This was our weekend in Berlin – a fever dream of a city
A somewhat wild weekend – after all, you can't dance with Harry Styles in Berghain every Sunday. About dreams, projections and a special section of the Berlin population: the expats.
On Friday evening, I set out with a friend, we stroll through Neukölln , Hakan Demir smokes hand-rolled cigarettes in front of a Späti on Sonnenallee. We get lost in Das Labor on Fuldastraße, on the Google Maps page you can see a picture of a young woman who should be easily recognizable to young and social media-savvy Berliners as the Chinese influencer Jing Yu, who lives here, 170,000 followers, lifestyle content, a photogenic Dalmatian.
I saw her sitting on the doorstep of this shop, which is marked as a gallery on Maps. Music is pouring out, we go in, it's small and crowded, especially full of drunken dancers. Not exactly a vibe. There doesn't seem to be anything exciting going on this evening.
It's still the Berlinale. My phone flashes: a new Raya match. Raya is a dating app for the beautiful, rich or influential. For people who are famous or popular. Access by invitation, and even then only after checking the Instagram account. Some people wait forever for approval, even those with lots of followers. I saw Lewis Hamilton there once, but he's not really my type. And now he's taken, too, by Sofia Vergara.
Of course, not all potential matches are of this magnitude. And if you're only in Berlin, as I discovered, the app is hardly worth it anyway. It's much more exciting to use in New York or LA, or at the Berlinale, when people from the film industry come from all over.
Like the director from New York who is writing to me right away. His pictures and messages suggest that a date could be fun. We text back and forth a bit and arrange to meet for coffee on Saturday. The sun is shining, the ice has melted, crowds of people are flooding the streets. Everyone is talking about the elections. My very charming date and I only touch on the subject briefly, terribly of course, the thing about the shift to the right , he saw the Böhmermann video on the New York Times website. Then we talk about Berlin. The young man notes that he has also toyed with the idea of moving here. Not particularly original, I think to myself.
Berlin is a kind of projection screen for many young people around the world. What draws him here? "The dream of living in a libertine city," he says. Berlin - the capital of sexual freedom. When I go out in New York and tell people that I live in Berlin, they often immediately say: "I love Berlin! The Mecca of sexual freedom! And the clubs, you couldn't have anything like that here!"
An incredible number of young people are drawn here in search of a wide variety of forms of self-fulfillment. They make up a distinct population group whose importance for the cultural life of the city can hardly be underestimated. The subject of numerous conversations and anecdotes is the expats. Those people who, unlike refugees, come here of their own free will. In search of creative self-development, to work or simply to party: sex parties, drugs, excess.
What are these expats doing here? Why do they so often live in better apartments than Germans of the same age? Why do so many of them stay among themselves, in their bubbles?
In Search of AdventureMany of my friends from abroad have made their dream of moving to Berlin a reality. Artists, photographers, performers, filmmakers - only a few have German friends. They want to get to know the city, its promise of freedom, but not necessarily its people. Or bureaucracy . Or language. It's a kind of parallel world that sometimes opens up. Not all of them, but many of them live better than my German friends.
Some are primarily looking for adventure, others are here to work. Life in Berlin is simply easier than in many other places in the world, less economic pressure, accessible cultural offerings, good health care. For those who are used to New York or London rent prices, Berlin is still cheap. You can afford a pretty good lifestyle here, especially if your salary is not German. And the freedoms. Somehow it does exist, this Berlin experience. This feeling: This would not have been possible anywhere else.
The fact that in some places in Berlin only English is of course something to get worked up about - but what is much more serious is that the social structure is changing and rents are rising. People who grew up or were born in Germany, especially native Berliners, often say that expats have ruined the city. But they also make the city more exciting.
And my date? I actually like him quite a lot, despite the rather lame remark. We meet again on Sunday near his hotel and walk through the Tiergarten. Anne Will is also walking here with her new friend, who looks amazingly similar to her from a distance. I explain to my date who he is. He says he wants to go to Berghain later and asks if I want to come with him. I decline, after all I have already spent the last two Sundays there. Sometimes you just need a less wild weekend in this (fever) dream of a city.
Berliner-zeitung
