Aufwiedersehen to All That

I began this entry, my first serious attempt at this Blogchen, sitting in Kennedy Airport. It was impossible to write there; first, I had forgotten my adapter and didn’t want to use up my battery and second (and more importantly) I was too agitated to really write anything lucid or measured. And of course, once I popped those sleeping pills for the flight, I was in a stupor until I arrived in Berlin. Taking those kinds of drugs does strip you of that last shred of the experience of travel, a process that began with the supplanting of sea travel on great ocean liners with the far faster (but infinitely less romantic) means of travel by air. These days, you pass out in one place, and wake up in another, without being aware of the passage of time, or the movement over a great expanse of the earth’s surface.

In the last months and weeks before my departure to Berlin, many of you would hear me rant and rave about how New York was “over” and that it was saturated with douchebags. (At the head of this post, I initially wanted to place an image of set of actual douchebags a la Andy Warhol. But I figured this might be too rude.) I would post on Facebook every article I found about how cool and promising Berlin was and how inexorably dull and passé New York was becoming.

Of course, I needed these independent opinions, preferably in print (and preferably from the New York Times) to affirm my decision. I’m sure there were plenty of articles to the contra that I conveniently ignored that would have fuelled a doubt that stems less from the move to Berlin itself, but rather from the memories of a disastrous move I made to California 8 years ago.

I remember the days of August 2000, just after completing my undergraduate degree from NYU, about to embark on PhD in Art History at UC Berkeley, when I temped at a law firm in midtown Manhattan and made a killing billing the maximum possible number of hours (even if I didn’t quite work all of them.) Back then, of course, I could talk non-stop about the superiority of San Francisco to New York. Those were the days prior to the pets.com meltdown, when anyone could become an e-dork in San Francisco and Silicon Valley. Two years later, however, that California dream was largely a nightmare; I could recount those horrors, but this Blogchen is largely about the Zukunft and not the Vergangenheit.

All what should be said, in the end is this: if there is one thing in my life I regret, if there is one thing I could undo, it would be the decision I made to move California. It is only now, eight years later, as I start my professional life as an architect in Berlin, this glittering and chaotic capital of the new Europe that I can finally say I have succeeded in a certain Vergangenheitsbewaeltigung. This obscenely long word is of course German: it means: “overcoming the past,” and generally refers to the means by which each successive generation of postwar Germans dealt with the tragic and horrifying events of the National Socialist regime. I’ve adopted the word for my own personal history, since so much of this move to Berlin ultimately is about overcoming the catastrophic mistakes of California.

Would it have been possible to do such a thing (“overcoming”) in New York? I doubt it, since the majority of my time in New York after moving back from California (with various breaks, 2002-2008) was essentially struggling to find a new path professionally and to quell the demons that had followed me from California. You could really say that the battle began to be won when I finally got accepted to a graduate program in architecture at Parsons. Not that there weren’t setbacks and hiccups during that time. But by then New York had come to represent less the embodiment of a transformation, and more a testament to that struggle; a battlefield littered with countless mistakes and errors in judgment. At every turn, the city represented less what could be achieved and more what was irrevocably lost.

Around the New Year of 2008, my friend T$ recommended I read Joan Didion’s essay Goodbye to All That, which recounts her departure from New York in the late 1960s (at the same age I am now), and why she felt compelled to leave. She writes:

I enter a revolving door at twenty and come out a good deal older, and on a different street… I want to explain to you and in the process perhaps to myself, why I no longer live in New York. It is often said that New York is a city for only the very rich and the very poor. It is less often said that New York is also… a city only for the very young.

That was the year, my twenty-eight, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every word, all of it… [I]t was a long time indeed before I stopped believing in new faces and began to understand the lesson in that story, which was that it is distinctly possible to stay too long at the Fair.

Of course, this essay is right in line with all the other material I’ve found that has endorsed my decision to leave. Nonetheless, the essay spoke to me on a number of levels. In New York, I’d be shackled by the past, by my mistakes, by the frequent (and colossal) waste of my youth; in the end, however, at a certain point it’s necessary to get away from where you are.

I can’t help but think of the characters of Holly Golightly in (the novel NOT the movie) Breakfast at Tiffany’s and of Malone in Dancer from the Dance. It frightens me, however, that following their departure, both figures disappear into obscurity. It is never known if Holly ever does find a place to call home like her cat (“African hut, or whatever, I hope Holly has, too.”) or if Malone finds the peace of mind that drove him from New York. Of course, that was a different time—communication then, if the two characters had chosen to keep in touch with those they left behind in New York, was infinitely more difficult. But did they in fact want to maintain some kind of ties?

In that sense, I am relieved that I have no intention of neglecting the ties to the friends, family and loved ones I left behind. You guys know how I am on g-chat. And, of course, I have this blog, quite possibly the most public attempt of “staying in touch” (although I wonder, in the coming busy months how much time I’ll have for it.)

Perhaps, then, it’s less about leaving New York behind (although, like Didion, I’ve “stopped believing in ‘new faces’”) and more about finally returning for good to a place that has always felt like home, always made my heartbeat quicken and always made my eyes sparkle: Berlin.