Moloch Berlin: A Warning

By Steffen Blaese

Years ago, I published a guide for people moving to Berlin. Since then, I've been plagued by a guilty conscience. I portrayed the city in a positive light. Everything good in the city comes from outside. I wanted to make it look attractive so that people would move here and find their way around.

The city has been living off a certain narrative for years: Come to Berlin and find fulfillment. The city was open, tolerant and, above all, relatively cheap. But today, only the newcomers believe in this promise. At the time I wrote the book, you could still have hope for the city. Tempi passati! Those were the days! The glamour has disappeared. The city has become an abomination.

I have years of experience with the natives of this stinking swine's den. I hate to put the negative story in here, but I like to capture the reality. You can only understand the soul of a city by looking into its abysses. Everything about dog shit, the Berlin air, violence and crime, hipsters, Nazis and punks, inhuman architecture, bad administration, provincialism, corruption, unemployment, human filth, psychopaths, depravity, decay, and much more – a short urban study full of gruesome facts. Not for the faint of heart, it's going to be dark.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Steffen Blaese
• Release date: Mar 23, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224668281

Book preview

Introduction

For decades, Berlin has enjoyed a reputation as an international metropolis that attracts people from all over the world. However, the international acclaim showered upon Berlin, particularly from Britain and the USA, seems almost incredulous. According to these narratives, Berlin stands as a hub of innovation and entrepreneurship, a city pulsating with visionaries, dreamers, and individualists. It boasts a unique array of attractions, a renowned cultural and artistic scene, and serves as a favored tourist destination with its plethora of museums, theaters, operas, and galleries. Berlin is celebrated for its iconic architecture, extensive green spaces, and a vibrant nightlife featuring diverse bars, clubs, and music venues. The parties last longer and are more frivolous. The city's public transportation system is heralded as one of the world's best – efficient, user-friendly, and extensive. Culinary delights range from international cuisine to street food, all set against a backdrop of liberal and cosmopolitan living. The people are described as tolerant, open-minded, and effortlessly cool. Berlin, they claim, is the epitome of the coolest city in Germany and the only major German city worth residing in. Affordable rents, accessible public transportation, and reasonably priced food further sweeten the deal, providing endless opportunities for personal and professional growth.

But are these accolades really referring to the same city? Where people cram onto overcrowded trains, contend with rail replacement services, and confront new service disruptions daily? Where ordinary residents worry about being priced out of their own homes? Where parents don't know where to take their children, and the playgrounds are rotten or occupied by drunks? Where people stumble over rubbish dumped on the pavements and rats roam freely in subway stations, trash cans, and even on the streets in search of sustenance? Where parks are devoid of greenery due to litter? Do these experts, columnists, and feature writers suffer from perceptual disorders? Have they ever truly experienced Berlin? A reduction in their ›happy pills‹ by about 10% might offer a reality check – you can be too cheerful.

Contrary to the upbeat narrative, Berlin's reality is far less idyllic. Transportation may function, and essential services like electricity and water are available (albeit semi-clean). But the city falls short of the glorified image painted by its global admirers. True, when compared to a slum in India, a banlieue in France, a poor neighborhood in Detroit, or the ass side of the world, Berlin may seem like a glorious never-never land of joy, luxury, and leisure. Yet, let's be honest – what sets Berlin apart from any other nondescript place on Earth? Which is, at least from the point of view of the people of Berlin, pretty much every other place in the world. From our vantage point, the city doesn't shine any brighter; it's not the coolest city in the world. It is a sad, hostile, and soul-draining place. Living in Berlin offers little sense – it will drag you down, if not immediately, then after some time.

