Berlin notebook: on tourism

After we had been in Berlin for some weeks, it was decided that we had better do the right thing: we had better see the sights. After all (so we told ourselves), it would be absurd to spend three months in Berlin without knowing what the Reichstag looks like, or Checkpoint Charlie, or the Berliner Dom or the Brandenburg Gate. So at last, more from duty than from conviction, we did the proper thing. We acquired a tourist brochure, complete with maps and instructive tips on where to eat and where to point your camera, and we set off for a day of sightseeing in Berlin.

As we made our way along Unter den Linden towards the Brandenburg Gate, I began to feel strange. Perhaps it was only the crowds and the heat. Perhaps it was only the bad expensive cheese sandwich I had just eaten at the crowded café. We pressed on through a sea of people. Everyone was talking loudly; everyone seemed unhappy. At the corner of Schadowstrasse I noticed the first faint stirrings of nausea. Waiting at the traffic lights, I realised I was not quite myself. A man beside me was eating currywurst with a tiny fork. He dripped curry as he ate the little slices. I wondered if it was dripping on his shoes. In front of me a man was trying to fold a map while a woman chided him in a low voice, looking straight ahead. The light went green and the crowd surged across the street. The currywurst man turned his head and said something to nobody in particular. He gestured with the plastic fork.

When we reached the corner of Wilhelmstrasse the first wave of nausea came. I was profoundly aware of my arms and legs – they moved mechanically, as if by automation – but everything else grew dreamlike and remote. The bodies pressing against me were eerily distant. I registered a flush of heat somewhere near my shoulders. I wondered whether my feet were hurting too: it was a possibility. On the edge of the street, two workmen in hard hats were smoking cigarettes. One of them chuckled. A truck rumbled slowly past.

Moments later we arrived at Pariser Platz. A sea of people and raised cameras. All of a sudden too much colour, too much sound. People gathered in little thickets around tour guides with microphones. Through the crowd ahead, a man dressed in military costume stood at attention on a little soapbox. He saluted and people took photos. Someone else was dressed as a gorilla. I saw the high impassive pillars of the Brandenburg Gate just before the first quick flash of light appeared at the corner of my eye. It flickered on and off like a faulty lightbulb, very bright, sinister and tantalising.

Now everything was reeling in a sickening orbit around my head, the cobbled pavement and the stone buildings and the double-decker bus that had stopped to spill its contents on the street. I reached out to steady myself. There was a steel pole. It must have been a tourist signpost. I held on.

I said to my wife, 'Sorry, I need to sit down for a minute.'

The lights came properly now, bright electric white lights, sharp like knives and moving in stabbing zigzags across my field of vision. The lights were very bright and everything else was dark. I thought: if I faint here, I will knock somebody down. I thought: if I faint and no one gets knocked down, I will crack my head on the pavement. I thought: sightseeing is no good way to die; I won't get into heaven. I thought: I could really use a drink of water.

My wife helped me. I said, 'I'm sorry, I can't see anything.'

She helped me to sit down and I sat there very safe and grateful on the cool cobbled ground. I said, 'You go on, I'll catch up in a few minutes, it's just a migraine.'

It is always better with your eyes closed, so I closed my eyes and watched the violent lights knifing their way across the reddish twinkling darkness.

When it was over I drank some water and we went and took a photograph of the Brandenburg Gate. I recognised the currywurst man standing in a little huddle around a tour guide. They all wore caps and sunglasses. Some of them had the names of cities on their shirts. They set off through the gate towards the Tiergarten, as grave and deliberate as supermarket shoppers.

That was my inauspicious day of sightseeing in Berlin. I don't know why, but tourism has had similar effects on me whenever I have tried it. In Prague I fainted from migraine outside the Powder Gate; the lovely streets were as vertiginous as a spiral stairwell in a tower. The worst fever of my life was in Rome; I fled St Peter's Square and lay in my bed, aware of every aching bone and horribly fascinated by the way the ceiling moved like the surface of the Adriatic Sea. 

It was with characteristic insight that C. S. Lewis, in The Great Divorce, portrayed the inhabitants of hell as tourists on a sightseeing bus that makes its way around heaven. Hell is just the streets and buildings of heaven as glimpsed from a sightseeing bus. To be in hell is to be gawking at heaven, peering from the bus and snapping photos and sampling the local food without ever learning to live there or speak the language. 

