Saturday, April 14, 2018

Leaves, Flowers, New Office, Transit Books

After a week of weather reaching over 20°, and the flowering and leafing everywhere, I'd have to be very skeptical not to admit that it may be spring now after all. The final emergence of leaf sprays and catkins on the oak trees and knobbles on the tips of the chestnut tree branches, and the greening of weeds and shrubs has happened in the past few days, at least in my corner of Berlin. It's the earliest sign of the mad expansion of May. But there are also paint-red tulips in the grass median; and golden daffodils, purple and yellow and white crocuses, and blue as well as white chionodoxa; and bright yellow-flowering forsythia. These have been blossoming longer.

The company I work in has moved eastwards within the city, and my trip to work is at least twice as long now. But the trip is not so long anyway, and I like seeing corners of Berlin I haven't seen before. When I am not aboveground and staring at the buildings — I have also read about the new neighbourhood we are in, to get a sense of its history and architecture, most of which appears to be postwar Soviet-influenced GDR or post-1989 capitalist where the office itself is at — I am reading.

The office itself is so luxurious, as the managers and the human resources colleagues painstakingly planned the amenities for us all together with architects, that I feel spoiled. The last time I spent weeks at a time at such ease was when I was at UBC in Vancouver. That said, it feels weird to me to be elevated from a cash-strapped, precarious creative, old-fashioned bohemian environment like the neighbourhood we were in before, to the kind of middle-class post-war atmosphere that I remember from Canada.

But there is 'grit' in the new quarter. Homeless people camp on the sidewalks; a seething cauldron (if you'll forgive the silly expression) of house occupiers adorn their houses with protest banners rather than geraniums, and a pair of humourless police vans at the exit of the train station. Tiny businesses that are only a little less tiny than the ones at the old neighbourhood survive behind modest façades and scaffolding on side streets. Last week I pretended not to see a man who was peeing, as decorously as one could on a narrow sidewalk in a by-no-means deserted street, against a tree. (Despite all of the old neighbourhood's other proclivities like copious marijuana, shattered glass windows, and brawls to which the police was eventually called, this was a new experience to me.)

The new neighbourhood grew toward its present shape during the East German period, as I said, because it was largely de facto demolished by the urban battles at the end of World War II as the Soviets moved in from the East, and therefore an easy candidate for post-war development. When I was informing myself about it lazily via a certain online encyclopedia, I saw a photo of a house row that was reduced to three-cornered stumps, only fragments of remaining side wall grasping perpendicularly on the shortened fronts, the empty sky behind them; as the 'Trümmerfrauen' bent in their frocks out in the street to pick up the rubble; from this neighbourhood. And although I can be unsusceptible to these feelings most of the time, it was moving to me to know how much that street had changed.

The GDR-era residential houses are like a Soviet echo of tsarist architecture, that itself was meant to imitate 18th century European architecture: it's all pastel colours and clean lines and classicist influence, and in a strange reminder of the low buildings near the Prussian palaces in Potsdam, not as tall as the 5- to 6-storey 1890s-1920s buildings I'm used to. I think there are surprisingly few archetypal, featurelessly square and large 'Plattenbauten' apartment buildings in this neighbourhood. It might be as close to St. Petersburg as I'll ever get.

In side streets, older non-GDR apartment buildings from the turn of the century with cavernous balconies and arched windows have been kept; but they are pretty unadorned. On the other hand, I feel 'weirded out' by the large stores, banks, hotels and shopping centers that have grown up amongst them since the Reunification. Large scale, Potemkin façades, attempts at mass appeal, etc. — they might have similarities with what existed there before. Perhaps that's a spurious impression, however. I am beginning to see that I have been only in my corner of Berlin too long, and have grown too narrow-minded; I experience a culture shock even when setting foot on a city block I haven't seen before. Also, I work in one of those post-Reunification buildings and can't really complain that it's a hardship ...

Anyway, I've rambled and probably asserted utter nonsense. So, on to my reading: I think it has been heavier since I finished We Were Eight Years in Power within the past week or so. Reading books is a more engaging experience if they were written within the last ten or five years, I think; and a few lines in that book described the events of the Trump presidency so closely to the present that Ta-Nehisi Coates might as well have written them today. I made no progress in the foreword to Aristotle; instead I've gone between the Structure and Evolution of the Stars; Res Gestae Divi Augusti (I was delighted when I abruptly reached the end of the Res Gestae themselves, only to find long endnotes); and new books. One book is a collection of Joseph Roth's newspaper reports and letters from Ukraine and Eastern Europe generally during the inter-war period, which are written in a steely skeptical style. Like Thomas Mann's it has the griping, doubting and analyzing urban mindset that is still rife in Berlin. (But, thank goodness, is far easier to read than Mann's.) I hadn't expected it after reading the Tolstoyan-sounding descriptions of his Radetzky March — I thought his prose would be earnest, worthy, and longwinded.

The second book is a German-language biography of Federico García Lorca. I liked the descriptions of his childhood in Andalusia; even translated into German, the description of the mists and the trees and especially the poplars was magical. While still a child, of course, he moved from his birthplace to 'Asqueroso,' which I think means 'disgusting' in Spanish but doesn't come off badly in his biography, and Granada. Later he studied in Madrid and travelled around to New York, etc., bankrolled by his wealthy father. It's almost comical how his student life is a who's who of famous Spanish names: Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dalí, Manuel da Falla, etc., etc. What I find a little irritating with the book is that it demands a lot of mental exertion. It makes sense because Lorca was full of ideas, abstractions, and tangents; but it's not restful reading. But a far worse problem is I think not with the book, but with Lorca's biography itself: Lorca seems to have not respected consent very much when he was chasing erotically after men. The very worst episode is the one where he was in Cuba and, if I interpreted it correctly*, went around picking up 'mulattos,' to quote the word that the biography uses. It sounded like a bad situation to me — exploitation of people in precarious socioeconomic positions who could not defend themselves, where any pretense of being given a choice is essentially ludicrous. At a time where being gay was fiendishly difficult in Catholic Spain, it's definitely worth considering that Lorca could not develop healthy attitudes; but on the other hand that's not much of an excuse for making life difficult for other men, especially if they are gay themselves and don't need someone else to worsen their existence.

* [Edited to add] Here's the actual text from the biography: "Auch in Bezug auf sein Liebesleben schien die Insel eine aufregende Erfahrung zu sein, und noch Jahrzehnte nach seinem Besuch zirkulierten in Kuba angeblich Anekdoten, die sich auf Lorcas amouröse Abenteuer und seine Vorliebe für Mulatten bezogen." If they were indeed only rumours, I am being grossly unfair.

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