Welcome in Berlin
A city is a state of mind
Welcome in Berlin is how Germans say in English welcome to… whatever city; you hear it enough, and it starts to sound grammatical.
After my summer trip to France, I’ve been having trouble readjusting to life in Berlin. To remind myself of why I’m here, I’ll do the exercise where you imagine seeing it for the first time, in this case, through other people’s eyes.
Many people I meet in my virtual and in-person travels ask me about life in Berlin. You are welcome to visit Berlin! There are 4.3 million visitors from abroad annually in a love-hate relationship. People come for that something special, and in the modern process of discovery and destruction, the there that was there is consumed. The cool, artsy neighborhood gets gentrified, the wild and rough “authentic” corners get overrun with tourists, you know the drill. Whether you should come live here and exacerbate gentrification is a question I can’t answer for you. One of the few things protecting the character of the city and its unique neighborhoods is the strong renter rights laws. If it were in the US, it would have long been overrun, like Austin or Pittsburgh.
I didn’t realize that’s what I was doing when I moved here or how my presence would be interpreted until it was too late. And now here I am. I went from traveling manically once I’d freed myself from the corporate world to a sudden full stop in my small neighborhood in Berlin—macro to micro. I moved here from a karmic pit stop in Pittsburgh in 2018, and I am as surprised as anyone that this is the city where I chose to spend the longest time of my adult life. Most of my existence is within one square mile of my apartment, where I shop, visit doctors, dentists, and friends, dine, and exercise.
Berlin is a huge and amazing city. Okay, it’s not Rio huge. Or LA or New York, but it’s big enough (3.85 Mil). I might not have made the move if I had done my research first. And by research, I mean looking at the average hours of sunlight for six months of the year. It’s so far north here that there can be months with no light; the clouds make it feel like that, at least. I was following a travel blogger who sang the praises of the Berlin artist visa, so that was one bit of “research” I did do. In the end, I needed a freelance work permit to be a translator, as I hadn’t yet unleashed my inner artist.
I was denied my visa on the first attempt because the standard-issue grumpy bureaucrat in the Foreigners Office (formerly Ausländerbehörde, now rebranded as the Landesamt für Einwanderung, that is, the State Office for Immigration) didn’t believe that my proof of gigs was real, as the emails showing the contracts were written with the informal “du” you, and not the “Sie” of high German. A friend had helped me by sending some work my way, so of course she would duzt me, not Sietz me. Not good enough for the grumpy, crossing T’s dotting I’s lady, though. She said to come back with the right paperwork. That was before Covid when you could show up at 7 am and take a number, like at a deli counter.
I was so frustrated that I left and got on the subway. I missed my next bus connection and stood crying in the freezing February weather on the fancy boulevard Ku’damm, right in front of a Berlin Ampelman shop, overcome with anger, desperation, and cold. Maybe PMS too. The second time I went back, I had a different employee who was kind and printed the visa that would be glued into my passport with no issues. I could write a whole chapter about the injustices witnessed at the Foreigner’s Office, for example them yelling at Africans—until their blond German wives show up—but I’ll save the negativity for another time.
Each neighborhood (called a Kiez) is very different, as Culture Trip will tell you. I live in the African quarter in northern Berlin, surrounded by people of all colors and cultures, especially Arabs, Africans, Turks, and Eastern Europeans. Culturetrip also has an article about the call to change the colonial street names, which was implemented in 2023. A street in my neighborhood was renamed from that of a colonializer with blood on his hands, to was renamed to Cornelius-Fredericks-Straße. Fredericks was a resistance fighter against German colonial rule in what is now Namibia.
Someone asked me about diversity here, and the definition needs to be clarified. There are not as many black people as, say, in Munich, Hamburg, NY, and LA, but many people you might think are white are actually from every other country in the world that isn’t dark-skinned. You’d only know once you hear them speak English or German with accents. I also do hear a lot of American English and try to play it cool, but I enjoy the eavesdropping. You’ve been warned, this is where I get my writing material.
I love Berlin because you can be anything you want here. You can wear anything or nothing, and nobody cares. You can pursue any hobby or niche interest and find other people here who are into it. The city It is a safe-haven for queer folk, and is full of artists, weirdos, rejects, exiles, and people who have fled their homeland for whatever reason to be part of the new culture being created here. Ok, maybe in some of the shi-shi Charlottenburg or Arab neighborhoods, there appears to be a dress code, but this is not a city known for high fashion, but weird fashion amidst headscarves. Unfortunately, incidents of harassment and violence are on the rise, but that’s another story, too.
My move here was eased by connections, prior knowledge of the language, and other factors. Not everyone has as easy a time as I—and I cried more than once. Of the 52 countries assessed in the 2023 InterNations Expat Essentials Index, Germany was ranked the most challenging country for expats to start a new life, followed by Japan and China. No kidding on several fronts, but once you get settled here, figure out the many ways they tax you coming and going and require permission to breathe—there are some perks. The cultural, musical, and artistic offerings are the prime reason I would cite. There are two operas, a philharmonic, many concert halls, theaters, museums, and countless art shows by amateurs and pros. I can live without a car and often tell people this is a good place to be poor. Healthcare is mandatory, and the high taxes go to creating the infrastructure that I enjoy—like getting to the opera with public transport.
Random but related anecdote: One time, I woke up like normal, opened the curtains, and prepared to start my day when, suddenly, something flew into my eye. For almost an hour, I tried everything to get the foreign body out, to no avail. I finally gave up and, with my one good eye, looked online for the nearest eye doctor and saw that they had Sprechstunden office hours until ten. I got dressed quickly and hailed a taxi to get up the street to the optometrist. Within 30 minutes, he had fished out the sizeable offending fleck and sent me on my way. No cost, no copay, no problem. That’s what healthcare for all looks like. In America, I would have gouged my own eye out to avoid going to Urgent Care and paying hundreds of dollars.
People from the digital nomad world seem to move away once they enter a higher tax bracket (as did that travel blogger I used to follow); after putting in their Bohemian, grungy-Berlin, starving artist years, it’s time to move on. However, a steady stream of students, academic fellows, and other literati are always coming through to take their place. Many people claim to have lived in Berlin for a phase of their lives—not just the famous ones like David Bowie (there’s a whole book just on his time here) or Nabokov.
Recently, there’s been a huge influx of East Indians coming to study engineering and IT and work in IT or, apparently, to ride the food delivery services’ bikes. Berlin’s foreign minister went to India in 2022 to invite them, signing a migration and mobility agreement. Germany, and especially Berlin’s tech services, are woefully behind the times, and a chief complaint in all forums about Berlin, whether Germans or newly moved migrated. This table from the Federal Bureau of Statistics shows how many foreign-born people are in Germany and where they are from. I was surprised to see as almost as many Indians as Iraqis. The culinary impact is noticeable, with more options now than kebab, pizza, and Vietnamese food.
Some of the excellent Substacks about Berlin and Germany with info in English have helped me feel like I am part of a wider expat community. These curated feeds help me escape the random endless scrolling on Berlin-related Subreddits, where people post all the bad things that happen to them, and instead stay more motivated to stick with this experiment in humanity called Berlin and work on my already serious case of FOMO. There’s a real community being built up via Substack. Links below:
Feel free to subscribe to my newsletter too—I don’t always write about Berlin, but from Berlin, the city that has changed my life many times and surely more to come.
Thanks!
🙏 Bettina ☀️