Going Dutch with German Writers (8): Not going Dutch, but going for a walk

Who?

David Wagner is a writer of, as I’ve just established, seven books – novels, poetry, collections of articles and essays. His most recent, Leben, won the Prize of the Leipzig Book Fair for fiction. He lives in Berlin and doesn’t like cycling in the city, so he does a lot of walking. Also he’s had a liver transplant, so it felt a little tactless to invite him out drinking. Instead, I suggested we go for a walk together.

Where?

Berlin-Mitte, from Rosenthaler Platz to Karl-Marx-Allee to Klosterstraße to Weinmeisterstraße.

What?

Fritz Zitrone, Bionade

What did we talk about?

We start off, I think, talking about the book David’s working on right now. It’s a re-release of his 2001 collection In Berlin, which I have on my shelves and read some years ago. He’s revisiting many of the places he described back then and adding updates, if you like, about how they’ve changed. Is there a basic pattern, I ask, to the way places have developed? Most of them have got posher, is the answer in a nutshell. But there have been a few surprises, like the tenacity of the trailer-dwellers in the Lohmühlen-Wagenburg. I talk about a photo project I did to accompany a translation, of Inka Parei’s Die Schattenboxerin, where I visited several of the settings and took photos of what they look like now. The contrasts were sometimes startling – what was once an abandoned railway shed is now a plush café – but some places have hardly changed at all, like Schöneweide. What has he got left to visit? Kino International – actually, why don’t we just walk there now? So we do.

On the way we chat about banalities – David is afraid he’ll have to pay tax now, having written an award-winning book that people are actually buying, but he’s still well behind with his tax returns even though his life is in rather good working order at the moment. And I ask him what I’ve been really wanting to know: does he drink? He only drinks with his doctor, he tells me. I think that might not be strictly true. Is it difficult, I ask, remembering how boring I used to find drunk people when I didn’t drink for two years. Not really, not now. It was tougher when he was younger but now it’s not such a big deal. Julya Rabinowich told me not drinking made it very hard to meet men, but I suggest David doesn’t have a problem in that department. No, he says, he’s never found it hard to meet men. I laugh.

We approach the cinema building from behind, around the corner of Rathaus Mitte (concrete and blue bricks). I talk about the last time I was here, at a club night “for girls and their friends” where my friend and I felt a little out of place, not least because we were about a decade older than all the other women. The cinema is a great dancing location actually; it felt like the foyer and first floor were made for precisely that purpose. In daylight, and sober, it’s even more impressive, from the heteronormative exterior relief (his words) complete with baby elephant to the golden ceiling on the ground floor. David points out the real light-bulbs mounted in the centres of the square metallic plates. They’re not the energy-saving kind, which would look ridiculous; they must have been hoarding them for years. I wonder, now, whether there’s some kind of secret former-GDR light-bulb store equivalent to the EU butter mountain.

We walk upstairs to the bar, which now has mirror balls mounted from the ceiling between the original chandeliers. Very minor changes have been made to the place’s East-Berlin charm, and now everything appears slightly camp and yet very tasteful, including the friendly man who sells us our drinks. We sit down facing the glass front. At this point it finally occurs to David that I’m planning to write about the afternoon; perhaps I hadn’t made it quite clear enough. I’m pleased he managed to fit me in though, because he’s a very busy man. I have a moment of dizziness when he says he’s going to write about the afternoon too, for his book, and I worry we’ll both get trapped in a spiral of writing about each other writing about each other, like when a magazine shows a woman reading the same magazine on its cover and I fear I might fall in and get stuck inside one of those miniature pictures. Then I have a little fantasy about translating a piece by David about me writing about David and David writing about me, but I keep it to myself.

So we talk about books for a while. Does he feel under pressure to read his contemporaries? Not so much – he likes to read writers from elsewhere too, and classics. He wrote a regular column on literature for the magazine Merkur for a while, which meant he noticed certain tendencies – writers of certain ages often write about certain things, like the twenty-somethings with their anti-parent novels, which he enjoys; he mentions Antonia Baum, whose book he found good and angry. I counter with middle-aged men writing about affairs with younger women, something I can’t be bothered to read about; David comes right back at me with women centering short novels around oddball males. I feel slightly offended and tell a story about my personal oddball male, the gardener along the River Spree between Friedrichstraße and Monbijoupark, who knits and fishes and knows all about ornithology – but then again, I’m not planning to write a book about him.

