Before I moved to Berlin, I visited twice. Both trips were at the height of summer, when the sun stayed out past 9 p.m., and every park looked like a Hobbiton backyard replete with checkered picnic blankets, piles of mountain cheese, and half-liter beer bottles. It was nice, at least between June and September. There was always a cool club to try out and, duh, anywhere is affordable compared to New York. But what I know now is that deciding to move to Berlin purely based on these wide-eyed summer visits was kind of like watching, say, a movie trailer for a musical that doesn’t make it clear that, by the way, this is a musical. And now it’s too late.
Granted, moving anywhere involves a period of post-Uhaul clarity, but I am holding firm on the belief that Berlin does a frightfully better job of hiding its shortcomings than anywhere else. It’s been eight years since I’ve moved here, and I am still finding new things to cringe at every day. Take the white people here, for instance. I have possibly never seen so many white people with dreadlocks. They are everywhere, and they’re always asking me things like, “Why can’t I say the N-word if it’s in a song?”, or explaining how they’re “color-blind,” or wondering at me why their sushi rice tastes weird.
Should you be able to shrug off the casual racism of these ultra-modern liberal Berliners, you still won’t escape the city’s overlay of graffiti, which rather than evincing some quality of ambient cosmopolitanship, sort of deadens the soul: “Clit.” “Love is love.” “Graffiti is liberty.” It’s not giving “counterculture” so much as it is the sensibility of a boomer director of a legacy nonprofit. In Berlin, I experience icks where I never thought possible. (But the graffiti is still better than the state of advertisements: “Bowl job, for free,” proclaims an ad for reusable bowls. A poster for high-ABV beer, featuring a giant pink vagina, promises to be “The most illegal beer in the world.”) The other day, I wandered into an art gallery in the heart of Berlin, and the exhibition du jour was an artist’s recording of a recent orgy. Berlin, baby! This is a city infected with a pre-teen’s idea of “being edgy.”
I could go on about the lack of taste. For example, Berlin is home to the worst-dressed people in the world. Everyone looks like they’ve assaulted a thrift store, but coincidentally this thrift store only carried everything two sizes too big. In time, one learns that the bad outfits are there to draw attention away from even-worse haircuts (no one on the planet besides Zendaya should be attempting micro bangs).
But the worst part of Berlin — or Germany, in general — has got to be the workplace. No one, neither Americans nor Germans, will agree with me on this, but I staunchly believe that 30 vacation days per year is TOO MANY VACATION DAYS. Throw a rock at any Berlin workplace, and you can bet that it’s rife with absenteeism and chaos.
This is what happens when people are constantly going away on hikes or visits to friends in Switzerland and Vienna. Trust me when I say that I have successfully worked at four separate Berlin-based companies, and I have never had to do more than two actual days of work per week. (Now that you mention it, I don’t even think I’m totally positive about what my current boss actually looks like. It’s been a while.) This sounds awesome in theory if you’re the type of person unconcerned with wanting to contribute meaningfully to society, but the end result is that everyone is a little bit pissy passive aggressive all the time. No one knows what anyone else does, and nothing gets done. I have learned zero new skills and absorbed almost no good art. But okay, last weekend in Vienna was pretty great.
—Mia Apfel
I know this is a hater column but this reminds of why I love winter in Berlin so much: you can go a couple of months without having to hear an American complain about art galleries before they come out again in spring
I work closely with my company's German office and it's true...the # of vacation days/holidays is insane, but I'm really just jealous.
Also, PLEASE make this a permanent newsletter. It has quickly become my favorite.