berlin
Berlin! Insanity.
It sprawls in every direction. You walk for blocks through anonymous gritty urban blight only to emerge in front of Rem Koolhaus or a former SS bunker-turned-memorial or a park full of beautiful mohawked punk kids sitting in the sun with beer and dogs.
Sixty years ago Berlin was rubble and twenty years ago it was prison and today it is a construction site, and I can’t help feeling that the Germans ought to scrap the idea of Berlin altogether and try again somewhere else, somewhere without the legacy of violence and inhumanity and destruction that keeps reinventing itself on the spot.
Some places are sacred and some are haunted and neither should be built upon, and just because we don’t understand the mechanisms of this invisible geography doesn’t mean we shouldn’t respect its rules.
I don’t like being on trains in Germany. I don’t like the German language and I don’t like bratwurst, and the beer is good but I drink too much of it whenever I think too hard about this city.
It sprawls in every direction. You walk for blocks through anonymous gritty urban blight only to emerge in front of Rem Koolhaus or a former SS bunker-turned-memorial or a park full of beautiful mohawked punk kids sitting in the sun with beer and dogs.
Sixty years ago Berlin was rubble and twenty years ago it was prison and today it is a construction site, and I can’t help feeling that the Germans ought to scrap the idea of Berlin altogether and try again somewhere else, somewhere without the legacy of violence and inhumanity and destruction that keeps reinventing itself on the spot.
Some places are sacred and some are haunted and neither should be built upon, and just because we don’t understand the mechanisms of this invisible geography doesn’t mean we shouldn’t respect its rules.
I don’t like being on trains in Germany. I don’t like the German language and I don’t like bratwurst, and the beer is good but I drink too much of it whenever I think too hard about this city.
posted by tortaluga at 7:34 PM
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