The Intentional Berliner

Intro - 06.08. 16:22

It was near the end of July and I was walking home from the Kohlenquelle over the foot bridge. In the corner I saw a guy sitting at a table with three signs in front of him, offering a conversation on three different subjects. I was curious. I’ve seen a lot of things in Berlin, but folks looking for a chat is rare. And that's how I met Anton. 

Originally from Tacoma, Washington in the States, I’ve been in Berlin since September of 2012. I moved here for the language, which people often find surprising. Since 2024, I’ve been involved in a few NGO’s in my spare time. During the day I’m a mild mannered computer guy; but at night I volunteer for all kinds of projects. I’ve been working with Wahlheymat and became a member of the board this year; and I wrote so many articles for our joint project with the Berliner Morgenpost – Wahlheymat Post – that they gave me my own column: The Intentional Berliner. I’m also involved with Hejmo in Neukölln where I help teach at the Open Music School and act as a Tischleiter at the Sprachcafé. 

So, when Anton put out the call for volunteers for Emigration For The Future, it seemed like a good use of my time and talents. I’ll be poking my nose around the event and posting observations and musings. If you see me, say hi. English is obviously my native language but I’m fluent in German and French too. Unfortunately not Russian…yet. 

Exbrache 07.08. 13:21

Met up with Ani and Anton and started spit balling plans. As Anton laid out the schedule, the scale of the festival started to sink in. Have I over promised what I can actually deliver on? This is gonna be a full time thing for the rest of the weekend. 

We walked to the bridge through Mauerpark and considered options to put up the poster Anton had made last night. 

I’m now sitting in Exbrache. It's my first time in the space. So typical Berlin: something organic and imaginative, stuck away and hidden in a corner of Wedding through a small gate at the edge of a Lidl parking lot. This city rewards explorers. There's prep happening here and it feels like the calm before the storm. There's pressure in the air to execute on something that obviously took a ton of prep. The scale of it is still sinking in. 

After Action Report 07.08. 22:27

We headed back to Chto Delat for the 14:00 lecture on the science of wine. I can’t remember the last time that I was the least educated, least accomplished person in the room. The lecture was pretty high level but presented the material well…and it helped that there was plenty of wine to “sample”. There was a quick tour through what goes into the taste of wine; and also a look at the technology fueled reality of today. I guess vintners are using drones now too. Plus all the chemistry. There was no mention, though, of the pressure that happens in all food industries where the producers seek consistency above all else. Every bottle has to be the same as the last which adds new constraints and logistic problems, producing a monotone product. We no longer talk about the virtues of a 1962 Bordeaux; the whole thing of being able to tell one year from another has just disappeared from popular culture. It used to be a thing up into the 80s. Didn’t James Bond have a preferred year of Dom Perignon in the early films? 

Also the first slide going over the history of wine placed first instances 9000 years ago and dedicated cultivation 6000 years. I think the speaker should have mentioned “human wine consumption”. Animals have been observed eating rotten fruit for the alcohol content, like birds. My dad once told me a story about a house he was living in with a trellis of grape plants in the back. One year the fruit went unharvested and rotted on the vine. And one morning my father went out to the back yard to find a murder of drunk crows, flapping around the yard. He said that one was hanging upside down by one leg from the branch of a tree and was staring at him from one eye, the other closed shut tight. If you’ve ever been drunk enough to have the spins and see double, you know the closing-one-eye-trick. My dad liked to tell stories, though; so there’s no way to know if any of this is true. But animals DO get up to shenanigans like this. The first being to drink wine was in all likelihood not a human. 

After the lecture we sat around and chatted for a few hours. Played some guitar. Had some more wine. I really can’t remember the last time I had such an interesting and engaging conversation with a group of strangers. I spend so much time by myself and in my Kiez. I played a few Renaissance pieces on the guitar and was totally surprised when Nikolai said immediately, “oh yes, Renaissance, very nice!” What??!?!?!?! I rarely run into anyone who even knows what Renaissance music sounds like at all, let alone recognize it immediately. After this chance encounter with Anton two weeks ago on the foot bridge, I had apparently found a way into a room of “my people”: a bunch of well read, well lived weirdos who are deeply curious and in the business of being alive. What a difference from the people at my office job, cranking out software for health insurance companies! Or the people I help with my volunteer work who are usually not in Berlin by choice. The whole thing was something I haven’t experienced since my days on the deck of the coffee shop, The Temple of the Bean, in Tacoma, WA back in the 90s. 

