Berlin has to vote again because of breakdowns. And some people ask themselves: “Are they actually doing nothing at all?” Why so many people still like to live in this city.
Sometimes you have the feeling that a soap opera is on in Germany that millions of people have a say in. Sometimes it’s about discarded mattresses on the side of the road, sometimes about messed-up construction projects like BER. The series can always be summed up in one sentence: “Someone screwed up again in Berlin.” Recently, the question has been raised as to how it could happen that an entire city had to repeat an election due to breakdowns.
It usually doesn’t take long for comments to come from other corners of the country. Bavaria’s Prime Minister Markus Söder (CSU) is one of those who like to have a pithy sentence ready. Now you know that life is a bit more complex. And if so many things go wrong in Berlin, why do so many people still move there?
“You can,” says Mazda Adli, “actually almost turn the question into an answer.” It is precisely the imperfect that makes Berlin very attractive. Adli is chief physician at the Berlin Fliedner Klinik, stress researcher at the Charité and, among other things, heads the research group neuro-urbanism, which deals with the influence of city life on the psyche.
Regional Bashing Stabilizer
The fact that malicious comments come from other regions of Germany does not seem to surprise him. “Regional bashing is particularly popular in Germany,” says Adli. This also serves to stabilize one’s own self-esteem. Most did so with a wink. And of course a city like Würzburg is much easier to manage than a multi-million city.
Berlin has always been a city that ticked somewhat dysfunctionally. “I once wrote in a book myself: ‘Berlin is going through a kind of permanent puberty,'” says stress researcher Adli. “Things are constantly changing. You always have to reinvent yourself. And as exhausting as that is, it’s attractive for people who are looking for exactly that.” The imperfect can also be a relief. “You don’t have to be perfect to count anything here.”
If you live in Berlin, you can – let’s say – observe all sorts of interesting things. In the subway station, the question often arises as to who threw up again. Adult males sometimes wear purple snowsuits. Moderator Bettina Rust recently posted a picture of a public trash can with plants on Instagram: “In Berlin we call it a vase.”
Berlin is the city of thigh tattoos, glazed endive salad and lighted takeaways. You can learn from your neighbors what “smoking tin” means – namely when someone has smoked drugs on aluminum foil in the stairwell. In the café you can get lavender-earl-grey “with oatmilk”. And at the counter under the department store escalator, a small beer for 2.30 euros.
When Lady Gaga sounds on the S-Bahn
Berlin is a city where people tend their allotments and love the lake. On the outskirts of the city, people live in single-family houses and in the rbb “Abendschau” some enthusiastically tell why something urgently needs to be done about an annoying detour. In a neighborhood portal, someone asks for a ball of yarn to finish knitting. And at noon you sometimes see people on the S-Bahn platform who, according to Lady Gaga, hear: “Just dance!”
Above all, however, Berlin is a city in which almost four million people spend some form of everyday life. Work, eat, sleep. Taking care of family and friends. Go out with the dog. Berlin’s governing mayor Franziska Giffey (SPD) often shows a middle-class picture of herself on Facebook. Giffey at the football stadium. Giffey at the Citizens’ Talk. Giffey making jam.
The city is not doing justice to the blanket banging on from the outside. And at the same time, people in Berlin also have the feeling that things are in a bad way. Discussions are then about ailing infrastructure and failed railways, school equipment and rising rents, controversial transport projects and the question of who will be able to afford the city in the long term.
Not everyone is allowed to criticize
The fact that the blanket “breakdown town” image rarely applies doesn’t mean that the people of Berlin don’t think about it themselves. Actor Ulrich Matthes finds a nice picture for it. “It’s like family,” says Matthes. You can complain to your parents yourself. “But when your classmates do that, you immediately throw yourself in front of your parents and tell the others: ‘You must be crazy.'”
“In the same way, I throw myself in front of the Berlin bashing from outside, but I’m increasingly a critical Berliner myself,” says Matthes, who works at the Deutsches Theater and was president of the German Film Academy. “As a native of Berlin, I caught myself thinking for the first time in my life in the run-up to these elections: ‘This time you really don’t know who to vote for.'”
If you want to delve deeper into the question of why things are going wrong in Berlin, you can, for example, deal with the history of the city and its idiosyncratic structure. In addition to the Red Town Hall, there are the districts, each as large as a city and each with its own mayor. Reforms of this structure have been discussed for a long time. Some believe that there is also a problem with political personnel. One thesis: The city of Berlin is in competition with federal politics in Berlin.
More accountability needed
When it comes to the question of how good the politicians are at the Berlin state level, Matthes quotes a saying from his grandmother: “The singer’s politeness is silent.” He also sees people as having a duty: “I have the feeling that every Berliner should – I’ve thought so for years – simply feel more responsible for the success of this city.” This applies to traffic, cleanliness and tone in the city.
“What really disturbed me, for example, to be anecdotal for a moment: After the city cleaning had picked up the blue paper bins from me, a huge cardboard lid fell out of the garbage can in front of my front door,” says Matthes on the phone. “And I picked up this cardboard lid and then threw it in the empty blue bins.” He just thought, “Well, why shouldn’t I do that?”
“And at that moment, two women, around 40, walked past, half laughing about it. And one said to the other: “Ah, now there’s probably a Kehrwoche in Berlin, too,” says Matthes. But for him it’s one It was a matter of course.” Someone will have to bend down for it. So how much will it cost me to do it myself?”
In pajama pants to the weekly market
Serenity can tip over into indifference. And then it can happen that systems reinforce each other. Let’s take a harmless example – pajama bottoms. You can go to the weekly market in Berlin with it, no one will look. “Exactly,” says Adli. “But there is also something ambivalent about it.” Because if you can basically go out in pajama bottoms, then people do it too.
In his opinion, Berlin manages well to endure differences, the “coexistence of the very bourgeois side up to the autonomous scene”. “The city does not fall apart between its many communities, scenes and social groups. Instead, despite all the differences, it is a whole.” That is an achievement that other cities could not easily imitate. “You can maybe say that about New York.”
If you ask Adli what annoys him about Berlin, he can think of a concrete example. “It annoys me that the Gendarmenmarkt is now being dug up for two years,” he says. “It annoys me because I think: ‘Man, the supposedly most beautiful place in Europe, which attracts so many tourists and from which we all live, has – as someone recently wrote – become the largest sandpit in the city.’ And no one know why it has to take so long.”
When is a city a city?
Apparently uncoordinated barriers could also be a nuisance. “Of course it’s also a bad 0815 lament to complain about a road closure,” says Adli. In his opinion, the fact that something bothers you is part of living in a city. “A city that doesn’t annoy us, a city that doesn’t sometimes stress us out, isn’t a city either.”
Incidentally, Adli mentioned an important point in the debate: “In the end, people vote on their behavior about Berlin. Namely, that more people are moving to Berlin than away from Berlin.” The city is growing. Some have been complaining and moaning about Berlin for years, but they still live here. “And that shows one thing above all: that – unlike what is said in Bavaria – it’s quite good the way it is.”
If you ask Ulrich Matthes what Berlin means to him, he replies that Berlin is his home. “I’m even touched when I happen to hear the song from the 1950s, ‘The islander doesn’t lose his calm’. Do you know that?” Matthes asks and begins to sing. “It’s a West Berlin song, a classic song from the Cold War. When I hear this song, I think: Yes, that’s a typical Berlin characteristic. Berliners don’t lose their calm.”