Anyhow, that's how it is with me. Even the world's most gorgeous streets and buildings, even the most impressive historical monuments, become an affliction when I see them as a tourist. I hate to think what might happen if I was ever forced to go on one of those guided tours to Jerusalem. Probably I would pass out and be found, days or years later, sprawled beside the Pool of Bethesda, waiting for someone to help me get in when the angel stirs the waters.

After we had done our sightseeing I needed something consoling and familiar, so I went to one of my favourite places, the vast abandoned ruins along Revaler Strasse in Friedrichshain. The crumbled gutted warehouses are covered all over in graffiti. The roofs have all caved in or disappeared; the walls are sprouting weeds. An iron gate lies on its side against an ancient vinyl armchair. In what might once have been a factory, there are many high glass windows, and all of them are broken. Standing inexplicably alone is a high brick facade; someone has etched a huge lifelike face on it. A shipping container stands propped up on makeshift stilts. It looks as if it might tumble down at any moment; it looks as if it has stood that way forever. There are broken pipes on the ground and big broken slabs of concrete. Everywhere there is broken glass. 

Here there is no time or history. It is barely even a place. 

Beneath your feet, railway tracks will suddenly appear, then sink again out of sight into the earth. Here and there you spy a lone figure creeping silently among the ruins, taking photographs. Someone is climbing a fence. In the shadow of a broken wall, a man and woman sit on white buckets, smoking contentedly, saying nothing.

I walked around with nowhere to go. Two boys went by carrying skateboards. From somewhere far away I heard laughter. I stopped to look at a black cross made of twisted scraps of steel and mounted on an old electrical box. Two buzzards, sculpted from clay and painted black, crouched like thunderclouds on either side. But the cross was, is, empty. I looked up from the black cross to the bright sky and shuffled away. It was silent as a monastery, apart from the glass and gravel that crinkled under my feet, and, somewhere nearby, the sound of someone's camera going click-click-click, purposeful and slow as a benediction.

Berlin notebook: on German sentences

I was brought up proper. So I know that, in conversation, you should always interrupt the other person halfway through their sentence. It is how you show you're really interested. Speaking is the most enthusiastic form of listening. If your conversation partner says something you like, something you agree with, something you find exciting or important or objectionable or just mildly fascinating, all at once you must sweep into action with a sentence of your own. And if all goes well, you will never have to finish that sentence, because your conversation partner will reciprocate with another good energetic interruption.

Every conversation is a minefield. The things that interest me lie buried just beneath the surface, waiting to detonate as soon as they are touched. The moment you trigger my interest in what you are saying, you can be sure that your own sentences will be blown to smithereens. And, in turn, if I have said something interesting and worthwhile, I naturally expect my sentences to be left unfinished too. Why finish a sentence – finishing things is such a bore – when there is someone else around to start a new one?

And so the whole conversation is carried not by even turns but by a series of abrupt lurches, collisions, and transitions. If nobody does me the courtesy of interrupting me, my statements tend to trail off inconsequentially: as though, without being interrupted at just the right moment, I lose all interest in my own sentences and cannot be bothered trying to finish them. As far as I am concerned, there is only one rule of conversation: the more violent the interruption, the better. 

Such conversation is less like tennis than like a game of rugby – not an orderly to and fro, but a wild haphazard flinging back and forth, punctuated by an occasional mad dash or brutal tackle or, if the ball is dropped, a quick ungainly struggle of seizing and grabbing, limbs flailing everywhere. That is how I expect any ordinary conversation to unfold.

My grandmother is a great talker. My mother is a great talker. I am a great talker. God willing, my children and my children's children will be great talkers too.

If my wife is angry with me and wants to torment me, she only has to practise what is called 'active listening': a horrible insulting procedure in which the listener politely nods, raises eyebrows, makes small encouraging indistinct sounds while you are speaking – instead of the proper thing, which is to contradict, expostulate, ridicule, vociferate, interject. Even when I am giving a lecture to my students, I feel restless and deflated if ever fifteen minutes passes without an interjection. It is a sign that I have failed to engage anybody; if they were really interested in what I had to say, they would all be talking right over the top of me. Polite, silent, attentive, 'active' listening is intolerable: it depresses me the way some people are depressed by cursing and shouting and thumping on tables. Hyperactive listening is the only kind I like.