Berlin may be the coveted destination that every hillbilly seems to yearn for. A steady stream of newcomers are convinced that they will find the cure for their insignificant existence here. Every day, new naive people arrive who can't imagine anything better than being here. Every bumpkin moving here thinks that will bring a wild, fresh shot of excitement into their otherwise sad lives. Whether they come by horse-drawn carriage or airplane, the allure remains the same. »I may come from the end of the world,« they think, »but once in Berlin, everything will change. Like a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis, I'll shed my uninspiring life. The city's radiant light will transform me. I'll proudly declare myself a Berliner, living life to the fullest. Nothing is trivial anymore, just brilliant.«

There are more people living in Berlin than ever before. Can so many people be wrong? Yes, and very much so. They quickly realize – at least the smart ones – that Berlin calls, but when you answer, it turns and runs away. Everyone has heard the stories of dubbos who left their small hick town behind to work where other people go on vacation. They borrow money from friends and family, invest in a nice restaurant, and after a year or so, the dream crashes against reality.

They find themselves broke, can't go back, and can't admit they have failed, concealing failure behind a façade of positivity. Persisting in painting a rosy picture, they yearn to encounter another unsuspecting thicko who will buy their dream so they can finally get out of their self-imposed purgatory. It's the same with Berlin. Do not fall for the hype. Or you'll be the fool of the month. One of many.

Contrary to the glamorous façade, Berlin is a shithole of epic proportions – a cacophony of odors, noise, and unsavory scenes. Berlin is poop-everywhere-right for dogs – and for humans, too. It's trash-strewn streets, torched cars, a dysfunctional administration, open drug dealing with no law enforcement, and run-down schools. It's bad food, disgusting and dirty restaurants, and lousy service that will ruin your stomach. Berlin is anti-life, I mean absolutely anti-life in a negative sense. Berliners begrudge you everything and don't like being free. They only talk about freedom, but when shtf, they just moan and groan and call for the nanny state. There is no other country riddled with so many ridiculous laws, and people call Germany a free country? Nothing but sheit. It's no place for good people. It is a breeding ground for psychopaths of all kinds.

The city's residents, perched halfway between New York and Bombay, believe Berlin is the world's navel. They see themselves as easygoing, cool, and cosmopolitan, and what not. The fact that there is life outside the capital is known to them, but incomprehensible. Fellow countrymen are pigeonholed as backward mountain Germans or inarticulate fish heads, residing either by the sea in the north or in the southern mountains. Outside Berlin, on the other hand, Berliners are perceived as arrogant, snobbish, and unfriendly.

Contrary to the romanticized image perpetuated by columnists, Berlin faces a starkly different perception within Germany. The country delights in mocking its capital. It's ridiculed and insulted for all it's worth. Hardly any other city has such a bad press as Berlin, with columnists pouring buckets of dirt on the city, claiming it either overvalues or undervalues itself. The myth of Berlin, it seems, may be far removed from the gritty reality experienced by its residents.

Nobody likes the Berliners. The average German clings to medieval tribal mentalities, finding solace in regional identities like Saxon, Bavarian, Hessian, or Thuringian. And with national patriotism in disrepute anyway, tribalism is all they have left. Everyone can find their tribe. Except for the people of Berlin. They defy categorization, standing alone as inhabitants of a city without a distinct tribal affiliation. This uniqueness doesn't endear them to others, fostering a general dislike for Berliners. Germany is not an open society, and it is not a good place for outsiders. Germans are very rude in everyday situations, and grappling with the remnants of tribalism, they don't like those who don't neatly fit into regional molds. This dislike is deeply ingrained.

You don't even have to have been there to find fault with the city. Too loud, too dirty, too criminal, too big, too unfriendly, too much trash and graffiti, too many hipsters and unemployed, too much debt and too many posh people. Berliners don't care what some hillbillies think about Berlin. Only those who live in Berlin are allowed to rant about it. It is by no means a disgrace not to have been born in Berlin. When it comes to the city's famous children, there are barely a dozen, with half of them belonging to the band Rammstein.

In the quest for fairness, perhaps the issue lies not with Berlin itself, but with its inhabitants. Everyone knows the trick: In the summer, you place a jar of honey on the porch at a distance so that the wasps will leave you alone. The jar exerts an irresistible attraction on the pesky pests. All the troublemakers will gather there. Berlin is like the honey jar, only it's not filled with honey, it's filled with steaming shit. And it doesn't attract wasps, it attracts flies. It is irresistible to annoying people of all kinds, from professional beggars and protesters to self-proclaimed creatives and long-term students, for whom a city full of »CLIT« graffiti on house walls is somehow culture and drugs available at all times is an acceptable way of life.

