It chimes in your chest like a bell

By Emma Venables:

It’s November 2013 and I’m on a plane, scared. I’m not scared because of all the things that could go wrong with the plane. I’m scared because we’re circling, preparing to land in the city that has occupied my mind for the past four years: Berlin. What if the Berlin I’m about to land upon isn’t the Berlin that’s consumed my thoughts, my research, my writing all this time? I’ve been so focused on the Berlin of the twenties, thirties and forties, what if this Berlin shows no traces of its past? What if I can’t compute 2013 Berlin with my version of Berlin?  What if we just don’t get on? 

Oh, Berlin. Beatrice Colin’s novel The Luminous Life of Lilly Aphrodite, starts with this sentence: ‘Berlin, a word that chimes in your chest like a bell.’ And oh, it does. My chest aches with the chiming of Berlin. Let’s sit in this feeling for a bit longer, think of the Berlin I’ve read about – of Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin, of Hans Fallada’s Berlin – and my own picture of Berlin. 

Eva Braun first brought my imagination to Berlin, down into its claggy depths with little time to explore its surface. I followed her around the Führerbunker, watched her apply her lipstick, marry the Führer, crack the capsule between her teeth. Magda Goebbels caught my eye, we backtracked, went out into the open, into the bombed-out wreck of a city and my attention turned to the women beyond Hitler’s inner circle, to the Frau Müllers and Frau Schmidts, to the women living and dying in the ruins – what were their lives like before and after National Socialism, before and after war? 

My curiosity about these women transferred into a Creative Writing PhD project and this is why I’m now on a plane, gliding down through the Berliner Luft, staring hard at the clouds, trying to get my first glimpse of real Berlin. It’s a grey day, a cold day, not the kind of day for first meetings, but it’s all we’ve got. Hallo, Berlin. I see you. I see your apartment blocks and courtyards, your lakes and open spaces, your roads and your railway lines. I see your runways, feel the bump of your tarmac meeting the aircraft wheels. 

Once off the plane, my fiancé and I go to buy travel cards to get into the city. We’re asked where we’re from. ‘Near Liverpool,’ my fiancé replies. ‘Liverpool? Ah, Sonia.’ SONIA. My childhood heart. I’m transported back to the early nineties. I’m wearing a pink and black party dress from Woolworths and Polly Pocket clip-on earrings and it’s my birthday party. Sonia’s album is the soundtrack to Musical Statues and Pass the Parcel. She’s currently the soundtrack to the writing of this piece. That boy was sent for me, that boy was meant for me…

Berlin, I feel at home already and I’ve not even left the airport, caught a bendy bus, experienced that special smell of the U-bahn (which I refuse to try and break down into its components for fear of undermining its magical effect), checked into my hotel room which has a Marilyn Monroe-shaped mirror in the bathroom and a photographic portrait of Andy Warhol above the bed. 

Over the next few days, notebook crumpling more and more as I retrieve and return it to my pocket, I wander around, researching, thinking, experiencing. The Brandenburg Gate. The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. The Topography of Terrors. The German Resistance Memorial Centre. The Jewish Museum. The German History Museum. A Third Reich walking tour. On one particularly bleak day we catch a regional train out to Fürstenberg/Havel, walking the same path through the quiet residential streets as the thousands of women destined for Ravensbrück Concentration Camp. I stand in the vast open space that was once crammed with barracks and bodies, living and dead, and wonder how I’ll ever manage to stitch history into fiction, how I’ll ever manage to communicate how such ugliness occurred in an area of such beauty. 

But my first experience of Berlin is not all research-related. On our way back to the train station from Ravensbrück we stop in a café and I get my first ever taste of German apple cake. We go in search of Christopher Isherwood’s residence on Nollendorfstrasse and when casually looking down, I spot a window and through that window: the office of Boner magazine. I smile to myself. Christopher would have loved that, wouldn’t he? We go to the zoo and I learn I’m more scared of a mouse rummaging through the straw than the rhinoceros it rummages around. I walk through the Tiergarten and experience the special shade of auburn that the tree leaves turn in autumn. I sit in restaurants by the Spree and discover I’m rather partial to a Berliner Weisse mit Himbeeren. 

I have been back to Berlin many times since that first foray in November 2013, and one thing remains: Berlin does not separate itself from its past, its neighbours, its visitors. Berlin is inclusive, reflective. Her streets have been shattered and separated by war and politics. You can still put your fingers in the World War Two bullet-holes in her facades, tread the path of the Berlin Wall. You can marvel at the Brandenburg Gate, the Tiergarten, and then turn right around and find yourself faced with the concrete blocks of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, the stark reminder of what happens when humanity attacks humanity, when we conveniently forget out similarities and propagandise our differences. Berlin’s history is our history. We share wars. We share peace. We share Sonia and Christopher. Wir sind Berlin. Berlin ist uns.

I’m no longer scared when hovering over Berlin Tegel on a plane, ready to land. In fact, I’m scared to leave and return to a divided United Kingdom, one that is all too ready to scratch out inclusivity, to erase its shared history, to pretend, like a petulant child, that it doesn’t need help from anyone, least of all its European siblings.

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Emma Venables is a writer and academic living on the Wirral. Her short fiction has recently featured in The Cabinet of Heed, Ellipsis Zine, Lunate, and Mslexia. Her first novel, The Duties of Women, will be published by Stirling Publishing in summer 2020. She can be found on Twitter: @EmmaMVenables.