Which brings me to that difficult and delicate subject: the German sentence. For all its elegant clockwork precision, for all its gothic poetical homeliness, the grave disadvantage of the German language is that it cannot be interrupted. For if you interrupt a German sentence halfway through, you might never get to learn what the verb was – whether she agrees to marry you or doesn't; whether their house was destroyed by fire or was saved; whether the person who invited you to dinner is horrified by cannibalism or is an eager practitioner. With the verb coming at the end of the sentence, and with the ever-present possibility that even the most vehemently opinionated sentence might end with that astounding little word nicht, interruption is, for all practical purposes, impossible. There is nothing else for it. You are in for the long haul. You will have to speak in entire sentences, and, what's worse, listen to them too.

Presumably that is where the impressive seriousness of German scholarly discourse comes from: from the habit of listening to a person all the way to the end of the sentence. Academic conferences in English know no such foreign niceties. For us, a gathering of scholars is judged not by who can speak and listen the best, but by who can provide the best and most brilliant interruptions. 'I have heard your subject, I have heard your verb, now let me tell you, sir, what I think!' This is excellent, and it is why our conferences are, as a rule, much more entertaining than the ones in Germany.

You can see the whole difference between these two languages if you walk into a Berlin bar around midnight. In any respectable English pub at that hour, everyone is talking, all together, all at the same time, all constantly and without ceasing. It is not so much a con-versation as a pan-versation. But at this cosy Berlin bar, you find people gathered respectfully in little huddles, speaking and listening in earnest, one voice at a time, everyone taking turns as if the whole thing were supervised by an invisible referee.

I will grant that the Germans invented quantum physics and psychology and moveable type and computers. Fair enough. I will grant that German is the language of science, of philosophy, of theology, of carefully crafted intellectual exchange. Like Latin, it is a language ideally suited to the university. But English – English! – is without rival as the world's great language of magnanimous interruption. A Christian woman I met in Berlin told me she likes to read theology in German, but to worship in English.

English is the language of dialogue – that haphazard rambunctious teemingly unpredictable grand good stuff of human speech. It is the language of Shakespeare and Dr Johnson, of Hollywood and Huck Finn, of Jerry Seinfeld and Jane Austen, of Facebook and Faulkner and Fawlty Towers and the glorious tumultuous clamour of the local pub.

Berlin notebook: in the café

When I arrive in a city for the first time, my most urgent priority is to find a place to drink coffee in the morning. As a general thing I find morning to be a very unsatisfactory business, an unwelcome accident that brings the calm oblivion of sleep and dreams all screeching to an insulting sudden halt. There are people who talk of climbing out of bed in the morning, or even of quaintly hopping up, but I have never understood these innocuous playground metaphors. I am wrenched out of bed, otherwise I would lie there all day. Amid the violent assault of morning, amid this cruel inhospitable turmoil that is called Waking Up, I have a terrible need for something calm, stable, friendly, and predictable. And so the morning coffee is my anchor. Without a good consoling place to drink some coffee and scribble in my notebook in the morning hours I am all adrift, just as some people come unmoored if you take away the television or the daily crossword puzzle or the telephone call from Mother.

So when we got to Berlin and moved into our apartment in Prenzlauer Berg, I quickly located the coffee shops in the surrounding streets. At first I went to a place called Café CK on Marienburger Strasse. Now by any ordinary standards, this is an excellent place to take your morning coffee. The baristas are friendly and attractive, the coffee is good, the big blue sofas are cosy and anonymous, the walls are adorned with paintings, the music is smooth, a little bluesy, never too loud or too distracting. Everything is in order, as the Germans like to say. But after my fourth consecutive morning at Café CK, I began to feel vaguely troubled and uneasy. Something about the place wasn't right, though I couldn't quite put my finger on it. 

On the fifth day I ordered coffee and sat down and looked around me – and that was when it struck me. The place was too clean. The sofas were all as good as new. The floor was polished. The walls looked newly painted. The espresso machine had been lovingly shined and polished like a boy's first car. Even the light fittings all matched; not one was cracked or broken. Everything was, in a word, perfect.

I left without finishing my drink and went out into the street. On the corner a boy was standing on a cardboard box and playing an accordion. I tossed a coin into the hat and crossed the road. I walked to Café Slörm on Danziger Strasse, where the roughly fitted floorboards creak and all the furniture is worn, faded, decrepit, forty years old and falling slowly to pieces. The front door is plastered with stickers that are peeling away to reveal the scrawled graffiti underneath. The coffee tables are rough wooden crates turned upside down with bits of rusted nails jutting from the corners. There are little homemade shelves with flowers arranged in beer bottles beside mismatched lamps in tattered yellow lampshades. The walls are crumbling away to reveal the red bricks underneath; everywhere there are signs of repair, patches of repainting, nails hammered in and pulled out again. Here and there one sees furtive ironic outbursts of graffiti. Against the big front window are some orange vinyl barstools; you can sit there only if you don't mind resting your feet on the cast iron radiator. Or you can sit facing the bar on a row of vintage folding cinema seats; they look extremely chic and extremely uncomfortable. 

