Commentary

Keeping your cool

29. Juli 2016
Hilda Hoy ©Merja Hannikainen

Hilda Hoy on her ambivalent love for Berlin after living here for nine years

Jul. 30, 2016 – What’s your longest relationship? Me, I’m coming up to my biggest-ever anniversary. Nine years. That’s how long Berlin and I have been going at it. I’ve stayed monogamous, but I can’t say I haven’t been tempted to stray. Someone asked me recently – that someone being an American writer moving here with starry-eyed dreams of the vaunted Berlin lifestyle – whether I still like Berlin after so long. My answer was yes, but it wasn’t the resounding yes I would’ve once given.

Every relationship has to survive the tests of change. Truth is, Berlin is not quite the city I fell in love with in 2007, when I stepped off a train at Hauptbahnhof and lugged my suitcases through an August drizzle to my 240-Euro WG room by Paul-Lincke-Ufer. Eating a strict Aldi diet and never going out at night without a supply of Späti  booze stuffed into my pockets, I lived off 500 Euros a month during that first year of scant employment and endless parties. I loved the rawness of Berlin, the iconoclastic resistance to “adult” achievements considered normal elsewhere, like holding down a full-time job and buying property. I loved that the city felt utterly non-judgmental, and that I could be as queer as I wanted, away from the prying eyes of anyone from my former life.

That freedom and iconoclasm still exist in Berlin but that spirit is harder to find now, stifled as it is under self-conscious hipster-ness and the sanitizing effects of generic commercialism. I miss the scuzzy empty lots where gleaming condominiums now tower, I miss meeting people with creative passions instead of start-up ambitions, and I miss the days when having an affordable place to live was the rule, not the exception.

But I’m not writing this to add to the same old tedious whine about how Berlin is over. There’s enough of that out there already, like the Slate headline this April that deplored “Being Cool Has Ruined Berlin,” while Vice asked anxiously, “Is Berlin Still Cool?” I’m sticking with Berlin, because every long-term relationship requires acceptance. Berlin continued to accept me through the awkward growing pains of my late 20s and early 30s, accommodating me as I tried on different forms of adulthood on for size. It gave me the no-pressure space to figure out who I am and how I want to live my life. I don’t think I could have done that in, say, New York or London, where there’s so much anxiety about measuring up and fitting in. Even with Berlin’s changes, life here is still much freer than in any other city I can think of. And let’s not forget, this is still a great place to be queer. You’re stuck with me, Berlin – maybe not ‘til death do us part, but let’s see.

On another note: after two years, this is my last column for these pages, so…. Farewell! It’s been an honor and a pleasure. Find me on Twitter if you’re so inclined.

Hilda Hoy is a journalist, copywriter and translator

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