You can't always get what you want

Look closely at my Berlin graph over there, the one with the 'x' axis labelled money and 'y' axis reality. See it? Now, you'll notice the graph line, declaring a gentle slope, running left to right, and downwards. Definitely down.

Since landing in Berlin about 8 weeks ago I've lived in a blissed-out state of perpetual hyper-reality, where everything through my gleeful eyes is exciting and immediate, drunkenly grinning at the shock of the new with stupid, childish awe. I've spent two months floating around the city ringed with a visceral golden glow. 

Not unlike the Ready Brek kid. In fact, exactly like the Ready Brek kid.

Me, on an average day in Berlin

But the money I begged, borrowed and saved to make the Great Escape is dwindling, pouring down the hungry drain of, mainly, booze and furniture! A cold, sharp, grey light is quickly eviscerating the fuzzy brilliance.

So, I really only had one terrible option left; find a job.

Now, my background and career (such that it is) has for the past decade been spent in political campaigning and community/union organising. So, a few weeks before moving, I emailed a bunch of excellent Berlin union and Green Party (die Grünen) folk, friends of friends, with a keen eye on seamlessly continuing my campaigning career (!) in my new, progressive home.

And there's the problem. Like someone peering over your shoulder and pointing out the black '10' on the red Queen, I feel a bit silly for only just realising. 

Whereas a lot of the British in Berlin are expanding stellar careers in online or digital technology, an industry where English is pretty much the sole, shared language, my background is in person-to-person campaigning, organising communities and engaging with the political process at a grassroots level.

And to organise people and communities, communication is pretty central; communication, ideally, without the need for confusing hand gestures and Google translate!

So, of course, my plan was completely unrealistic. Did I really think I could mooch on into Berlin, speaking not one word German, nor knowing one person, and expect a job in German politics to fall into my lap? Of course not. Well, maybe a little bit of me closed its eyes and wished really, really hard.

But, as part of the Berlin masterplan, in August 2014 I undertook a month-long intensive TEFL (teaching English as a foreign language) course, in order to give me an actual skill to exploit once here.

So I arrived in Berlin, waving this TEFL qualification, clutched tightly in my little hand, wondering which of the many English teaching colleges in the city would be the lucky one to first offer me a job. But, bewilderingly, the queue for my teaching services is as remarkable in its absence as the offers from the Berlin political world.

The teaching career, I think, is going to take a while to build...

All this is a round-the-houses way of saying that last week I started my first part-time minimum wage job since I left casual employment over 10 years ago. You know. For a 'real' job!

My wonderful flatmate took great pity on me and set me to work in the warehouse of the children's clothing company he works for – Kirondo.

It ain't a bad job – there are certainly much worse out there– and I'm certainly very grateful. And, even working just 9-3, Monday to Friday, on minimum wage, I think can pretty much live quite comfortably in this cheapest of capital cities. 

(By the way, paying minimum wage really is your boss letting you know that if they could pay you less, they definitely would!)

Working part-time will also let me, in the afternoons, evenings and weekends, build my teaching work and experience, which is very much what I eventually would like to do in Berlin. 

Brian Roberts is my role model, here.

Also, importantly, if you earn over about 450 EURO a month here then your employer is legally obliged to pay your health insurance (no NHS here!).

So, in the end, here's the upshot: I work with lovely people in a decent enough job – where, importantly, not speaking German isn't much of an issue - that lets me listen to 6 hours of new albums or podcasts every shift, working part-time that gives me over half of each day to myself to write and play, pays for my health insurance, while allowing me to fairly comfortably live and booze in Berlin with consummate elegance and depravity. Which, ultimately, was why I moved here in the first place.

Turns out Jagger was right: you can't always get what you want, but, right now, I find I've got what I need.

Take it away, Mick.

They won't get me, I'm part of the Union

I'm very much a Merseyside boy, with split footballing loyalties. It can sometimes happen. I was raised a Liverpool fan; my earliest memories was going with my Dad to the Anfield Kop. But then I've been many more times to sit in the Cowsheds at my hometown team, Tranmere Rovers (the Wirral's finest!).

Last season Tranmere were relegated out of the league and into the Conference (now called the National League, which itself sounds a little like a sinister fascist political party.) So I've experienced life at both ends of the English football league.

My first trip to Stadion an der alten Försterei (Stadium near the old forester's house), the home of 1.FC Union Berlin, in the lower reaches of 2. Fußball-Bundesliga (2^nd division), reminded me of a heaving Anfield in full swing. 