Out behind the bar there is a second room: you can see it from here, since some practical-minded person has made a window by smashing a rough hole through the dividing wall. In one corner the floor is raised on a carpeted platform, supporting a green sofa and a steel table that looks as if it was once a filing cabinet. Above the sofa, stuck to the wall with tape, a series of nude sketches done in charcoal. Big flat cushions and worn velvet cushions and books and magazines scattered on the floor. A table in the far corner appears to be a sort of workbench; someone has taken apart one of the wooden crates and stretched chicken wire around the sides. Perhaps they will use it for mice, or small rabbits. Perhaps guinea pigs. Or perhaps it is merely art. In another corner a wooden chair is painted all over with whimsical cartoon pictures: a whale sipping Coca-Cola through a straw; vines and flowers sprouting from the wood; an enormous cat with enormous cat eyes. A few more chairs sprawl idly around a three-legged table. In the very back there is a high bird cage, the home of two South American parrots named Paula and Leo. A chalkboard on the wall asks you not to feed the birds. Leo flaps his wings and squawks; the floorboards shudder with punk music; everything is a little too loud and a little too severe.

I sit here and drink my coffee, happy at last, and I have never gone back to that other place with its matching decor and comfortable chairs and shiny bright espresso machine.

The Berlin aesthetic: it had got to me. And as long as I was in that city I could abide nothing that was clean, or new, or flawless, nothing that had not already been repaired and ruined two or three times, nothing that was more than barely serviceable, already (and again) on the brink of decay. 

And so at Café Slörm I drink my coffee from a cracked bone china cup while a mangy dog comes over and sniffs around my feet, and the barista sits outside smoking a cigarette on the broken concrete steps. A pretty girl rides by on an old repainted bicycle made of spare parts. The handlebars are very high and wide. I thumb through one of the books on the overturned crate beside me. It is a scholarly monograph, lavishly illustrated, a feminist interpretation of pornographic photography in 1920s Berlin. Some of the pictures are very good. 

The music gets louder; it pounds in your head like a hangover. The coffee tastes a little burnt. The yellow armchair is a little too low, and all the vinyl is peeling off the sides. You have to adjust your weight carefully if you don't want to feel the broken springs digging into your back. Like any self-respecting Berlin café, the total effect of the place is to make you feel that you are in someone else's living room – someone who might have, to be sure, some vaguely sinister intentions, but who is nevertheless quite sociable and hospitable on the whole.

I get another coffee. I kick my shoes off and put my feet up on the chair beside me. I scratch a few lines in my notebook and read the chapter about Anita Berber. I study the photographs and conclude that she was rather beautiful, in that vacant pitiless nightmarish sort of way. The sun falls through the window across the floorboards. I close my eyes to the sun and the music and the sounds of making coffee. It is good to be here. Yes, there is a certain tattered homeliness about it all, and everything is all right now, here in the unassuming dilapidated comfort of morning in a Berlin café.

Berlin notebook: on the Berlin aesthetic

Crossing Eberswalder Straße, I saw an American tourist looking around, perplexed, clutching his camera as he surveyed the street in search of something that might be worth photographing. The woman beside him said cooly, 'I mean, they have buildings here with all the wires hanging out.' 

In other European cities the past is always visible. You visit Rome or Prague or Constantinople to see what the past looks like. In fact you could visit those cities almost without noticing the existence of the present, since the present is less solid, less tangible than the continuing presence of the past. But in Berlin there is no past; or rather, the past is visible only as ruins and decay. 

The city was reduced to rubble in the Thirty Years' War, and again, three hundred years later, in the Battle of Berlin. 'In other European cities, the past was glorified, the architecture spruced up for tourists to the point of caricature. But here, nobody seemed in a hurry one way or the other. Buildings had been bombed and the city had been ripped apart, but years later holes remained all over the place without explanation or apparent concern. The city moved forward with a lack of vanity that she found relaxing' (Anna Winger, This Must Be the Place).

