Sehnsucht

Last night I went to a pub in Prenzlauer Berg. Prenzlauer Berg is the epicentre of all things cool in this city, and it is quite difficult to get to. I think this is on purpose: if it were really accessible by public transit you wouldn’t get to embrace the zietgeist and ride your antique looking but actually brand new and quite expensive bicycle – its front basket laden with organic produce and a memory stick containing your latest digital art. In addition, if there were more buses in the area, then everybody would live there, and then how would the people of Prenzlauer Berg feel superior to the people who lived everywhere else?

Everybody in Prenzlauer Berg has a bike…and a child….and this being Germany, various state of the art contraptions to adapt one to the other. In fact, there are so many children around that the area is now called “Babyberg”, and one can while away the hours on the Kollwitz Platz watching the urban-hipster-moms agonize over which brand of fair-trade quinoa to buy for little Jochen or Eva before riding home (how do they do it in their peasant skirts and combat boots?) to work on their dissertation/performance art/sustainable macramé.

Of course, those in the know will tell you that Prenzlauer Berg has become far too gentrified to be considered a hip and happening place. Apparently, the action has moved further afield to the great socialist housing blocks of Friedrichshain –although I hear that these too have been overrun by drunk British tourists, and other species of untermensch . It is hard to know where to go, really – but someone did tell me the other day that there is this club in a bombed out basement in Lichtenberg that is hot and as of yet, undiscovered. You bring the vodka - I’ll bring the keen sense of awareness. (By the time you read this, the place will probably have lost its edge and then we will have to drive all the way to Poland for a good time, perish the thought.)

Prenzlauer Berg is in East Berlin.

East Berlin was once ghastly and is now less so, although traces remain. Interestingly, many people feel a sort of fuzzy longing for the iron-clad security of daily life in the socialist past. There are even East German -themed parties: you get driven there in a Trabant, dress up as a Young Pioneer and dance like its 1988. Few of these parties feature food shortages and police informants however, nor are you walled in. East Germany – it was the party you just couldn’t leave.

It is curious to note that a good portion of the people who suffer from Osalgie never actually lived in East Germany. Many would consider it peculiar to be nostalgic for something you never knew, but not the Germans – they have invented a word for it: Sehnsucht.

Was ist Sehnsucht? My dear, there isn’t enough ink in the world. Sehnsucht is an emotion – how does one say auf Englisch - a feeling, or the perception of a longing for that which is unknown, but on a deeper level is perhaps understood. It is the acceptance that the delicious pein of this unfulfilled longing is sweeter than the fulfillment of any mortal desire. In the context of the fall of the Berlin wall, I think it would be like saying that you wished you knew, or could actually have seen for yourself if the grass were really greener on the other side. Of course, now that there is no other side, you will never know, and the realization that this particular longing will never be fulfilled only serves to make it more intense. But with the pain comes a frisson of excitement – the awareness that you are perceptive enough to have this longing; that you posses the character to be able to experience and identify these feelings at all, and in so doing, confirm the depth of your soul. I mean, you always knew that you were deeper than your friends – more aware, more attuned to the human condition, but now this longing has confirmed it – and you feel special…but oh, the pain.

That, in a nutshell is Sehnsucht – although the Germans will delight in telling you that it just one of those concepts that is impossible to translate, but if you become a willing student of German culture and society, maybe – just maybe – you will be able to understand and then someday soon you too can experience Sehnsucht and it will cause you to rent a Trabant for a day, or live in a commune.

I know one man who actually does lives in a commune. He is from West Berlin, of course, and comes from a distinguished family. We went out for dinner the other day, and he was beside himself with glee. Communal living! Now he could finally cast of the shackles of his capitalist past and contribute to “actually existing socialism”. (Cheers to that). He told me that he loved living communally because everything was shared – costs, chores, frustrations and joys (blame?). In fact, he pulled out his iphone ™ from his Burberry™ trench coat to show me a picture. Now, I don’t really know much about living in a commune, but if it means you can buy designer clothes, then I am all for it.

In the interim, I will have to endure the unfulfilled longing I have for a bespoke suit.

It could be a lot worse. I could be walled in.