And, like Liverpool, a cherished club that evokes dedicated passion from fans, 1.FC Union Berlin is so entwined with its fanbase that it demands devotion from its supporters. It is this history and community that attracted me when searching for a club to support in my new Berlin home.

Pre-1989, east of the Wall, Union was a hotbed of anti-Stasi and anti-Communist sedition, so much so that the old ground developed into a meeting point for regime critics. When Union had a free-kick, the spectators used to shout "Die Mauer muss weg" (“the wall has to fall”). Union's hated local rivals, BFC Dynamo, received financial support from the Ministry of State Security, and was very much the team of the east Berlin Soviet officials. Now there's a local rivalry that defines the term.

Nowadays, happily, some traditions still cling on. When Union have a corner, some in the crowd take out their keys and jingle them at the players. This is a nod to the team's nickname of Eisern Union (Iron Union) from the 1960s, derived from the name Schlosserjungs (Schlosser boys), working class employees of Schlosser, the colloquial name for small companies that carry out construction metal work.

As in Soviet times, Union's fans are legend, and they define the club; their legend is literally woven into the DNA of Union. In 2004, the club urgently needed £1.5m to avoid bankruptcy. The supporters stepped up and organised "Bleed for Union" where fans gave blood and forwarded the reimbursement to the club. And who then, four years later, worked free for 140,000 hours to physically rebuild their stadium.

Our love. Our team. Our pride. Our club

The club motto, writ large over the stands, sung with pride at every game, is a anthem to fall in love with: Unsere Liebe. Unsere Mannschaft. Unser Stolz. Unser Verein. Our love. Our team. Our pride. Our club.

The legendary punk singer Nina Hagen sings the club hymn, played before every game, firing up the crowd. Kind of a Half Man Half Biscuit for Union.

As each Union player is announced pre-game, the crowd roars 'Fußball- Gott' – football God!

There is a saying at Union that captures the spirit of the club perfectly: Sie gehen zum Fußball, gehen wir zu Union ('You go to the football, we go to Union!').

With the club and fans so intimately joined, it's no wonder that the atmosphere, at an average home game against a mid-table team, crackled.

During the game itself, four men in the main kop stand on podiums above the crowd with microphones and drums, leading the swaying, singing crowd.

And there's the key word – swaying. British football league crowds haven't swayed since the 80s. 80% of Union's ground, much like the majority of Germany's football grounds, is for standing fans. Well regulated, safe, secure standing fans: light years away from the pre-Taylor Report zoos found at British football grounds.

For £10 I watched a great match between two major-ish football league teams, stood the whole 90 minutes with fellow fans, sang, chatted, and swayed, and all with a beer in my hand. A cold beer. A cold German beer. Refreshed regularly in the stands, not missing a beat, by one of the nice chaps with beer kegs strapped to their backs.

The Germans have this football thing sorted. The UK could really learn a thing or two here.

The forest trail to the ground from the U-Bahn.
Pre-game BBQs are a common sight here. As is beer. 

Union lost on the day, giving us much to discuss as we melted into the forest, heading to the U-Bahn station.

But for most supporters, though, success in football is a distant abstract, a Gatsbian green light that only the lucky few ever reach. 

This is not why we support.

We pick a side because a football club is a beating heart that pumps blood to feed oxygen to its supporters. Without the oxygen of support, a club withers on the vine. 

Football, in its distilled, pure essence, away from TV rights squabbles, glittering baubles and devaluing corporate deals, is still about a community, a history, a tradition, a story, love. It's about that beating heart, and how strongly it pumps blood through its veins.

Union's heart beats loud, and the blood flows strong.

In the biggest shadow of all

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanjahu's recent idiocy, blaming the Jewish Holocaust not on the Nazis but on a former Palestinian leader, has forced Germany, and particular Chancellor Angela Merkel as the global representative, into a strange and awkward position.

Merkel is working with US Foreign Secretary John Kerry at the moment in attempts to end the latest round of violence in the Palestine/Israel conflict, so the Chancellor had to move quick to stamp out this particular fire before Netanjahu's words set the region even more aflame. 

Das Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas
(Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe), Berlin

Germany doesn't hide or fudge its responsibility for the Holocaust. So, in response to Netanjahu's screaming about Palestinians and the Holocaust making global headlines, the world looked to Germany.

And then, once everyone was looking , they had to basically say, 'That Holocaust. Yeah, that was definitely still us.'

In international diplomacy, Merkel's response was as admirably definite as it was solemn: “Germany abides by its responsibility for the Holocaust. We don’t see any reason to change our view of history.”

