Berlin Berlin…

Well it’s slightly late in coming, but then I gave up any claim to frequent posting a loooong time ago…

Anyway, I had a birthday recently - my 26^th - and thought to myself that rather than do what I’ve usually done these past few years, namely go into a bit of a sulk and try to ignore it in the misguided belief that this will somehow lessen the misery of knowing that my years are ticking inexorably by, I ought to do something to mark the occasion. So when longstanding friend Pete mentioned a vague desire to visit one of Europe’s most historically troubled but now vibrant and cosmopolitan cities, I didn’t hesitate to jump in and suggest I go too in order to cheer myself up. Pete’s brother and acquaintance of mine for many years Luke also seemed up for the idea, and so it was that we found ourselves on a cheap yet very cheerful AirBerlin flight from Stanstead to Berlin Tegel near the end of last February.

After the usual delay in locating our hotel (somewhat far out of town near the snappily-titled Hochhuhn Schonhausen tram stop) we unpacked and promptly ventured into town, assuming we wouldn’t need to venture too far before finding the legendary Berlin nightlife and drinking dens of sleazy ill-repute that us simple-minded twenty-somethings had heard so much about.

Two and a bit hours of trudging around the general vicinity of Alexanderplatz later, the most we’d managed to find was an ex-pat-friendly Irish bar which was nice enough, but hardly the echt experience we were after. It did give us an opportunity to sample the well-known ‘beer’ going by the name of Berliner Weiser however, though alas besides its use as a colourful, exotic prop in a cheesy holiday photo there’s very little to recommend this bastard cross between Bavarian pilsner and Panda Pop soda – it comes in either red or green, looks like it’s meant for kids and tastes like fruit-flavoured soap.

The next three days largely consisted of the three of us spending a great of time shooting around town on and trams courtesy of the magnificent integrated public transport they have there, seeing the usual touristy sights such as the concrete syringe that dominates Berlin skyline known as the TV Tower (seen up there from below and from within looking down), the Brandenburg gate and drinking as many different varieties of beer that we possibly could. German purity laws a wonderful, wonderful thing…

The highlight of it all though was probably what we found ourselves doing on the final night we were there. The other two had expressed a general wish to see some genuine cabaret – with my German heritage I myself was keen to just what this equivalent (sort of) to Britain’s music hall and stand-up tradition was actually like. After some guide book perusal, we settled for the Kleine Nacht Revue, a small place located somewhere along Kufurtdamstraße.

Very small, as it turned out. We got there around half ten, were given a very warm welcome and ushered into a modestly sized room containing a bar, maybe a dozen or so tables, a sound booth and a small stage area. We ordered our overpriced (though not shockingly so) drinks settled in and thus the show began.

One of the gents who’d ushered us in (who looked remarkably similar to British actor David Warner) promptly took to the stage and proceeded to reel off a series of impenetrable monologues and songs, one of which I’m pretty sure concerned the sex life of a middle-aged woman from Baden-Baden, though I could be wrong.

Throughout this we’d been served our drinks by two rather attractive hostesses – when David Warner had finished his bawdy routines, one of them disappeared and then reappeared on stage naked from the waste down and performed what could conceivably be seen a piece of interpretive dance – in reality though, it was a striptease, albeit one done in the best possible taste.

Now, here’s the thing – I make no apologies about calling myself a feminist (honest guv), and I do have some genuine issues regarding the exploitative nature of so much pornography, not to mention the deplorable modern trend of treating women as little more than pneumatic sex objects for the gratification of baying bovine males (thank you FHM, Nuts, Zoo and all your detestable ilk – you mark my words, there’ll be one out soon titled Testicles: For Men with Balls).

That said, sex is nothing to be scared of and should of course be celebrated – just not used, debased, commercially tapped, sold off and used to beat people with in order to make them feel inadequate. And yes, all of this was running through my mind as I watched the first hostess and the second do their scantily clad, erotic ‘thang’. Over the next two hours the pattern basically went – naked or near naked dance bit with blonde hostess, David Warner’s stand up, naked dance bit with brunette hostess, back to Herr Warner, blonde hostess and so on with a 15 minute break between each one. The pacing was good, giving us a chance to have a few flustered and sardonic words between us and exchange pleasantries with some of the locals, though it was slightly disconcerting having our drinks orders enthusiastically taken by women who were flashing their bits at us only moments before.

Yep, all in all we were in smoky, Weimar-style ‘men looking at the women looking at the men with an occasionally bored, always detached look in their eyes territory’, at least until the blonde hostess got up to sing a number about her ‘disposable man’ or some such while wearing a wispy, wafer-thin barely-there dress and saw fit to drag yours truly up onstage for a ‘dance’ – with her leading and me mugging helplessly. I would have enjoyed it far more if I hadn’t been able to hear Luke and Pete’s cackling over the top of the pre-recorded music she was singing to. And frankly, I can’t help but suspect that some ‘hey, let’s make us a fool of ze Englander’-motivated mischief was involved, as there was no other audience participation at all in the whole two hours we were there.

So it’s highly recommended – and for all my guilty hand-wringing about enjoying it, I should mention that there were a fair few couples in their forties and fifties there (what the women would have got out of it, I’ve no idea – maybe they were really feeling David’s effortless bon mots) and even a family who’d seen fit to bring along their 12 year old son for some reason. As me and the other two remarked to each other, if he hadn’t hit puberty before that evening, he sure as hell would have done by the time he left.

Which brings me on to what I found really great about Berlin – ‘ver kids. Yes, when we in Britain score record lows in global UNICEF surveys of child welfare and development in ‘western’ society, second only to the good old US of A, something ain’t quite right. In Berlin, arguably, you can see how it should be. Our tram ride back to the hotel that night (at quarter to three in the morning – oh, to have had one of those going from Wakayama Shi to Ogura) was absolutely packed with ‘young people’ of a similar age to ourselves, many of them clutching oversized bottles of lager (as were we), with a small group of early 20-somethings sharing a quiet joint somewhere near the back, most people on board just shooting the breeze with their mates, nodding off, laughing, nearly all of them wearing proper coats and hats and things to keep them warm on the winter street – you know, acting like decent, civilised normal human beings.

None of these guys seemed to feel the need to bellow incoherently at each other, to intimidate us upon hearing our English, to start fights or indeed to act like wankers in any way shape or form, drunk and/or stoned though most of them undoubtedly were. So why is it then, whenever I’m walking back from my mate’s house on the other side of town on a Saturday night around 2 in the morning, I have to carefully navigate a route through the centre of Colchester that won’t lead past certain clubs or certain pubs, carefully sidestep past numerous abandoned kebabs and burgers and piles of vomit, the latter mostly likely from people who decided to chow down their post-pub treats instead of dropping them on the floor? Frankly I don’t care if I sound like Disgusted Of Tunbridge Wells here, it seems like most of my generation in this town behave like fucking animals and something’s got to give. Now, I wonder what the English-teaching opportunities in Berlin are like…

Oh yeah, and it might be hyped to high heaven, but go out and get hold of Arcade Fire’s latest, Neon Bible, anyway because it’s really good. Those backing vocals on ‘Black Wave/Bad Vibrations’ is how I imagine the (fictitious) almighty kingdom of heaven to sound…