By Peter Brutschin

Turmstrasse

My neighbor, Mrs. B., took the 187 bus once a week to have her fortune told by Mrs. M. She lived on the first floor, in an apartment with a turquoise bathroom, with turquoise curtains, a turquoise carpet and turquoise soaps. “Mrs. B., was she buried in a turquoise coffin?” “No, in a turquoise urn, placed in a hall just 30 meters away from Marlene Dietrich’s grave. A better neighborhood than she had in her lifetime.”

A neighbor of Mrs. M., who, like her, lived right next to the Turmstrasse subway station, but in a basement apartment, in a house built in 1895, demolished in 2020, was, according to rumors, one of those crazy Polish women who left the house in very early morning with paint cans and brushes to express her opposition to the far-right Polish party (and Putin) on construction fences.

Let’s call her Mrs. W., who rode the 187 for years, first along Alt-Moabit, passing a gambling hall, masquerading as a sports bar, where her husband gambled away also her hard-earned money.

Then crossing the Tiergarten, Berlin’s Central Park, where my neighbor, Mrs. B., gets off to take her dog for their daily afternoon walk and visit one of the oldest trees (“From the 17th century!”) hugging it, caressing it’s skin, and then sets off again, now very energetically, with Snoopy, on the way back, this time on foot consulting with him, what they will do tomorrow (pee on the oldest tree?)

But: she’s a truly kind person whom life has never treated kindly, 4 husbands ! 7 children!, never getting much comfort.

Ms. W. drove until Potsdamer Strasse, where she has worked “under the table” as a cleaning lady in various men-only bars for half of her life, from midnight until early morning.

There, where I used to sit in a corner caffé once a year in July and watch the “Berlin Pride” parade go by; amazed at how relaxed heterosexual people can be, at least on a day of a year, when they march alongside gay, non-binary, transgender, … (or was my perception clouded again after the sixth, seventh, eighth coffee?). But what sticks in my memory is this young guy—or girl ?, acting a guy who’s acting a girl, even if only for a day? Finally exhausted from walking on high heels for miles.

Next stop: the former Kaiser-Wilhelm-Platz, now named after a former mayor, who never set his foot in this district-just like the last German emperor.

Nearby is a hospice where I visited a friend repeatedly during his final months: the melancholy view from his window: about our own decline

A building—actually a dilapidated shack—waiting for an investor, meaning: for its demolition.

Berlin is a city, wrote Karl Scheffler, that is doomed to be constantly in the process of becoming and never to simply be. Construction, demolition, new construction, demolition… in between, it is “beautified” until a new “most beautiful building” comes along, which will then be “beautified” once…

The Berlin suburbs begin; buildings of at least four stories, now alternating with two- and one-story structures; more modest, no stucco, no more ornamentation on the walls. Where the old live and the young don’t want to go.

So one day Mr. S. died and laid dead behind his shop counter, from which he had sold ropes and other boating supplies for 56 years.

Or Mr. E., a shoemaker who, even at the age of 86, still offered to professionally repair shoes—facing ever-increasing competition from cheap shoe sellers in China, whose products are cheaper to buy than to have “Made in Germany” shoes repaired. He took his own life on New Year’s Eve, holding a pair of solid Salamander shoes, polished, with newly replaced soles in his hands.

“What are you doing here? There’s absolutely nothing to see here.” An elderly woman approaches the fence that surrounds her huge property, a former briquette and coal storage yard. “Yeah, the briquette and coal business is dead for years, just like my husband. His liver, from all the drinking. It was no life—the drudgery, hauling half a hundredweight of briquettes up to the fifth floor; the constant filth; the people who barely gave him a few pennies in tip for carrying them up.

I imagined my life in the big big city—I come from a village in Brandenburg—would be quite different“

She begins to hum a song, an old Berlin popular song:

“You’re crazy, my child”

Another of Peter’s contributions to aamora https://www.aamora.com/2023/05/12/berlin-places-by-peter-brutschin/

and here are Peter’s images on Instagram