So button it, Benny big balls.

However, this event has highlighted a recurring symptom in Germany that I've noticed since arriving here. Aspects of the country's behaviour – its politics, its media, its citizens – is still partly informed by its role in World War II, 70-odd years ago.

Wilmersdorfer Witwen

Just a few days after arriving in Germany, my wonderful flatmate took me to see the play Linie 1 (with English subtitles projected on the walls). Written in the 80's, the play used the central U-Bahn (tube) line through the heart of west Berlin – the Orient Express to Kreuzberg - to explore the culture, politics and people of 1980s Bundesrepublik Deutschland (FRD) Berlin. It's a wonderful play, but the scene I remember most vividly is the hilarious Wilmerdorf Widows – Wilmersdorfer Witwen – song.

Die Wilmersdorfer Witwen

Four self-righteous widows, all played here for comic effect by male actors, have a go at the young heroin of the play, when a middle-aged lady intervenes. The widows insult the lady, whose father was a "socialist degenerate" and "red rat", who replies "Better a red rat than a brown blowfly".

The widows, declaring themselves "German nationalists" and a preference to be "brown" than "red", go on to sing about the advantages of the Third Reich, and that they are fighting "for purity and discipline, as fifty years ago". Their deceased husbands had high positions in the Nazi party and consequently for the rest of their lives pick up their fat government widower pensions.

It's an extremely funny performance (you can watch it below, sieg heils and all, but unfortunately I can't find any English subtitles anywhere online).

Linie 1 is from the 80s, but 30 years on it is still massively popular in Germany, with secondary school teachers regularly dragging their classes along to see it.

That a film like Linie 1, that ostensibly comments on modern-day Berlin (in the 1980s), should delve into the city's terrible past with Wilmersdorfer Witwen, and feel the need to poke fun at a lasting but marginal relic from that dark period, and that Wilmersdorfer Witwen is still so popular in 2015, I think speaks volumes about Germany's insecurities. 

Er ist Wieder Da

A new film came out in Germany a few weeks back simply called Er ist Wieder Da , or 'He's Back'. The film basically has Hitler returning to modern-day Berlin, bemused to find a peaceful multicultural city and a woman in charge of the country.

It's a satire, and even in German looks hilarious, but where people in most other countries I think would rightly laugh at the film and its extraordinary premise, in Germany it seems to have really touched a nerve and caused some controversy.

Our modern-day Hitler, for instance, meets real life members of the UKIP-style Alternative for Germany party and the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party (NPD), while the final scenes show news footage of far-right protests and a rally by the nasty PEGIDA movement (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the Occident), a sort of EDL but without the charm.

As Berliner Morgenpost, one of Berlin's major newspapers, said, "A fake Hitler, a small moustache ... allowed insights into Germany's dark side." Hitler, it said, in a figurative sense, "never really left...The far-right ideology smoulders to this day and has found new forums... in the form of the Alternative for Germany and the PEGIDA movement.”

Indeed, one viewer, who gave her name as Angela, complained: 'It was all a bit too forced. The film is playing too hard on the fear about Nazi ideology, and they only picked out the worst sequences.' 

Tell me again about the better parts of Nazi-ism?

As the AFP reports

'In the real-life scenes, lead actor Oliver Masucci - replete with Hitler moustache and uniform -- is seen getting rousing receptions from ordinary people, many of whom pose for "selfies" with him.

'Tourists and football fans cheer the fake Hitler at Berlin's Brandenburg Gate, in a Bavarian village and elsewhere, and elderly people pour their hearts out to him, often voicing extremist views.

'"Yes, bring back labour camps," says one citizen to the dictator.'

'Frau Merkel. Here is the people!'

PEGIDA

Speaking of which, according to reports, tens of thousands of people cheered at a PEGIDA-organised anti-refugee rally last week in Dresden when some tool with the microphone said 'It's a shame the concentration camps aren't up and running.'

It's the specificity of the language used here that is interesting. Above all the usual far-right brain-farts you get from these numpties, in Germany they casually and approvingly talk of specific places where millions of people were murdered.

Concentration camps? Really?

from the good, good people at Ballspielverein 
Borussia 09 eV Dortmund (Borussia Dortmund FC)

Refugee crisis

Even Germany's heroic response to the Syrian refugee crisis is haunted by World War II.

Willkommenskultur , a word really invented by the Government in essence to create an open and warm welcome that would attract skilled workers from other countries to Germany, has been hijacked and used as a much better application to encourage help from German citizens for the hundreds of thousands of refugees arriving here by the month.

