I'm back after almost two months away. Is that I tend to get tired quickly in life, I've already said. And I also tend to leave long trip and have nothing to shine once there, what happens on the Internets. In return, by cons, with the days suddenly seem to have multiplied their hours by two, I'm catching up. So here I am, to speak from a place in the world now where I most want to return to Berlin.
Everything has probably been said again and again. Berlin is the city of the 20th century, it has the world's history etched everywhere, even in the few ball marks on the remaining buildings, and yet she has both feet in the future. It rebuilds all sides, it is that site and architectural anachronism. And it is beautiful, this strange quilt of nine-rebuilt-as-the-old, nine-built-like-the-new, really old, nine-memorial and old-block-Eastern Townships . It even more beautiful when it's covered with graffiti.
I wonder what it means to be young in Berlin at the moment. What it means to have the weight of the past to shake the shoulders to reinvent his hometown, to find a future. What it means to live in a mixture of Ostalgia , negation of Nazism, guilt, and boiling today. What it is like to live with an unemployment rate verging on 20%. As far as I know, I hold two Germans: one who chose to leave the city several times for very long periods, to study elsewhere; the other who stays and who, through his studies in graphic art, painted on the walls of the city revolves in the underground scene and gives a morning a week, a preview to curious tourists. The most cynical is not the one who walked away.
In Berlin, as you can drink in the street. At first, like good little obedient Quebecers, we are uncertain, there is something to hide our beer in our sweater. Then you realize that almost everyone has one in hand, then made into a habit, too. In Berlin, everywhere there are small outlets where you can buy Currywurst, a sausage in a kind of sauce that tastes like hot curry and ketchup. And groceries, it takes a dictionary to choose kind of sausage - well, when you speak like me that 22 words of German. In Berlin, however, pictogram wear hats. And everywhere, there are many many bikes. And a transit system that is the world's only to be used below its capacity. And a university that sells books out every day of the year to redeem itself for having participated in the burning. And large companies that buy old stations refurbished in a flea market and skatepark to throw everything down and make a mall.
near Berlin, there are also Sachsenhausen, a concentration camp not known but just as terrible as the others. And Sans Souci, an odd rococo castle where Voltaire spent some time. It was at Potsdam, where the map of Europe (from 1945 to 1989) was drawn by Churchill, Truman and Stalin.
And when we go to Berlin, he must go back a few years later, when the city will still face changed, for better or worse.
0 comments:
Post a Comment