When Berlin Commanded My Attention
Restlessness, memory and the signals that refused to settle
Considering I spent fewer than four full days there in 2021, my memories of Berlin are disproportionately vivid and plentiful. Of all the trips I’ve ever taken, this post-Covid adventure curiously flashes back to me the most – albeit in scattered bits and pieces.
My time in Berlin was as expansive and dynamic as the city itself. Simply put, I was busy there, on a mission to stay in motion – to absorb all that spread out in brilliant shape around me. I visited the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, the Deutsche Kinemathek, Germany’s museum of Film and Television and of course the Berlin Wall Memorial. I walked to and through the historic Brandenburg Gate, across Museum Island and around Nikolaiviertel – a collection of pastel storefronts that line picturesque cobblestone streets.
I was warned well in advance that I would love this city. Love it I did and love it I always will. It has a current to it that energizes, awakens and provokes. Berlin demands presence and contemplation. And if my flashbacks have anything to say about it, Berlin is a city that never loosens its grip.
Some places mysteriously inspire us to move differently when we are there. They conjure up a hard-to-put-your-finger on sensation that if obeyed, direct our senses and experiences in ways we may not fully expect or understand at the time. As I think back to Berlin, I first have to acknowledge my trip there lived inside a season of intense, rapid-fire travel. In the span of four months, I wedged Berlin between Croatia, Venice and San Miguel de Allende.
Travel during this window was more a refusal to be still, stay home and idle than it was a tactic to learn, sate or discover. I wanted to find stimulation anywhere – mind, body, gut or soul. I wanted to pique and activate all five senses. And I wanted to shake something hard to name inside me loose.
What I just couldn’t see at the time was that my bias for action through travel was stoked by a need to resuscitate ambition. I could see I was stuck, not in place, but somewhere much more precarious – in life. What I was sensing but not yet interpreting from the restlessness and weariness that hung about me was misalignment.
Rather than confront the discomfort and work through what plagued me, I anchored my life around it.
Solo travel was just one tactic deployed during this time that offered me the rebellious defiance and confidence I needed to feel like I was effectively holding everything together. It made me feel successful, enlightened and independent. And so, the circular plan of avoidance I fell into created exactly what I hoped it would – a façade retrofit to the life I was living quite conveniently.
Berlin met me right after I took two pivotal solo trips to the aforementioned Croatia and Venice. I was therefore primed to experience the city at peak sensitivity, uncharacteristically open and eager at the time to convert every nudge and signal Taste, my compass issued.
There was something altogether transfixing about how overlapping signals emerged and guided my movement in Berlin. By shifting from one to the next, fluidly but deliberately I was adding new depth and substance to how I moved. I was trusting and tapping my whole being – mind, body, gut and soul – to inspire connection and extract meaning.
I believe cities hold different meanings and messages for every traveler who passes through them. What we carry with us into these places – the rhythms we travel behind, the hope we cling to in our hearts and the openness of our imaginations and psychic energy – eventually shapes the dimension and richness of what we take away.
The night I arrived in Berlin, I dined at Cordobar which would have been the standout meal of my trip had I not followed it up the next evening with dinner at Michelin starred Nobelhart and Schmutzig. Each plate, no matter the size, complexity or course was fused together by bold, courageous creativity in concept and in presentation. Flavor was more than outcome. It was a carefully curated journey designed to unfold and captivate our complete attention. Bites and sips weren’t snapshots in time, they were full-on multi-sensorial experiences.
What I would come to eat in Berlin would vary as much as the moments I would go on to have across the city. As I love to do, I swung high and low. One afternoon, I was sipping a glass of champagne at Berlin’s iconic Hotel Adlon Kempinski. Hours before I was taking down my first ever currywurst, a German fast food staple. My mouth can’t help but water now as I think about that no-fuss sliced bratwurst seasoned and smothered with curry ketchup.
Yum. Just yum.
I also feasted on traditional German at Zur Letzte Instanz, a pub whose origin story dates back to 1621. At the waitress’ recommendation I took the Königsberger Klopse (meatballs) with caperberries and mashed potatoes. And I couldn’t imagine capping off this proper German meal in such a storied location no less than with anything other than an Apple Strudel.
One stand-out Berlin dish that lovingly taunts me on cold Chicago days like today was the classic soup and sandwich combo I found at Mogg’s Jewish deli in Kreuzberg. The bursts of flavor and the contrasts in texture and in temperature between the bubbling hot French Onion soup and that pastrami on rye… Nothing short of divine. While Mogg’s (and Cordobar too) has sadly closed its doors, this memory of taste will endure within forever.
Having said all that, I didn’t just encounter overlapping signals of inspiration at the dinner table. I encountered them throughout my stay, most memorably in all the unexpected ways I consumed and contextualized the city’s prominent fixtures and stories.
To move about it is to realize Berlin is an extraordinary city that projects power, creativity and import. At the same time it is a humble city that bravely exposes the bitter remnants of its own ruins and failures. Inside its vulnerability and admission is graceful resilience and an underlying promise of reconciliation and peace.
That brutally human and honest dynamic is why I couldn’t stop moving the moment I got to Berlin. Too much felt at stake not to.
While there was so much heartbreak and tragedy behind the city’s memorials I visited, there was also tremendous beauty and hope. I often think about the Berlin Wall Memorial and how it turned to art to solve a practical and literal gap in its visual storytelling. In places where pieces of the wall no longer existed, the designers put up imposing but beautiful steel rod slatted installations that vertically traced the wall’s shape but symbolically still let light and visibility to the other side through. These installations were at once artistic and striking but also cold and rigid.
The same can be said of the cold, haunting concrete slabs at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews. Its minimalist columns laid out in uneven, varying heights across nearly five acres in the center of the city create an inescapable sense of dread and calm. Walking between them in the total silence they command feels like gut-wrenching privilege.
The Memorial of Murdered Jews
Chaotic as my misfiring memories of Berlin have been over the years, they have been surprisingly easy to assemble for reflection. I suspect that’s first and foremost because I now have a purpose to finally assign them to. But just like meaning sat below juxtaposition and between layered signals in Berlin, so too does deeper meaning emerge here when I dive below the newfound tidiness and order of the moments my journey inspired.
It wasn’t until I came to pass through Berlin, that I came to understand in perfect parallel to how I discovered the city itself, that the envelope is part of the message.
The truth, the flavor, the story inside is the snackable constant. How we choose to receive that is entirely up to us.
But when we accept the complete and total package, we turn a message into a mini manifesto, a journey of micro-movements into a fulfilling, lush and well-lived life.
We turn flashbacks and fragments into our very own mosaic.
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