Meander past shabbily constructed tents, down labyrinthine alleyways, and prepared to get lost in a good way. You can find fountain pens, antique pocket watches, fresh fruit, bulk indian spices, (sometimes stolen) bicycles, t-shirts, purses, lamps, typewriters, jewelry made of legos, vinyl records, funky hats, and anything else you or someone else could conceivably want or need...and a few things that no one wants but someone is bound to buy anyways.
Possibly more interesting than the eclectic collection of stuff for sale, however, is the eclectic collection of shoppers. Its here where you really see Berlin in all its berlin-ness, coming out to enjoy the sunshine and find that perfect something. Old women, transsexuals, men with big beards, naked laughing children, sullen teenagers, hipsters, tourists, turkish grandmothers baking flatbread in brick ovens... look hard enough and you'll find angels. The sort of angels that exist only in Berlin, that city of contradictions.
The Flohmarkt stretches along Mauerpark which a huge field that runs next to the last remaining pieces of the Berlin Wall. Up next to the wall are swingsets where little kids laugh and down the hill a bit is a grungy basketball court where a pick-up game is constantly being played. At one end of the park stands a man with a DJ booth attached to his bike, at the other a local ska band--recently written about in one of the city's hip cultural mags--jams out. The electric bassist is a beautiful blonde girl, and the saxaphonist/singer, sans microphone, is skipping through the crowd as he plays. Everywhere people lie sprawled in clumps on blankets drinking cheap beer, eating some of the amazing ethnic cuisine to be found for staggeringly low prices inside the markt, or simply sleeping in the sun. On one side of the park, hundreds of people are crowded into the amphitheatre where a german girl is singing "I Will Survive", adding her own flourishes("go on now go...fuck off!...walk out the door") to resounding cheers. There are baton twirlers, jugglers, and dancers.
How to describe the beauty and despair embodied here? The city is threatening to close Mauerpark...it tends to attract "undersirables" such as the homeless and drug addicts...and if it goes, so will the Flohmarkt. The flohmarkt is an explosion, a firework finale, of all the beautiful and strange that many of the more "upstanding" citizens of Berlin would like to do away with.
They don't get it. The wall has fallen yet there is still a "mauer im kopf" a wall inside the mind, that keeps many people(not only berliners) from realizing how desperately important such places of free cultural exchange are to the continued existence, not only of the city, but of the fragile new identity post-war germany has tried to create. It is the same attitude that objected to piercings and weird hair, lesbians and foreigners and loud teenagers, that put up the wall in the first place. Sure its weird and dirty and loud and disorganized. Sure its not the proper way for proper germans to act... its better, its more, its something altogether different.
At the flohmarkt I bought two vintage t-shirts and an Elvis Costello pin. My norwegian hostel roomate bought a box of 60-odd nibs(he collects fountain pens) and Paula shopped unsuccessfully for a couple bicycles to rent out and eventually settled for a new dress.
Yesterday Paula's partner came into town from Switzerland, where she works as an assistant professor of information systems at the University of Geneva. She has as many degrees as languages(that would be 4). Currently they are hanging a map on the wall so that people can mark off where they are from when they come to stay. We're drinking pink champagne and telling jokes. Paula tried to shoot the cork out of the open window and failed, making it ricochete across the room. I think: this is Berlin, this is it.
It's right in front of you. Just look.
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