The next lecturer came in and set up. The Secret Life of Ions: Biomolecules to Quantum Computing. I got an intro into ion traps and how they’re used to inspect and dissect biomolecules. It was high-level and novice friendly and very accessible. And it was completely awesome! Even though I have no background in science, I still find it fascinating and have learned some stuff on my own. As the lecturer was moving through the explanation of this mind melting tech she was using, I had to ask, “how old is this tech? Where did it come from?” 

“1905.”

“Uh…. ok.”

We are surrounded by these engineering marvels and a vast body of science, thinking and data about how the world works; and we take it all for granted, never giving a moment's thought to the amount of complexity that we swim in. It’s just dazing. 

The Q&A for the lecture went long, and, again, it was a lovely chat that went all over the place. I vaguely remember defending German bureaucracy at one point.  

After that we wanted to get some dinner before heading back to Exbrache, and scooted to Rosenthaler Platz. God damn, Mitte is expensive now! We went to a Döner place and I paid 8€50 for half a chicken and an Ayran; I had a shock looking at the prices on the menu board. Everything cost 2 or 3 Euros more. As a friend I knew back in Pullman, Washington once said, “I have seen the future; and it is expensive.” For fuck sake, people! The prices everywhere have creeped up, but this was a whole new level. And, if you live in Berlin, you know how it is. You praise the city for the different neighborhoods with their distinct flare; it’s like a bunch of different smaller cities strapped together into one big city. But, still, you hardly ever leave your Kiez. You’ve got all the stores and restaurants that you know that are all within walking distance.  If you put a gun to my head, I couldn’t tell you the last time I ate dinner in Mitte. Shoot away, bub! At Nabil, my local Schwarma place, I can get a Schwarma Halloumi Box for 6€. Fuck a bunch of Mitte!  

Finally, we headed back to Exbrache and caught the last bit of an art film based on a book from the famous Strugatsky brothers: the “Roadside Picnic”, “Stalker”, thing. I think I watched “Stalker” once back in the 90s and didn’t have much patience for it. The film kept trying to convince me how dangerous the “Zone” was, but it just looked like a very low budget, weighty film with people acting like danger was around every corner while a lot of not-danger was happening. Maybe I should give it another go. It WAS 30 years ago. Anyway, the atmosphere was very Russian. I didn’t hear a word of English or German. In our hidden grove full of old wooden benches, twilight turned into night while the black and white video played on. One of the people in the audience kept speaking an endless stream of commentary at no one and everyone, interrupted every now and again with flights of song…all in Russian. Many people in the crowd knew each other and greeted each other on friendly terms. I knew only Anton, Ani and David. I was a stranger in a strange land. I waited for the film to finish up and then said my goodbyes. No one was being openly hostile, but I was in a place where I didn’t speak the language. And it’s been a long time since that was the case. 

Tomorrow I’m heading back to Chto Delat at 10:30 and then we’ll see where the day takes me. As I said, I didn’t really appreciate the scope of this thing when I held up my hand and offered to volunteer. It’s challenging – and even scary in parts – but I’m still curious to see where the rabbit hole leads.  

Что делать 08.08. 17:15

I promised to be at Chto Delat at 10:30 to get on the same page and exchange feedback. I took the metro and was there in 20 minutes, and there was coffee waiting. Always a neighborly thing to do. Anyway, I looked over the schedule with Anton; there was a plan ready that would involve a mix of academic and street performance art. But, in the words of Von Moltke, “no plan survives its first touch of the enemy. 

Lisa from Counterclockwise was already setting up for her workshop: Utopia Under Construction. She had a large map of Berlin laid out on the table, printed on a tiny scale and covered in plastic. It took me a solid 10 minutes to find my apartment; I located Mauerpark and then traced my daily walk past Haus der Sinne, Kohlenquelle, over the foot bridge where I met Anton, past Arnimplatz and down Erich-Weinert to Humannplatz. My apartment was just at the map’s edge. Next to the map was a collection of supplies: clay, markers, tracing paper, small notepads. The project which would take place over two days invited us to think about the problems in Berlin – transport, open spaces, today's solutions that won’t address tomorrow's problems – and then to brainstorm fixes. The goal at the end of the workshop would be to produce a short film using stop animation. It’s very ambitious for 8 hours. 

People started filing in and we immediately fell into conversation, looking over the map. I was shooting my mouth off about the pro-car politicians in Berlin and how much they prioritize cars, when Lisa asked the group, “who here is an architect?” The majority raised their hands. I realized right away that the people at the table knew a lot more than I did about the subject that I was spouting about and got a lot less preachy and more listeny. 

