Post #132: The Unbearable Lighting of Berlin

22 Aug. 2024 (Last full day in the city, and in Europe)

     I have often asked myself just what it is about Bangkok, despite its many problems and defects, that makes it such a comfortable place for me to live, and why Berlin should have the opposite effect even though I grew up there and once loved it very much.

     Putting the two side by side, it is by no means obviously that Bangkok is the more appealing city. Certainly there is much eye-catching ugliness in Berlin, but there are plenty of eyesores in Bangkok too, and much that would be decidedly unattractive if it weren’t for a certain elusive quality about the place—a special Thai touch—that can transform the most unlikely corners into charming spots. I have a hard time putting my finger on what exactly that magical quality consists in, and why I feel its absence so keenly and painfully in these contemporary European parts. It’s connected to the human factor, not the buildings, and to the Buddhist influences, no doubt. It creates a mood, an atmosphere, and the best I can do is to think of it as a kind of lighting on the scenery of life.

     The home of my younger years, once upon a time so very dear to my heart, and with so much to recommend it today, at least for the visitor, has a way, a manner, a favored style of lighting (I speak metaphorically not literally!) that spoils almost everything for me. Of course there are a host of obvious ills in the city that might dampen one’s enthusiasm: the pervasive filthiness and bad upkeep, the grumpiness of many locals, the general creakiness that makes the new Berlin nearly a satire on the old Prussian virtues with which it is still sometimes associated abroad. No, the trains do not run on time here; the administration is not lean and efficient; the work-ethic is remarkable mostly in the negative; the new airport took thirty years to get ready, with an almost comical succession of bumps along the road; and a recent election was carried out so poorly that the courts stepped in and cancelled much of it. Peinlich, say the ancestral spirits: embarrassing to the point of mortification.

     But I am less concerned with these obvious defects, which an enthusiast might forgive and which might apply with equal force to equivalent issues in Thailand. What I am after is something more subtle, a matter more of mood and manner than substance. One of my oldest and closest friends (we were already in pre-kindergarten together at the age of two: the anti-authoritarian Kinderladen kind, running around naked, finger-painting, and biting each other) speaks of the irredeemable joylessness of our German culture. But he is far from joyless himself, thus a living refutation of the claim that Germanness must take such a form out of sheer inner necessity.

     The language, as it is spoken and written these days, is much implicated in the bad lighting as I see it, but again, it was once an idiom for “thinkers and poets,” as the Germans used to describe their national character. If ever a man understood the need for delicate lighting it was the national icon, Goethe, and he had plenty of worthy successors. Besides, the Austrians speak German too, and for all the troubles afflicting their national character, then or now, a propensity towards bad lighting was never one of them, quite the contrary. Hence the stark difference of mood and atmosphere between Vienna and Berlin. (Sharp tongues might wag and say that Vienna is all about the lighting, to the exclusion of anything more substantive; I shall have to leave that delicate subject for another day.)

     The new Berlin has changed almost beyond recognition from the old Prussian capital, the Germania of the Nazis, or the East-Berlin franchise of the great Communist project of the twentieth century. The West-Berlin counter-culture of the 1960s and 70s (and the 80s and 90s too, before history came to an end, as far as I am concerned) has left imprints that are perhaps more clearly visible still—but it all is all held together, culturally, not by a firm sense of tradition, as in other places, but by an ever-critical distance, if not the outright repudiation of the things of the past. Berlin is a postmodern city not so much by choice as by necessity: there is no one thread from which a convincing tapestry could be woven, and the different colors of wool that are available for the spinning neither fit together very well, nor recommend themselves to single use.

     To postmodern spirits and hipsters of all kinds, this most incongruous of cities recommends itself precisely because of its disjointed identity, and because for many generations, even in the days of the old Empire, it was a magnet for escapees from the mainstream, who naturally proceeded to set up their own regime of implicit norms and understandings, no less binding than anyone else’s.

     In fairness to the genius of the place, such as it is, the strange combination of disparate (or even altogether incompatible) elements does make for a rather interesting mix, and it is no wonder that Berliners old and new take much pride in that unruly aspect of their city. What is conspicuously missing, however, is the light touch, the finesse, the delicate lighting that I’ve been talking about. The sharp tongues I invoked above might say that this quality was never much at home in Prussia, and they may be as right as they are about Vienna at the other extreme. That said, Karl Friedrich Schinkel (motto: it would be undutiful if one wished to appear more than one is) was hardly a nobody, but the Prussian architect par excellence, and I see no legitimate grounds on which he could be denied the laurels of finezza. What separates the sleeping lions that once adorned the graves of the fallen heroes (and the Iron Cross as Schinkel designed it)* and their twentieth-century counterparts, let alone their twenty-first century demise, is no mere stretch or leap, but a deluge and a cataclysm.

     It is evident to this day that Berlin was, historically, no polished metropolis like Paris or London (or Vienna, the old imperial capital of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, so called), but a poverty-stricken provincial outpost that acquired significance only very late in the great game played by the European nation states with each other. A relatively rough place it would have been, then, when Napoleon rode with masterful contempt through the Brandenburg Gate in 1806 and encouraged his troops to exercise their seigneurial rights over the store rooms and sleeping-quarters of the city, to say nothing of cutting Prussia in half and humiliating her royals. (A largely forgotten dimension to the catastrophe of 1914 that makes a cameo appearance in my article on the peace that could not be once the Great War had broken out, see my Academia page.)