The country should actually be grateful for this. Tirelessly, year after year, the capital sucks the human scum out of the provinces. It is a melting pot for morons, losers and down-and-outs, an insufferable conglomeration of permanently misunderstood self-proclaimed life artists. Incompetent, unskilled, clueless and useless. They hang out in coffee shops, drinking decaf quatschissimo with soy milk, pretending to do something on their laptops, looking for girls or boys to talk to about their »projects«. Projects – that sounds exciting and thrilling, not like you can't get anything done. In the socialist planned economy, projects were called »five-year plans«. But none of these failures here plan that far ahead. The city is a moloch of laziness and chitchat.

Unemployment in Berlin stands as the highest in the country, a dubious distinction that persists even without the bunglers in government. Financial concerns take a back seat for those summoned by the muse of creativity, whether poets, singers, or felt designers. In this city, there's no need for artists to demean themselves for filthy lucre.

The truth is that people here are stingy to the bone. They have no idea about money theory, and they have never heard that money has to flow. Elsewhere, they at least pass the hat around for the artist. Here they give them nothing, and that automatically revalues the artists. And why should they? After all, culture in Germany – from small galleries to opera houses and major theaters – is largely funded by taxes.

Yet, gaining access to these resources requires established networks, typically limited to those with at least a third-generation Berliner pedigree. Earning a substantial income is a rare feat. In fact, you can't make that little money anywhere else, though this reality is somewhat mitigated by the city's affordability. Berliners need not toil as strenuously to eke out a living compared to other locales.

Anyone in Berlin can do what they want without worrying about paying clientele. Mummy and Daddy from faraway Shittansburg send a little money once a month, providing a financial safety net. In the worst-case scenario, people in their early thirties who are forced to ease the burden on their parents' finances give up their backbreaking jobs as late risers and fake freelancers and take on a part-time job for the first time in their lives, perhaps as a barista in a notorious coffee shop chain.

Don't worry, in Berlin, any job is hailed as a dream job. Even the hookers have college degrees. But few people seem to align their careers with their genuine aspirations, and the happiness they've yearned for remains somehow missing. Everyone wants to work in the creative industries. But because there are so few jobs, there is brutal wage dumping. There is hardly any gainful employment, but all the more body work, relationship work, and work with the past.

Jobs are reserved for the bourgeoisie anyway, and the question »What do you do for a living?« is asked here only with contempt. Berliners are more concerned with enjoying life than accumulating material wealth. They are proud of the fact that the city is a »laboratory«, that visions flourish here as well as business elsewhere. Social welfare serves as a financial crutch for many, while the pitiful rest, the cogs in the wheel who are not lucky enough to be kept afloat by their parents, flock to public transportation morning and evening and have to listen to the same crappy hype stories over and over again. For the average Joe, the cost of living rises and the quality of life diminishes.

Nothing you achieve here is worth anything. All that is done here could have been done somewhere else. Everything good in Berlin comes from somewhere else. Berliners are naturally greedy for everything new. That's what they are obliged to do here, and they don't care about genuine substance as long as the appearance is maintained. A self-centered ethos prevails, rendering recognition for genuine talent a rarity. If you are really good at what you do, hardly anyone here notices because everyone is too busy with themselves. Hubris is one of the milder terms to describe the locals.

Art in Berlin? It sucks, it's just an ego prosthesis, a desperate cry for attention with the most pathetic superficialities because no one cares about you. Everyone fantasizes about being happy in their lives, wasting years in incredibly cool creative industries. At some point, they realize that it was all bullshit. That they could die right now, and maybe that would be the best thing that could happen in the rest of their totally messed-up lives. Behind the carefully maintained mirage, this is what poisons the urban atmosphere. This is what the newly arrived Berliners have no sense of: the omnipresent resentment and contempt that people have for each other. Berlin is an ugly shithole. People make a city worth living in, and the Berliners are just an ugly bunch without soul or heart.

