Berlin, 2005

Look at that kid. He is so happy. All he wanted to do was smile for me, a paunchy, goofy-looking, American with a backpack that could hold the rations of a small army. Especially those dehydrated curry bags they give the British soldiers. It was Sunday, my last day in Berlin and he was doublefisting paper airplanes. There was an idealism even a cynical college student could reach out and grab.

After a childhood with a German grandmother and a Jewish mother, I was in college with enough fascination over the elder’s accent that seemed to command unflagging reverence. And guilt. Shitloads of Jewish guilt. Admittedly, the best way to reconcile your pangs of guilt is not to, in a stupor over studying for finals in the library, bandy about the Lufthansa website. Despite however appealing those German flight attendants are, we can appreciate good decisions don’t tend to happen in the haze of a Chicago winter at 1:30 in the morning on the internet. Somehow, after three hours of scouring, there it was: an open-jaw ticket. I would spend 10 days in Germany, starting in Munich, heading back to the States from Berlin. There were winding train rides—including a foray into Utrecht, Netherlands, where I, self-conscious of my snoring, hid in a private sleeper car to avoid scrutiny. (Did Europeans not snore? I didn’t know, but I was not about to be the subject of ridicule or the standard bearer for the United States.)

Finally, I ended up in Berlin, because I wanted to and because Lufthansa said I had to. And I would only obliquely acknowledge the touristy crap you’re supposed to see and I would eat doner kebab both in my obsessive desire to crack into the urban underbelly and because I really was just that broke. Frankly, I hung out in shady places where the German sounded less like I remembered from Schindler’s List and more like some noisy mix I’d imagine hearing in New York—there was a mix of Spanish, Russian, Afrikaans swirling around me. Despite an expectation for cultural tourism, St. Pauli girls and schnitzel were not on this part of the S-Bahn. In exchange for the tchotchkes I didn’t buy and glossy veneer of Berlin life I then bypassed, I amassed—in four days, mind you—a ragtag collection of tour guides, all who gushed with excitement to show me ‘their’ Berlin. And so, there was bocce ball outside a theatre, beers in the East, beers in the West, poker in the breakroom at the Westin, and hookah (admittedly not a very easily transportable contraption) on some guy named Jurgen’s deck overlooking the train station. (I remember, despite the deliciousness of a peach hookah and a bitterly cold March evening, feeling like seven people might be too many for his wood suspension deck. Paranoia that I would fall, through and on to a train going to the Black Forest consumed my thought process.)

I’ve attempted to reconstruct my time in Germany by keeping in touch with this pack of kindred spirits and through my obsessive cataloging of photographs. Both have proven futile. And as the news crews head to Berlin, attempting to teach those who weren’t there or weren’t alive, what happened 20 years ago—it becomes a sludge of headlines and mirage of old news reels. The obsequious use of CAPITAL LETTERS TO TELL US THINGS ARE REALLY FUCKING IMPORTANT. And scrolling. And flashing. And breaking. So, when Tom Brokaw stood at the Brandenburg Gate yesterday and offered up images of 20 years past, I could only think, well, you just had to be there.