According to a recent opinion poll commissioned by the TV channel ARD-DeutschlandTrend, a simply stunning 88% of Germans have donated clothes or money to refugees, or are planning to do so.

But, it's quietly acknowledged by Germans that their efforts in the crisis are, at least in a small part, a response to the events of the WWII.

Petra Bendel, of the Central Institute for Regional Research at Erlangen, in Bavaria: “German citizens know that the regulations of the Geneva Refugee Convention stem from the historical experience with Jewish refugees fleeing the Holocaust.”

The self-aware bank man

And finally, on a more personal note, I went to open a German bank account here in Berlin last week. The process involved me sitting down with a nice man from the bank and, over a cup of tea (German people, it's really not that funny to splash a little milk in a cup of tea!), go through the process.

Like a lot of Germans I've met since I arrived, he was mad keen to talk to me, in flawless English, about Britain, our culture and, particularly, in a 'are you people nuts?' sort of way, British politics. My man here brought up the 2017 UK referendum on EU membership.

'The EU is so important,' he said to me. 'If only to stop us invading France...'

That a stranger, a bank worker of all things, should want to talk to me about the war while opening a bank account is remarkable enough, but to be straight to the point about his country's role in invading their neighbours, is astounding. Could you ever imagine an Englishman saying how important the 1707 Acts of Union was because 'it stopped us from invading Scotland?'

I had absolutely no idea when I arrived, but am fast learning, that Germany is still a country where guilt over World War II and the Holocaust still has substantial influence in shaping the national discourse.

Of course, history like Germany's in WW2 should never be forgotten, and walking around Berlin it's clear that Germany goes to great lengths to ensure they, and we, never will. But examples like these make me wonder when, if ever, the German people, no matter what their age, will ever be able to live free of the biggest shadow of all.

UPDATE 28/10/2015: Here, at last, are the subtitled trailers for Er ist Wieder Da

Ich bin ein Berliner II

I recently wrote a blog about why I left England and moved to Berlin. It was a pretty scathing denouncement of English politics and society, and also offered an extremely pessimistic forecast for the future of working people there. 

Rereading, maybe it was a little strong in the end. In truth, it's only half of the story of why I left. Half? Probably less.

Since arriving at the beginning of September I've spent almost every weekday morning at German language classes, trying to wrap my head and tongue around this most inconsistent, bludgingly logical, expansive and grammar-heavy of languages.

Along the way I've discovered the joy/nightmare of compound nouns – individual words formed by joining two or three together (or many many more); particularly those individual words that pinpoints a situation, emotion or feeling that in English we need several lines for.

My favourite so far is

Backpfeifengesicht (Back/pfeifen/gisicht) (n) a face that cries out for a fist in it, or ' a person with a face in need of a fist'.

This one compound noun describes an emotion you might feel when looking at a picture of, say, Jeremy Clarkeson, or people who play loud tinny music from their phones on the bus, or, you know, Tories.

We should totally import Backpfeifengesicht into the English language immediately!

But I came across two more compound German nouns that winded me like a grammatical one-two to the stomach. These words cut straight through the bluster and semi-comfortable narrative that I had built for myself about my emigration, and forced me to coldly address my true motives, even if at the time I wasn't even really aware of what they were.

Torschlusspanik: (n.): the fear, usually as one gets older, that time is running out and important opportunities are slipping away

This one word burrows down, laser-like, to the nub. Having spent 15-odd years working for various wonderful organisations and with a 'achievements' CV that I am immensely proud of, I found myself pushing 40 with limited career options, treading water, and with the niggling feeling that life was passing me by elsewhere.

But added to the Torschlusspanik that was lurking with intent around my stupid head was utter campaign exhaustion and disillusionment with British/English politics. I'd spent 15 years working with some of the best people in the world on brilliantly worthwhile campaigns, and with some minor successes along the way.

But all the time I felt that the Tories, conservative ideology and the right were winning, and would win ultimately, because they controlled the story, the media, the state instruments (police, judiciary etc), the House of Commons (with the Lib Dems, then), the story and, really, the pre-Corbyn Labour Party.

The Tories will use May 2015's surprise election win to destroy the lives of millions. And this made me sink into severe

Weltschmerz (n.): mental depression or apathy caused by comparison of the actual state of the world with an ideal state.

15 million British (probably, mostly English), almost half of those who voted, voted for either the Tories or UKIP. And with that the tiny flame of hope that I still held for England was extinguished. In its place a resentment towards England grew.