Berlin is a city founded, time and again, on its own ruins. Urban decay is the Grundprinzip of the city, and the secret to the Berlin aesthetic. In Berlin there is no history, only art. Those bits of the past that remain visible are fragments that have been picked out and arranged for aesthetic and artistic purposes. The city is a gigantic lovely mad assemblage of found objects. 

This explains the importance of photography as an art form in Berlin. Photography eschews the sentimental Christian ideals of narrative, history, truth-telling, tradition, and time. Every photograph is only a fragment, a piece of rubble retrieved from the debris of time. 'Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt' (Susan Sontag).

At a gallery in Kreuzberg, I saw the exhibition of a young Berlin photographer. He had photographed sculptures made of urban debris – old brooms, crumpled newspapers, plastic bags, advertising signs, cardboard boxes, broken electrical goods. The objects had been assembled in front of walls and buildings; the sculptures look like random piles of rubbish, but the shadows cast on the walls resemble classical figures from Christian art. The distinct shadowy figures of Christ, St Nicholas, St Sebastian. In this series of shadow photographs – obviously inspired by Plato's theory of forms – one sees the strange distinctive contours of the Berlin metaphysic. Human culture and religion and tradition are shadows on the wall, the beautiful insubstantial images cast by objects more solid, permanent, and original. Except that here the eternal Platonic forms have been replaced by the most transitory, pointless thing in the world: a heap of urban debris.

The Christian myth of primordial harmony is the organising theological principle of most European cities. (That is what separates European cities so markedly from the colourful polytheism of urban India, and from the steel-and-glass Pelagianism of the cities of America.) But in Berlin, the Christian creation-story has given way to a mythology of primordial originary decay: 'In the beginning was the rubble…'

The Roman might well feel that she is living in an eternal city; but the Berliner dwells in the ruins of time. And the ruins of time are beautiful. That is the Berlin aesthetic.

Berlin notebook: on the existence of Germany

I was well into my twenties before I ever believed in the existence of Europe. Even then I believed only in France. (I also cherished a certain guarded agnosticism about Switzerland; I had been there once, but too briefly to determine if it was real.) It was not till years later that I became firmly persuaded of the existence of Germany.

If this seems surprising, it will be enough to remind you that I come from a remote primordial island-continent known as Australia. Now Australia has many virtues, as everybody knows; but it is a long way from anywhere else, and it is very hard to believe in other places when they are so far away. 

My country's immigration policy is one of the natural extensions of this principle. Our attitude towards our own indigenous population is another. If there were once only indigenous inhabitants in Australia, it suggests that once we did not belong here; but we could not have come from any other place, since Australia is – we feel it deep in our bones – the only place. So the existence of indigenous peoples is an unfathomable abyss. It strikes us as an alarming proof of our own nonbeing, and therefore as something that is best simply ignored.

The same conviction also explains what is called the 'cultural cringe' – one of the most peculiar features of the physiognomy of Australian culture. There are countries in which artistic, literary, and intellectual achievements are paraded as marks of national superiority: think of the way Americans will talk about Mark Twain, or Germans about Goethe. But in Australia we apologise for our cultural achievements. The cultural cringe is the belief that nothing of value can come from a place like Australia; that anything of real worth must be created someplace else, or at least receive the imprimatur of other places. So Australians will be embarrassed of a homegrown novelist: but if she happens to win a British literary award, we will praise her and love her and perhaps even buy her books. 

The cultural cringe comes about when Australians discover, usually quite late in life, that other places exist – and we never really recover from the shock of it. The shock produces an inverted idealism: instead of believing that my country is the only one, I now understand that it is, after all, a disappointing mirage. Only the other places are real.

Australia thus unites two antithetical (but morally identical) ways of relating to outsiders: either we ridicule foreigners for their funny looks and funny accents, or we abase ourselves before the foreigner – so fashionable! so sophisticated! – and lament that we were ever born in a drab uncultivated penal colony at the bottom of the world.

Even when I had been trying for years, with discouraging results, to learn the German language, I still secretly thought of Germany as a country so far away that it does not exist; and of the German language not as an ordinary means of social exchange between ordinary human beings, but as a sort of magic, something that people like Hegel and Heidegger use for conjuring. I learned German grammar the way seminarians learn their Greek: as if memorising runes. I quoted German the way seminarians invoke The Original Greek in their sermons: as if uttering the syllables of an incantation, something that transcends the limitations of ordinary speech. 