At first glance, the people who come here seem normal. They tell themselves they have good reasons for staying – reasons that don't really exist. Work? Aesthetics? Fulfillment? No such thing. If you come here to work, you will find no friends, a digital backwardness, serious language problems, and – unless you are an alcoholic – a boring choice of leisure activities. Nowhere is it louder, dirtier, or more hectic. The background noise of the city is a penetrating tinnitus. If you like it, there's something wrong with you. Urban flair? A station toilet has that too. Disgusting, loud, dirty, and gray, with construction sites and traffic jams everywhere – dit is Berlin!

Of course, there are nice people in Berlin. And some good locations. But you can find that everywhere. And like everywhere else in the world, these are mostly tourist traps spruced up to attract the clueless. The ads never show people urinating in the street. And not everywhere do you have to wade through human dreck to get anywhere. The best thing about Berlin is that you can get away quickly by car.

A Brief History of Berlin, Briefly

In Thea von Harbou's »Metropolis«, the novel that inspired her husband Fritz Lang's famous silent film (1927), the mother devours her children:

»And the machine which has sucked out and gulped down the spinal marrow and brain of the man and has wiped out the hollows in his skull with the soft, long tongue of its soft, long hissing, the machine gleams in its silver-velvet radiance, anointed with oil, beautiful, infallible – Baal and Moloch, Huitzilopochtli and Durgha. Your great glorious, dreadful city of Metropolis roars out, proclaiming that she is hungry for fresh human marrow and human brain and then the living food rolls on, like a stream, into the machine-rooms, which are like temples, and that, just used, is thrown up...«

»Berlin, city of the north and of death, the windows frozen like the eyes of the dying [...] Oh, you sick, festering city: the fear of your mob covers your wrinkled skin like cold lava.« This is how Yvan Goll opened his novel »Sodom Berlin« in 1929, about the city from which death was sent into the world a little over a decade earlier and which would bring death and destruction to even more people a decade later.

The architect David Chipperfield once said that every city has its history, but »in Berlin, the ground is sodden with history.« Two world wars started here. Both were lost. Fought to the last bullet. First for power and colonial expansion, then for the most murderous ideology in human history. And after the last bullet was fired, fifteen-year-olds were sent out with rifles without ammunition and with broomsticks. And when that failed too, they surrendered, claiming they had been liberated, not defeated. One moment they were a murderous gang of criminals, and the next they knew nothing about neighbors who had disappeared or about crematoria and gas chambers.

And in the East, they claimed that all the Nazis had fled to the West before the glorious Red Army. They certified a solid Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past) and a unique culture of remembrance and responsibility. And to be on the safe side, they built an »anti-fascist wall.« To keep the Nazis out, they said, but more importantly to keep their own people from fleeing. Those who tried to flee were machine-gunned in the back.

Rome is respectfully called »The Eternal City«, Prague »The Golden City«. New York may not be a capital city, but it is »The Big Apple«. Copenhagen is »The City«. Dutch people love »Damsko«. The Spanish mock »Madriz«, the Swiss the »Sleeping Pill« Bern. Over a thousand bridges have earned Amsterdam the nickname »Venice of the North«. Paris is known as the »City of Fashion« and as the »City of Light«. Berlin has many nicknames, most of them unflattering but mostly accurate.

In 1706, the poet Erdmann Wircker paid tribute to his Prussian ruler, Frederick I, for having »built a Spree Athens« with Berlin. »Spree-Athens« is not a nickname but a deliberate misstatement. The former settlement of Germanic traders and Slavic fishermen was, and still is, far from being the cradle of Western culture.

According to Western European historians, the name of the settlement goes back to the leader of the bear clan, Albrecht, the first Margrave of Brandenburg and founder of the Ascanian dynasty. However, this version is not supported by East European historians. Most of the place names east of the Elbe come from Slavic languages. In Slavic, there is the word »ber«, which means »swamp«. And the suffix »in« means a place of residence. So Berlin is simply »the Swamp City«. A name that speaks for itself.

Compared to other European capitals, Berlin is young. No Romans settled here, no Greek cathedrals were built here. When Paris was already home to 110,000 people, various barbarian tribes roamed the wasteland between the rivers Elbe and Oder in search of a comfortable place to live. The city's history began, ironically, as a divided town called Berlin-Cölln in a modest, swampy hinterland on either side of the Spree.