I think a lot of activists and campaigners suffer Weltschmerz at some point, especially acute after the 2015 elections I imagine. But it's what you do to haul yourself out of it that counts. Some people crack on, more determined than ever to fight for a better world.

I used to be one of those people.

But when hit with a lethal cocktail of Weltschmerz and Torschlusspanik over just a few months, I petulantly threw my toys out of the pram and buggered off to a more progressive country for fun, adventure and new opportunities.

Now then, where's that German grammar exercise book?

Ich bin ein Berliner

Dear England

I ought to let you know that I am slipping away from this scene of nightmare.

Though I made the decision to leave in May, I've been gone for six weeks or so now. I don't imagine you noticed; likely, my leaving was a tiny blip on your radar, unseen, slipping by your seething, broiling obsession with those coming the other way. What's one more exile to you? I'm somebody else's immigrant now.

I'm leaving you, England. I think it's best to get that in first, then we can go from there. I'm leaving you for Berlin. But this isn't about Berlin, or Germany, or the EU.

It's about us.

I've been wondering for a while where it all went wrong, trying to remember the exact moment or moments that would see us come to loathe each other so terribly.

Because, in the early days, when we first met, I think I really did love you.

And for so many, many reasons.

Back then, in the first flushes of youth, to me you were a country of exquisite optimism, of rebirth, a kaleidoscope of communities living for each other, a stern matriarch but whose gentle maternalism coaxes the best of us, a duopolostic dream of aspiration, fairness and ambition.

You taught me in those early years to grow through kindness, empathy and compassion. You taught me, at a tender age, that the greatest love and care that you show for others is reflected right back. That it was never about escaping where you were from. It was about taking your community with you.

And I believed in it. I really did.

I believed it, because I thought the love was mutual – that by working hard at our relationship we would grow together.

Onwards and upwards, our kid.

You spent 36 years telling me to be kind, to believe that all people are equal, to look out for those less fortunate.

But all the while, you were growing cynical and bitter.

You see, of late, there's something terribly mean about you.

You can disguise it, dress it fancy-like with on-message slogans and focus-grouped soundbites. You can make us look the other way. For a time, at least.

But like the dread stare of a cruel man, the eyes give it away.

And those courageous enough to look harder recognise the dark, freezing mist swirling across the land; something truly, deeply terrifying.

Our children, the most helpless and vulnerable, living in poverty and condemned so early; our new-born dying in hospital at scandalous rates; our wonderful old folk, who gave their all for us, forgotten.

All work and no play makes us exhausted and beaten.

Rickets and gout, those most common of afflictions of the Victorian poor, are back.

Food banks are not normal.

Food banks are not normal, but one day soon, if we're not very careful, they will be.

None of this normal. None of this has to be this way. We have become social pariahs to our neighbours, weird outriders of Europe, where everything is back to front and upside down and many suffer the unsparing consequences.

But this isn't an accident, is it?

You're using our corpulent riches to fund the poverty-as-policy war on the young, the disabled and the vulnerable. On all of us.

You are determined to rip apart the land beneath our feet and the streets we live and die on because the heartless whispered poison in your ear and it trickled down to your soul.

Really, England?

All this, driving your ungodly vans through our towns that are less white than others, to the cheers and applause of millions, causing the fine golden hairs on your neck stand to receive the ovation.

I see no further future here than a land of insecure, unstable jobs, of growing inequality, of declining wages, of laughing bosses, of richer rich and poorer poor, of odds stacked against us, victims to City spivs and thieves, scapegoats made of the powerless, differences exploited as a violent divide, a dirty future of ripped up land and deep scars...

And I can no more watch this destruction around me than I can stop the hurt. So I've made my choice, as difficult and cowardly and heart-breaking as it is.

I think it's best I just go now.

I wish our Celtic neighbours well in their quest to be rid of you. You don't deserve them.

So, in case you ever cared, for once and for all, I'm leaving you.

I'm leaving you for your lies and deceit, for your unsparing meanness, for cheering the war on those poorer than us, for the hearts that you are blackening, our friends that you are turning against friends, the blood for which you are baying with every selfish ballot tick, the pounds of flesh that you cut from each of us until you carve deep into the bone.

For the country that you keep telling us you are and maybe, perhaps, once dreamt of being...

'I ought to let you know that I am slipping away from this scene of nightmare. I can do no more good here.'

In sorrow

Matt
Berlin, 14 October, 2015