The discussion started in ernest. There were a lot of ideas and perspectives at the table. And we had a very good turn out for the workshop. Lisa passed out clay to everyone. She never said the word, “ergotherapy”, but I could see what she was doing: “just do things with your hands while we go into this lecture.” I appreciated it. She started her presentation that she announced as “boring” and she got a lot of push back from the crowd. The lecture was well put together and introduced a ton of very theoretical architects from around the world that were dreaming up all kinds of things from the 20s into the the 80s. At the top of the list was the question: how does space define and shape the people who live in it? It’s a great question and reminds me of this youtube video I recently found about Soviet science-fiction and the focus on “what kind of person would this future produce?” She got into her presentation which she struggled through: a combination of English and public speaking anxiety. I had a lot of sympathy when two of the participants just left. She was doing her best as she showed us concept drawings and a short video from 1972 – I swear I saw the roman numerals MCMLXXII in the title cards – which seemed maybe ironic… I don’t know if it was meant as such and would need more context. The 70s were really weird, man. There was more conversation after that. Some of it got heated. Templehofer Feld came up. There was a lot about the Kibutz and that flowed into the genocide in Palinistine. It made my stomach clench. As a Native American, I know what cultural genocide and land stealing looks like. I grew up in the shadow of it. I know where I stand, but to engage in argument is rough. Thankfully, that chapter didn’t last long. Still, the images of these various concepts of cities dreamed up in the last century stuck with me. They were haunting. Lisa asked us at the end what we thought of the art we had seen and my answer was immediate, “no human would want to live in any of that.” Humans, when they’re honest with themselves and left to their own devices, want to live in close communities. They want the “Kiez” that Berlin offers to so many. They need sun and air and plants; and they need a place where they can interact with each other, form community. That’s what makes the primates happy. Living in some of kind of box – whether in space or on the ocean or on The Line – is miserable. We are being sold a life that nobody wants. I love Berlin for this very reason: it is made for humans.   

Even though the whole thing went long, we wrapped up. I went down the block to get some water. The Späti around the way is run by a guy from Polen… I think… and he was so friendly. The prices were in line with Berlin. I got a bottle of Spree Quelle and headed back for the next lecture. This event has offered so many different things, but I found myself really drawn to the academic stuff. I love the talks, and I love the conversation after. When you’re up for deeper science, it’s hard to find your people. But here I was, and there they were. I’m into the street art stuff, but I’d rather talk about metro planning with a bunch of architects or nuclear physics with a physicists any day. 

And there we were. Nuclear physics and the A bomb. The next lecture started off light, going over the basics of nuclear physics. Again, it was aimed at dummies…like me. So I could follow along. There was no scary math to send me back to checking my phone. And then we got to the whole, “and this is how we turn this into a weapon…and this is what the weapon does.” The thing is, I was born in and grew up near the end of the Cold War. There was nothing in these slides I didn’t already know. I sat through the lecture thinking, “yes! Deterrent! This is the stupidest idea ever!” At the end when we got the Q&A, I couldn’t help saying, “we can understand the problem and we can see the graphs. It’s fucking bad. But I never really grasped the horror until I started reading eye-witness accounts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That’s when it really hit home what these weapons do.” If you haven’t read the eye-witness accounts, I suggest you do; I also suggest you be in a good place, mentally, because it’s rough. For the record, I think the US dropped the bombs on Japan to see what would happen. It was an experiment, pure and simple. After discovering this power they could have picked any uninhabited location and said, “this is what we’ve got. Stop the war, or you’ll get this.” They didn’t do any of that. They really wanted to know what would happen if you dropped it on a city.   

I had time for lunch and I  headed back to Rosenthaler Plazt. I thought there was a Mexican place there, but, after walking up and down, I couldn’t find it. I ended up at the Curry Wurst joint on Tor Straße. It’s pretty good for a Curry Wurst and it has been there forever. 

I then headed back to the space. I was trying to do this write up when the next speaker came in. I asked him, “are you here for the talk?” He answered, “I’m giving the talk!” What can you say to that?

Mischa set up and we gabbed; apparently he was a big fan of golden age sci-fi when he was a kid. I was so curious for his talk on astronomy. I followed all the steps of the James Web Telescope and the New Horizons project. He was going to talk about the Einstein Telescope that is designed to detect gravity waves. Here. On Earth. I was so into it. I love everything space. These people who are doing space stuff, just ask them about their sci-fi library, or what they’re reading. It’s a guaranteed in. 

The talk was about graviton waves and graviton wave detectors. It’s a very new science that doesn’t have a lot of history. It did open my mind, though. If two black holes collide, then a lot of their mass turns into energy that we can see, using incredibly expensive detectors. It changed my whole idea of how a black hole works. When I was a kid, these things were entirely theoretical like exo planets; and now we're observing them. Crazy!