A very adventurous place

I used to live over there – I point out of the window – so we set off again for some more walking. Schillingstraße has come up in the world since 1997. There’s a butcher’s shop in a container, a one-euro shop, a hairdresser, a drinks store complete with a display of beer bottles – empty? Yes, empty – and quite a lot of green. The night before, I was talking to a couple of women from Leipzig who complained about Berlin not being green enough. Pointing out tiny patches of grass, lush bushes and trees becomes something of a tongue-in-cheek leitmotif. I’m often on the brink of a twee comment – ah, we must always take note of the positive things in life, no matter how small – but I suspect David wouldn’t appreciate it. The old supermarket (I say Kaufhalle to pretend I have East German roots; David doesn’t react – either he sees through my pathetic ploy or he doesn’t notice) was a club for a while, he tells me, and soon it’ll be a letters museum. We peer through the window and two men in work clothes stare back from a sofa. I smile; they don’t.

Across Holzmarktstraße to the bridge, where the pillars holding up the S-Bahn viaduct are hollow on one side, studded with bumps the size of plums. Someone has stuck coloured tape to one of them to make it into a miniature climbing wall. David shows me where he once found a geocache with a girlfriend. The pillars would make great dead letter boxes or drug caches, he says. It suddenly seems like a very adventurous place, underneath the bridge at Jannowitzbrücke. We head back west along the river, tourists in our own town as he puts it. It’s fun. A sudden rain falls and we shelter under a tree, pressing closer and closer against the trunk, but it’s soon over. And then we keep going, more green (now wet) and Klosterstraße, again suddenly a fascinating place full of gorgeous old buildings we’ve never noticed before. David says he used to walk around blindly, not interested in the buildings around him and only ever going to the same handful of places. But then there’s the ruined Klosterkirche, and even I’ve never been inside it. We walk down steps to get in; the ground level used to be much lower, says David, and I’m skeptical but of course he’s right. It just doesn’t look as old as it is: thirteenth century. It’s open to the elements (bombed in 1944) and wet, and yet still churchy in that there are people inside who smile and nod and say hello. A woman in a kiosk turns the visitors’ book around invitingly as we approach; neither of us takes the hint.

The place reminds me of a dry dock, lower than the rest of the city. And it reminds me that Berlin’s centre has shifted so many times. David says it’s because Berlin’s so young in comparison to Paris, say, and because it’s made up of villages. But haven’t lots of cities come about that way, I ask, like London? True, he says – he spent three months in London last year. Sometimes, I say, I get the feeling people construct a lot of myths around Berlin because so many things have happened here. But I feel like I’m not expressing myself clearly, although this time I don’t have alcohol as an excuse. Or perhaps I’m just trying to provoke an argument for no good reason.

We head back towards home because I have to cook for my daughter. Across Grunerstraße at risk of life and limb, then through the delightful Rathauspassagen shopping mall, where we somehow arrive at the story that David comes here to meet women at the ice-cream bar, seeing as he doesn’t drink. It’s a delightful idea but I have to disappoint you, ladies – he’s taken. We’re both getting really hungry, shaky-hands kind of hungry, and David points out we should have got something to eat after all. He’s right, and I turned down his suggestion when we met at Rosenthaler Platz. Sometimes people who are right about things I’m wrong about get on my nerves. David doesn’t, strangely.

We end up talking about our daughters, who are of similar ages. Neither of us really wants me to write about them. David wrote about his daughter and his mother in his book Spricht das Kind. And he did so very discreetly, which I imagine must have been very difficult. What I do want to write about though is shared custody arrangements. Because I wonder whether we’re not asking too much of our kids, making them commute to and fro between their parents. I sometimes wish the kids got to stay in one place, and the parents took turns living with them. But then you’d need three flats, David points out, and would the parents’ new partners move to and fro with them? OK, not well thought out. I don’t mind though. Does the shared custody model work in places where housing isn’t affordable? And as Berlin gets more and more expensive, will couples end up staying together because they can’t afford two flats with space for their kids? That would be terrible; imagine the hell. The effect of rent levels on family structures. David says he thinks the new model is definitely better than the old days – he spends much more time with his daughter than he ever got with his own father (and the same certainly goes for my family).

We dip into the U8 at Weinmeisterstraße – not an attractive station – and say goodbye on the train. At home, I re-read his piece about the cinema from In Berlin and realize it’s not possible that he used to walk around blindly. His description is precise and intelligent, splashed with subtle humour and close observation. I feel rather humbled. And of course the idea that he might write about me is pure vain fantasy. The texts are about place, not people. In a way that’s a relief because it means that this piece of writing doesn’t have to compete with his piece on the same subject. But still.

Hangover?

No.