Stendhal once asked: »What would have possessed people to found a city in the middle of all this sand?« The area had no natural resources or fortifications. It was an inaccessible marshland with a few pine forests. But it was conveniently located at the crossroads of medieval trade routes. Two small villages with a few wooden houses on a trade route to the left and right of what is now the Mühlendamm bridge. Two ferry piers, so to speak.

Nobody knows exactly when Berlin and Cölln were founded. There is no trace of the founding documents since they were destroyed in the great fire of St. Laurence's Day in 1380. Documentary evidence of Berlin and its neighbor Cölln is only found decades after the first inhabitants settled there. The first known mention of Cölln is dated October 28, 1237. And as Cölln and Berlin were twin towns, this date is also considered Berlin's birthday.

All other capitals of Europe came into being differently than Berlin. From the very beginning, they were the natural centers of the countries to which all forces were directed. Berlin was different. It was never a natural center, never the predetermined capital of Germany. For centuries, it was hardly mentioned when it came to the affairs of the German Empire. Located on its northeastern periphery, it was too far away from the core areas of German culture and history. The stream of German culture from the sources in the west and south of Germany barely reached there. Then it dried up, swallowed up by the Ice Age dunes on whose sands Berlin is built. This city has always been a marginal existence, and in some ways, it still is.

The two rival moieties were in no hurry to unite. While the other indigenous peoples of Europe were working hard to bring their cities up to world standards as quickly as possible, the Berliners did not care for the hurly-burly of the medieval world. They ostentatiously stayed out of everything, and no matter what was offered to them, they always rejected it. Eventually, in 1307, Berlin and Cölln teamed up to lead the defense of the Brandenburg region and defeat the robber barons who terrorized merchants and peasants in the area.

Until 1448, Berlin remained an almost autonomous outpost of the empire. However, following the forceful quelling of citizens' resistance opposing the construction of a castle on Spree Island and the subsequent imposition of land concessions, control of the city shifted to Frederick II, the Elector of Brandenburg. He was a member of the Swabian Hohenzollern dynasty, which was to shape the country's destiny for the next five centuries. This very castle was later expanded, blown up in 1950 and since rebuilt, served to demonstrate victory over the rebellious Berliners and to suppress them more effectively. The Hohenzollerns, over time, established Berlin as their residence and designated it the capital of the Mark Brandenburg.

Life was apparently simple in the 15th century, as the historian Trithemius noted: »Life here consists of nothing but eating and drinking.« While Notre-Dame added a touch of class to Paris and Westminster Abbey to London, Berlin was not yet making much of a splash. Plagues and fires repeatedly depopulated the city, bringing trade and commerce to a standstill barely after it had recovered. Even the electors themselves lived modestly. Their lives were centered around their feudal responsibilities, managing their lands, overseeing agricultural production, and collecting rents from their tenants.

The last chance to completely do without Berlin was lost in 1648. Like the rest of Germany, the city was devastated by the Thirty Years' War. In a futile attempt to navigate the religious conflicts, the rulers of Brandenburg sought to befriend both Protestant and Catholic armies but ended up alienating both, ultimately leaving an undefended Berlin vulnerable to its own destiny. In the war's aftermath, the city found itself reduced to a mere 556 and 379 households in the respective districts of Berlin and Kölln. The city withered under Swedish rule. The misery was so bad that people considered abandoning the shitpit. But then, unfortunately, something came up, and they stayed.

During the Northern Wars (1674-1679), the territory of the Hohenzollerns was expanded until it became the powerful Kingdom of Prussia in 1701. After Frederick I had crowned himself king, he made Brandenburg a Prussian province and Berlin the capital of Prussia. From here, he wanted to enforce his policy of »blood and iron«. Berlin remained an unloved place, dominating the northern Germanic realm above all militarily.

During the reign of Frederick II of Prussia (1740-1786), later called »The Grea»«, popularly known as »Old Fritz«, the influence of the military on the capital of