there. 

After my possibly averted mugging, I ended up walking toward the heart of the newly rebuilt Berlin, Potsdamer Platz. Potsdamer Platz is a whole neighborhood of Berlin built where once the Berlin Wall ran. Today the area seems like the corporate future city, with different area’s named after the companies that sponsored them, including a DaimlerChrysler Quarter and Sony Center. 

By then it was one in the morning and I was a loss at what to do. The rhythm of the city was dying down and I had no where to go. The temperature had fallen well below freezing and I began to feel like a homeless person looking for shelter. I found shelter in some Deutschbank/Daimler/Sony mall in Potsdamer Platz. I emailed some friends from a computer terminal, by then it was 3am, and decided to slowly make it back to my hostel. 

By the time I had gotten back on the S-Bahn the partygoers were returning home. It was a weird sight to see destruction and illness on such a massive level. People were screaming, throwing up and passing out all over the train and station. I got off and went to my hostel to pick up my bags. 

By the time I got back on the train the rhythm was different as the people looked more like the first round of people heading to work. This group had the tired faces of early risers. One woman clearly had a questionable profession as she switched out of her jeans and sweater into a tight mini skirt and tube top on the train. She put the last finishing touches of her makeup before running out. 

My night in Berlin was a surreal experience. Cities really transform at night into other places, living parallel lives as we sleep. It kind of reminds me of that old Volkswagen commercial (link below) where the guy goes for a night drive. Berlin surprised me in a way. It had that same teutonic seriousness you see in other German speaking places but in it all there is that melancholy that is almost Slavic. Looking at all the faces on the S-Bahn, it seemed that the people of Berlin haven’t changed as fast as their city. That night in the train station I wrote in an email, “Berlin is like the a city thats arrived in the future, and with that arrival, its population is slightly peeved about the destination”