Our Own Private Germany

I first went to Berlin in December 2000. I was not even one week off the plane from Australia, and it was cold. Very cold. The wind ripped through my inadequate jacket and chilled me to the core. I remember very clearly venturing into the East. Along Unter den Linden, through Mitte and into Alexanderplatz. Even then, ten years after re-unification, it was grey but it was interesting. There were still buildings that didn't appear to have been touched for 50 years. Crumbling, battle scarred buildings that were evocative of everything I'd been taught as a school child.

Over the next five or six years, I must have traveled to Berlin around a dozen times. On each occasion I stayed in the same Mitte hotel, ate breakfast at the same cafe and tried to absorb an atmosphere that was completely different to my very rural upbringing in Australia.

My last visit to Berlin was in 2012, on business. Mitte was nothing like I remembered it. I couldn't find the old hotel, or the cafe, or the bars. The Spree was still there, and the Pergamon museum. Yet, something had certainly changed and I lost feeling for the city. Maybe it was a case of being older, perhaps just being there with different people, under different circumstances.

In 1989 and the early 1990s, I wasted a lot of time. Stoned or drunk, or just being an idiot. The majority of my late teens and early twenties were spent not particularly productively.

I spent a year in South Africa in 1992, before the first free elections in 1994. I treasure the time and friends I made. Yet, I spent my time in very rarefied circumstances, protected and cossetted from a lot of reality. If I look back on that time, I'm grateful for it, as my young immature self would have probably otherwise ended up dead in a gutter somewhere.

The people in this article probably wasted just as much time, stoned and drunk (maybe). Yet, looking back they were part of something. Part of a moment that turned modern Europe, and perhaps Western society, in a different direction. There was no real comment in the article about how they felt about that. At the time, they may not have been so consciously aware of their involvement in a fulcrum, but surely in retrospect they can look at their 1990s youth and appreciate how fortunate they were to be involved in that page of history.

During the last fourteen years, I've spent quite a lot of time in Eastern Europe, mostly Latvia and Ukraine. There is a smell. It's not a bad smell, it's just the smell of clocks running a little slower than in London, or New York, or Los Angeles, or indeed now in Berlin.

I find it interesting how many people mentioned smells when describing their first impression.

And just like in so many places, these people will become the establishment and will hold on to their position so tightly that a new generation will have to find somewhere else to go.

Except that in the West, we're now running out of places to go.

I don't get it. They have just occupied a building ?

NSFW.