About 15 months ago, I’m in Berlin, and I’m slowly becoming grumpy as shit.
I’m on a Fantastic Family Holiday. I’ve been down to London, taken my kid to Buckingham Palace to stare at the guards (it’s a classic, as we say in our family). I’ve ridden one of the last double-decker buses and watched Muslim school kids in headscarves talk smack and while eating crisps. I’ve road-tripped up to Derbyshire to witness my oldest friend get married, and I’ve worn neon pink patent leather wedge heels while doing so. I myself have eaten All Sorts and roasted hog. The May weather has been glorious. The meadows are dotted with gamboling lambs. It was too hot on the wedding day to wear my spring-weight Liberty of London coat that was born to compliment my dress.
But it’s been two weeks, now, of Fantastic Family Holiday.
And that whole time, I’ve been with adored Husband, Son, Mother, or Friends, 24/7.
And now, in early June, it’s our last day in Berlin, and we add Distant Cousin D. to the posse. Distant Cousin D – we’ll call him DCD – is way distant. His grandfather and my maternal grandmother were cousins. But since he and my mother share a last name, and he resembles everybody on my mother’s side of the family, which is to say wistful, artistic, intelligent, gentlemanly, and unlikely to come out on top in a bench-cleaning brawl, he seems more closely related. DCD is Israeli, because his branch of the family got out and emigrated to Palestine when they could, but now he’s German, because he’s become a citizen, and he’s just finished art school in Berlin with a photography degree. He’s fluent in English, Hebrew, and German, and he’s an incredibly nice fellow, and we’ve spent the morning in his spotless and appealingly decorated Mitte apartment, looking at his work (and his girlfriend’s shoes, fabulous, feathered and delicate, of the Jimmy Choo genus, she was elsewhere) but, like I said, it’s been two weeks, and there’s something I desperately need.
And that’s to be alone, just for a day, an afternoon – oh, hell, an hour or two.
I need to do my own thing.
I must cease coordinating, cooperating, waiting, providing snacks for, listening to, and tolerating others, what with their needs and personalities. I must boycott wondering where the bathroom is, if there’s Wifi, or if anybody has a napkin. I must cast off my large, Chilewich tote bag laden with jackets, travel guides, water bottles, and trail mix that was purchased in a Hammersmith Tesco for the flight and has since gone melted.
I just need to shake these people loose for a little while, these people I call family, so that I can do what I need to do.
And that, my friends, is look at clothes, shoes, and bags.
Looking at clothes, shoes, and bags, is pure pleasure, is what it is. Don’t get me wrong, I can stare deeply and satisfyingly at a good painting for a long time. I can tromp over meadows and sigh with appreciation at a cairn, and gaze at my child until I want to weep the miracle of it all, and tuck into a good book, and consider how many angels can party on the head of a pin.
But there is deeply contemplative state that can be achieved only by browsing garments and accessories – ladies, can I get an amen – and lawd it’s time.
You get that it’s my last day in Berlin, right? That this is all the time I have left in my Woulda Coulda Shoulda Hometown. As this last glorious day speeds along yet crawls past, the streets taunt me with their liveliness and their fascinating boutiques, and it’s looking less and less likely that I’m going to have a shot at breaking away. Every cute bicycle that zips past, bearing a cute Berliner looking like a tear sheet from The Sartorialist, dares me to jump on and whither like the wind to the nearest bespoke shoe shop, Paul Smith storefront, or flea market.
DCD is showing us around his immediate neighborhood. We are walking down narrow streets, past cafes crowded with tourists. We are craning our necks to appreciate the vaulted ceiling of the Nikolaikirche, the oldest church in Berlin, recently reconstructed and reopened. Everywhere, there are memorials. Under our feet, DCD points out burnished plaques, cast in bronze by artist Gunter Demnig, and scattered around Mitte – and other neighborhoods and cities as well. Shaped like cobblestones, each one commemorates individual victims who were deported and murdered by the National Socialist regime. Demnig has installed them outside of the homes where the victims once lived. Demnig’s Stolpersteine (“Stumbling Stones”) illustrate the concept of “rememberance prompts,” an alternative approach to grand memorial art work, designed to make the passer-by stumble and think. The plaques are beautiful and chilling. We squat over them, reading the embossed details. I glance up from a brass stumbling stone – Henriette Fischer was her name, she was 18 when she was deported — to glimpse a pedaling girl, in grass green stacked heel pumps and black knee socks, a slim jumper dress, sharp bob, and giant black sunglasses, not distracted in the least by the stone bearing her name, instead headed somewhere wonderful, perhaps a job at a newspaper, or off for strong coffee and plum cake with a new boyfriend…is she the same Henriette Fischer? Could she have been? What separates these stylish Berliners I so want to hang with from the names on these brass cobblestones? Only seventy years.