But there came a day in my life when I had to admit to myself that Germany exists, and that the German language is really, after all, only – a language. That was a hard day and a hard lesson. For everything in Australia, the whole moral fabric of my childhood world, was premised on the conviction that Australia is the only place, and that any place you cannot reach by the Pacific Highway – radio blaring, elbow out the window, cane fields rushing by – is, strictly speaking, no place at all. 

Nowadays though, I like my country all the better for the fact that it is not the only one. I'm glad there is a variety of places in the world; I'm glad there is even, somewhere, a segregated location for all the New Zealanders to inhabit. But in Berlin whenever I meet a person who has never been to Australia, I immediately adopt the persona that I have learned so well over so many years (and that makes Australian expats such powerful ambassadors of the Australian tourism industry). 'What?' I cry in shock, as though I had just met a fellow who had spent his whole life underground. 'Never been to Australia? Never even visited? What the devil have you been doing all these years? Sit down, sit down – two beers, bartender, quickly! – and let me tell you a few things about a magnificent great island at the bottom of the world…'

Berlin notebook: on bicycles

Right now I'm in Berlin for a few months, so I'll be posting a series of notes about the city.

It has been said that great books are the ones that have to teach us how to read them. It is the same with cities. London cannot teach you how to experience New York, any more than Dickens can teach you how to read Dostoevsky. And when you are in Berlin, the correct way to experience the place is by bicycle.

Now there are people – you will have heard of them, I'm sure – who believe that riding a bicycle is a 'sport', a way to keep 'in shape', something that is merely 'good for you'. Nothing is more morally or aesthetically objectionable than such a cyclist, zipping through the traffic lights in his skin-tight lycra suit and his shiny torpedo helmet, austerely sipping water from an aerodynamic flask strapped to his shoulder.

Who is this fellow? What is he about? He is performing that peculiar Calvinistic ritual that is known as Exercise. On the surface he might appear gregarious enough, but in truth he is a mean unsympathetic creature, this secular ascetic with his sculpted buttocks and his strap-on water bottle. He pursues cycling for his own selfish ends, and therefore cannot enjoy it. To him, it is all the same whether the bicycle actually goes anywhere or whether it is fastened to the floor of a gymnasium, a mere simulation, one of those monotonous unmoving Exercise Bikes that are exactly like a real bicycle in every respect except that they have no wheels and cannot propel you along the street.

There are some things that are corrupted by proficiency. The expert lover, the slick preacher, the professional childcare provider – these are not honest things, because good honest preaching and childrearing and lovemaking require some element of awkwardness and ineptitude and surprise, something tenderly human that resists the cold logic of technical mastery. Just so the cyclist: the fast expert sporty cyclist is an ungodly man, you can count on it. He speaks harshly to his children and spends hours grooming his fingernails and has always felt, deep down, that his father didn't love him. He uses the bicycle the way an expert lover uses a woman, his mind absorbed by all the correct techniques for stimulating pleasure, working at her body as cooly and clinically as a pornographer. Such a lover goes nowhere with his beloved, just as the Exercise Cyclist goes nowhere on his bicycle but stays imprisoned in his own immaculate body even as he whizzes through the city looking straight ahead with a steely gaze through four-hundred-dollar wrap-around pink sunglasses. 

Expert cycling, therefore, I abhor. Expert cycling belongs in no proper self-respecting city. But the bicycle as a vehicle – the bicycle not as an instrument of self-improvement but as a machine of transportation – the bicycle as a strictly utilitarian way of getting about town – now that is a noble and excellent thing, beautiful and true and good in its wobbly ungainly rattling clattering swiftness, all legs and arms and wheels and whirling gears.

What could be nobler than a bicycle? For in the bicycle, you take the most marvellous, ancient, portentous triumph of human invention and ingenuity – the wheel! – and append it to the human anatomy so simply, so naturally, that you would think the human body had been designed for nothing else than wobbling about town on a pair of wheels. Perhaps a million years from now the human species will be born with wheels instead of legs; it would be an improvement. But for now, this spoked, sproketed, handle-barred, rubber-tyred, pedal-driven apparatus supplies what nature lacks. 

Berlin reveals itself to the cyclist, just as Paris reveals itself to the walker and Los Angeles to the freeway driver and Dublin to the drinker. If you want to know what Berlin is, throw away your guidebook, forget about all those tourist sites, and don't even think about setting foot in one of those brand new bright red sight-seeing buses. If you want to know what Berlin is, all you need is some loose change in your pocket, a scarf around your neck, and a bicycle between your legs.