Features/ Fun and Responsibility: Berlin Childhood: Faces of the City

Anyone who sees John Hejduk’s “Kreuzberg Tower” for the first time and doesn’t know that it is an architectural-historical site will be surprised. The complex, consisting of three buildings, blends into its surroundings like a mimicry – the periphery around the former wall strip in Berlin-Mitte. The color scheme is greenish-grey, a bit like the Berlin sky, a bit like the wall that no longer stands, a bit like the residential and industrial blocks that surround it. Despite the mundane appearance of the Hejduk houses at first glance, there is an animistic element in them: you look at the buildings and suddenly they look back, wink at you and stick out their tongues mischievously at you.

When my mother moved to Berlin in 1984, she was given a “Berlin Key” and allowed to look at various apartments in Schöneberg and Kreuzberg on her own. She could, it seems like a utopia today, simply choose one. There was no central heating or bathrooms. There were children playing in the street in front of the house she chose. The wall was so close that there was almost no traffic. Almost all the streets here were dead ends.

My mother says: “I used to always take a shower at the university (which was still called HdK back then) or in the Spreewaldbad.” I learned to swim in the Spreewaldbad – or at least tried to. I failed the seahorse test several times. The other children played for weeks with the small transparent-blue plastic shells that they had dunked when they (passed) the exam. I wasn’t allowed to play because I hadn’t been able to catch a mussel from the bottom of the wave pool. I still get angry when I think of the little show-offs with their little shells.

I learned to ride a bike on the former wall. I wobbled in the wind. Many, many tears were shed before, it seemed and still seems like a miracle to me, I suddenly drove straight ahead, towards the angel pool, where turtles lived and, right next to it, my most feared kindergarten teacher.

The Berlin key is, as they say, a double-bearded key. Bruno Latour dedicated an entire essay to him. He writes: “Here we have an object that makes a technologist’s heart beat faster, while for an archaeologist it represents a nightmare. (…) What strange thing is this? What is it good for? Why a key with two key bits? And two symmetrical ones on top of that? Who are you trying to make fun of here?”

If the key is an intermediate link, it does nothing except carry or transport, relocate, embody, express, reify, objectify the meaning of the sentence “Always lock the door behind you at night, but never during the day.” to reflect. In a more political variant: “Let us regulate the class struggle between homeowners and tenants, property owners and thieves, right-wing Berliners and left-wing Berliners.”

Reification – when I hear the term, I always think of the Marx seminar at the FU, where my father studied in the 80s. I think of the “Baller” couple of architects who built so many distinctive houses in the western part of the city, for example the philosophy faculty in Dahlem where the Marx seminar took place. One of my favorite kindergarten friends lived in a baller house on Fraenkelufer. Unfortunately, she had another, better best friend.

My kindergarten was a converted parking garage; We raced down the ramps, which were actually meant for real cars, as fast as we could in our little red bobby cars.

I remember my neighborhood as a province. Run off alone to go on the swings or get mini milk from the Späti. On the way back, strangers sometimes shouted things to you that you realized were in the “crazy but safe” category. “I’m your dad!” a red-faced man shouted, and I ran home as fast as I could.

I walked alone to this kindergarten, which was actually a parking garage. My father had signaled to the baker Ishmael on the other side of the street to watch me cross the street.

The city has many faces, then and now. Some literally look at you, like the one in Hejduk, not far from the former strip of the Wall. I don’t know whether it still feels as sheltered for children as it did back then. But: The make-up doesn’t suit the city. And certainly not the unaffordability.