On my third day in Berlin, I couldn't help but think that i’d come to the city too late. Not because I was expecting it to be the anarchist anti-authoritarian city run by the punks that it’d seen it be in documentaries from the 90s, but because Berlin already didn't like me. “Berlin doesn't love you” wrote stickers on the walls. Other signs in marker pen around Kreuzberg wrote “NO tourists”, or, “NO hipsters”, or even “NO hipsters- especially not the US kind”. Savage. Ever since things like David Bowie’s stamp of approval on the city in the 70s, and VICE’s weekly article on Berlin’s “edgy underground club scene”, the city has accumulated an undeniable international hype. The buzz of Berlin has given hungry hipsters around the world a head spin as they drool at the online Berlin apartment listings with key point selling words like: ‘the new Kreuzberg’, promising walkable distance to upcoming art galleries and vegan restaurants. After all the holiday recounts by friends, films, and articles I've read on Berlin, the common denominator has always been how ‘unpretentiously cool’ the city is, and it always sounded so intriguing to me how those two adjectives could co-exist side by side.
I did Berlin with one of my closest friends from Perth, Luke. Standing at a U-bahn stop (Berlin’s very efficient inner-city railway system) on our first day, I realised that something wasn't right. Coming straight to Berlin from previously visiting family in Turkey and Greece, I looked down to see that I was still wearing my tan coloured sandals and white linen pants. It seemed like I was the only person not dressed in all black at the U-bahn stop.
“We should go opshopping,” I turned to Luke as we waited for our tram, “I’ve packed for the Mediterranean, not the Baltic”. Waiting at the same U-bahn stop the next day after a successful session of opshopping, I was finally dressed in head to toe black, just like everyone else at the U-bahn, right in the middle of summer. The style of fashion in East Berlin has a very celebrated, yet unspoken about aesthetic. When a collective of people are trying so hard to look like their not trying, there is an underlying pressure that you feel is being disguised. It’s like the paradox of Kreuzberg’s Hipster folk going to tremendous lengths to look original, but all end up looking the same. I was told by friends that in Berlin "you can get away with anything", but it seemed as if my white linen pants and sandals were an exception. Now without sounding like Carrie Bradshaw; I couldn't of helped but wondered at the time if Berlin’s hype of being ‘unpretentiously cool’ was destined to fail based on intent?
My sleeping in Berlin was done on a friends couch that I knew from university in Perth, who was studying in Berlin for a year. One afternoon he took me to his favourite coffee shop in Neukölln where we couldn't stop hearing Australian accents. We drank our coffee on the outdoor patio and said hello to the Australians sitting next us. Before we could ask them what they were doing in Berlin, they told us they were DJ’s from Sydney, and that this was their 3rd year in Berlin. Their monochrome XXXL large t-shirts were distracting on their skinny hard-partied looking bodies and hollow cheeks. Little did I know that this was the case for most expats that i'd speak to in the city. Every time I got into conversation with expats in Berlin, dressed in their soft-grudge sport-lux attire of course, they would inform me that they were either DJ’s, photographers, graphic designers, or some other freelancing artistic title that was the trendiest of that week. It’s the same group of people who lead the conflicting, yet increasingly fashionable lifestyle, of eating kale salads and drinking soy lattes during the day, but smoke a whole packet of cigarettes in the evening. The same ones who will rant for hours about making a difference to the planet if they see you sporting a plastic bag, but they’ll happily snort the white stuff fuelling the bloodbath that is Mexico’s drug cartel war. The ones who would never have a smartphone because they detest the increasingly luxury driven consumerist world, but they'll firmly remind you of their middle class status when you see a Macbook sitting on their desk in their apartment. It’s the ones who'll tell you that it's the expats who are ruining Berlin, but they’re an exception because they’re just, “here to like, help niche my art, and like, discover to who I am, man”.