And yet, I’m peckish, I’m snappish, and I want to shop.
On Grosse Hamburger Strasse, DCD points out a gap in the tightly packed buildings, a hole like a missing tooth, where an attractive residential building once stood. This is French artist Christian Boltanski’s work, The Missing House. Boltanksi researched the building’s former residents and discovered that the Jewish inhabitants had been expelled or deported by the Nazis. Plaques bearing their names, occupations, and dates they lived in the house are attached to the fire-wall of the adjacent building, a permanent shadow.
There are ghosts everywhere in Berlin, conjured beautifully.
That doesn’t mean I’m not growing ever desperate to scratch my fashion itch.
Suddenly, I stop in my tracks. Because I’ve turned, and there, right behind me, is Rianna In Berlin. A vintage store. With a terrifically clever window display. Needlepoint purses. Really good ones, not dingy or sad, but vibrantly colored. And stacks of Bakelite bangles. And…
“Listen,” I say to Mother, Distant Cousin, Husband and Son. “You guys go ahead. I need to go in here for a minute. I’ll meet you up the block in fifteen minutes, okay?”
“I’ll go with you,” says Husband. He is not one to shop. But perhaps he needs a break, too. We enter Rianna in Berlin, and life returns to my parched soul. The clothes are extravagantly bright and well-curated. The jewelry is chunky candy. The proprietress, perhaps Rianna herself, speaks English. We chat, and she wishes she lived in L.A., if such a thing can be imagined. I offer to trade lives with her. We laugh. I ogle an utterly divine bracelet that costs 80 euros. The proprietress fetches it from the case. I turn the bracelet in my hands. Oh, how I love bracelets, all piled on. Bracelets primarily indicate that I’m not on the clock, because I can’t wear anything on my wrists when I’m writing, which is what I spend most of every day doing. Am I going to spend 80 euros on a bracelet?
Oh, shit. Seriously? My fifteen minutes are up. That was a mere nibble of the deeply focused retail contemplation of which I’m capable. If this shop exists, right here in the center of town, what treasures await me in Kreuzberg? Freidrichshain? I will never know. Not on this trip.
Husband and I leave the shop. I vow to return. We make our way up the block. Mother, Son, and DCD haven’t gotten very far. We see them sitting quietly on a bench.
“What spectacular treasures did you find?” my Mother asks. But there is something in her voice. I turn to see what she sees. The bench my family occupies flanks the Grosse Hamburger Strasse Cemetary, the oldest of Berlin’s Jewish cemeteries. Prominent Berlin Jews were buried here, including the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, and the Jewish School for Boys occupied an adjacent building. But during Nazism, the Gestapo confiscated both buildings and converted them into internment centers or “Judenlager,” barred prisons that held Jews prior to their deportation.
More than 55,000 Jews were deported from this spot to extermination camps.
Fifty five thousand.
In 1943, the Jewish cemetery was destroyed on orders of the Gestapo. The Nazis desecrated the graves and turned the grounds into air raid shelters, the walls of which were reinforced with demolished gravestones. In April 1945, the authorities used the grounds as a mass grave for soldiers and civilians killed during Allied air raids. Today, a symbolic tombstone in honour of Moses Mendelssohn, as well as a sarcophagus filled with destroyed gravestones, are the only concrete reminders of the cemetery’s history. Approximately 3,000 war victims (only 2,000 are known by name) were buried there alongside approximately 3,000 Jewish dead.
Will Lambert’s bronze figural sculpture marks the site. Past the bronze figures, there’s a simple iron gate, and beyond that, a bright green lawn rolls out. I walk to the gate and stare out at the grass. I select a stone from the ground and place it on the memorial.
I feel sick with the thought of bracelets.
Longing for bracelets. Fretting over bracelets. Eighty euros for a bracelet.
Fifty-five thousand. A horror that can scarcely be imagined. Barely counted.
I sink onto the bench, ashamed of myself.
Flibbitygibbet.
How dare I want to shop when this entire city is a gravesite. Not just of my people. But also of My People. My actual ancestors. The Ebels. The Hirsches.
Where once I was grumpy, now I am tired and sick with myself.
But also, I am not dead.
Hitler didn’t get me. My parents made it out, and I made it back. With euros in my pocket and a fashion itch that will never be utterly scratched.
So maybe it is my birthright to moon over bracelets in Berlin. Maybe I must buy that bracelet, to prove how very alive I am, how much I am capable of enjoying myself, even here, in the very spot from which so many were swept away.
Maybe that’s the point of being in Berlin, and maybe someday of coming back.
To live, everyday, in that paradox. Live, goddammit. To go about my business among the ghosts. Rather than stumbling over remembrance, I could embody it, as I pile my bracelets on, one after the other.
This is all the time I have left.