     Though a measure of traditional coarseness may be native to the place, then, that’s not quite what I am getting at. The contemporary lighting that bothers me so was surely not there from the beginning, but came into existence in the course of a particularly troubled history this past century-and-change. Nor is the bad lighting a strictly universal phenomenon in these Teutonic parts; as the contemporary German aesthetic still leaves room for untimely gentler notes, in places like Heidelberg for example, so Berlin has its more tender parts, no doubt. Even so, the melancholy fact remains that I cannot open a German newspaper, watch German TV for more than a few minutes, walk the streets of Berlin for any length of time, or even spend my time with the dearest of German friends, or my parents, without being disturbed and upset by the uncongenial lighting.

     It’s the tone that makes the music, according to a common German saying—a much-needed reminder in a culture that is not known for its ease with diplomacy and tactfulness. In a like spirit, one might say that the lighting makes the picture, and the mood that goes with it. Imagine having to eat even your favorite food (or to make love!) in the kind of clinical, glaring lighting that would be entirely appropriate in an operating room, a morgue, or a slaughterhouse. Cast in such an unforgiving light, would not the most sensuous appeals fall flat or become outright repellent? They would for me.

     I am not saying that this deathly-disgusting mood is the one that Berlin puts me in, as if it were a hospital or a place of butchery and death. That dimension of things is real enough too, but needs no further expounding in 2024. The historical poisons, though much abated, remain in the ground, a kind of magnetic cultural force-field that continues to distort things in a detrimental way and affects the lighting in subtle ways. Black Holes, after all, have their most noticeable effect on what is visible for afar and what is not.

     I don’t wish to issue any historical and political indictments; that has been done to excess these past hundred years, both from within and from without. I am only noticing that something about the mental atmosphere, about the kinds of lamps most in use here, still has a way of spoiling the fun for me, while Bangkok, with a political history that is not for the faint of heart either, has the opposite effect despite everything—the heat, the pollution, the noise, the crowds, the awful architecture, the creaking infrastructure, the corruption, and a host of other problems one could adduce to its disadvantage. I am not saying that these problems don’t matter, any more than I am denying Berlin its fair share of virtues and beauties—only that the lighting effect is so powerful, for me at least, that it makes both the problems in the one case and the merits in the other look secondary, despite the fact that neither disappears from views.

     The extreme modernism that is typical of Berlin, blended with heavy doses of postmodernism, must have something to do with it. The Reichstag and the rebuilt royal palace downtown, both done in a hybrid style, illustrate the problem vividly. The older parts retain some of their traditional atmosphere, while the new elements, including the matching subway stations, take the bad-lighting dynamic to extremes. And yet it’s not about the years alone: mark the contrast with the equally new subway station built in Bangkok, on the Blue Line, only a handful years ago, likewise near their old royal palace in the most historical quarter of the city. (The many old trees, blooming gloriously in summer time, do much to soften the harsh effects in Berlin; their relative scarcity in Bangkok is sorely felt; but where they remain they are often sacred trees, housing spirits, and that makes up for their numerical dearth very nicely.)

     Lighting affects different people in different ways, admittedly. My dear mom, owing to weakening eyes, lights her kitchen with bulbs so glaring that I would find the effect highly unappetizing—but she not only does not mind in the least, she would find my perspective bizarre. (Her cooking is at any rate most beautifully “lit” in the sense I am trying to convey here.) When I came home from my first sighting of the very pinnacle of “bad lighting” that is the new Berlin palace subway station, it was impossible to make either of my parents see what I was talking about. To them it was the Bangkok equivalent, in its quiet but forceful majesty, that was the oddity. Talk of water and its peculiarities may not make much sense to fish for whom it is their natural element, as David Foster Wallace observed in his 2005 commencement address at Kenyon College.

     I remember how astounded I was whenever I looked up from the street in Singapore and saw bedrooms in the ubiquitous HDB housing blocks lit in a manner that would have made me instantly lose all carnal interest. Extremely low fertility rates even by contemporary standards may suggest that the effect is not entirely lost on the residents either, but presumably most would be as puzzled as my mom if I raised the issue with them. Perhaps, to take the argument another step further, there are fetishists (in Berlin especially) who can only get excited under the glare that is such a killjoy to me; but then one of the reasons why Berlin is not for me is that I am not a fetishist, and do not wish to be.

     To make us love a country, Edmund Burke observed, it ought to be lovely. I could not agree more. But who, alas, could call Berlin lovely with a straight face, for all that may recommend the place? More likely, the votaries of the city and what it represents would brush off my objections as somehow beside the point. Which is no more than the lighting problem once again, approached from a different angle.

     I am reminded, I know not how sensibly, of Nietzsche’s proclamation in his Prelude to The Gay Science:** “Ja! Ich weiß, woher ich stamme!” To wit:

Yes, I know from where I came!

Ever hungry, ever flame,

Self-consuming fire’s glee.

Light is all that I engender,

Ash whatever I surrender:

Flame am I most certainly.

     Like he, I know my origins well enough, what I owe to them, and how much of them I carry with me wherever I may wander. But to consume myself, I prefer to go elsewhere. Like Bangkok for example.

*On proud display at the Invalidenfriedhof, for example, atop the memorial for Gerhard von Scharnhorst (d. 1813). I stumbled upon another such lion by chance yesterday, at Alt-Lietzow near Richard-Wagner-Platz. No pilgrim to the aforementioned cemetery should miss the touching tribute Frederick the Great paid to his confidant and favorite general Hans Karl von Winterfeldt (d. 1757): “He was a good man, a soulful man; he was my friend.” Schinkel’s idea of a  fitting war memorial in the understated Prussian style, with plenty of his crosses, still stands at the peak of Viktoriapark in Kreuzberg. Both sites are used by contemporary Berliners mostly for walking their dogs and letting them relieve themselves freely on the once-hallowed ground. If one in ten had the faintest idea what the sites are about, despite ample inscriptions, I would be surprised.

**Rhyme 62: Ecce Homo! The translation is my own, with a bow to Walter Kaufmann’s version.