by Lyz Pfister

Who do you want your Berlin to be? She’ll be anything for you. Do you want her in glitter? Stripped down to sweat-broken tights and a cuffed white shirt, she’ll be the half-drunk beer loosely cupped in an open hand, feet sticky on the floor of the train. She’ll be neon lights on the rotisserie stand, one chicken’s fat runneling onto another speared bird, where grease-slicked lips kiss new night strangers, hands shoveling globby red-white gobs of fries into those same mouths, all washed down with Club Mate like an ashy aftertaste. She’ll be the three a.m. döner, spilling with salad, bloody tomatoes and sweet white onions, crusted meat and the trinity scharf, Kräuter, Knoblauch.

Do you want her to speak Berlinerisch? The clipped icks and innes and dets decorating an already guttural tongue like parsley on a bald potato, white, a mirror for ghostly asparagus stalks, pale hollandaise, a yellow beer the color of melted butter bubbling in the glass. When she ditches blue worker’s overalls to don her nighttime leather jackets and greying blonde, she just orders a beer and a beer is a beer is a beer unless it’s a Weizen. She’s at the Stammtisch with the other regulars at the corner bar where the paneling is wooden and the curtains are lace and the succulents in the window are not that kind of succulent but the kind we called cactuses before they were hip.

Do you want your Berlin barefoot? Smelling of calendula oil and crusted with dirt from the community garden plot? She’ll be the organically-raised, free-range, home-grown, hand-killed, never-killed chicken or tempeh faux. She’ll be foraged in the strangely sandy Brandenburg forests and shared in apartments covered in peeling posters and sandalwood candles.

And she’ll be bio everything, crossing all boundaries. Bio bread and bio Wurst, green bio stickers slapped on cheese at the discount grocery store, bio meat on your burger, bio döner, bio Currywurst, bio hot sauce. She’ll be the soft-lit bio supermarket funneling high-end stroller-traffic, with shelves of grains and cereals, buffalo milk, herbal teas, and tiny vegetables scrubbed clean in baby bins.

But Berlin can be newsletter writeup-friendly, her exposed brick everything, custom-poured concrete and thick wood slabs, serving up charcuterie in measured portions. She’ll be the third wave coffee hand-roasted, the new wave classic cocktail hand-shaken; she’ll be the ten-course tasting menu shaved daikon, cucumber water, red beet glacé, smoked watercress; she’ll be the fifteen euro food truck pulled pork sandwich slow-roasted smoky and rich with reproach that says, “Remember when I was punk? Remember when I was cheap? Remember when there was no such thing as an iced galão to go?”  

And you do. And you don’t. And you eat your pulled pork sandwich and wash it down with a craft beer, an IPA — another thing that wasn’t here before. And you walk to the canal, mist-shorn in Berlin’s gray fall, she’s in the swans, graceful gliders nipping at each other in the chill; she’s in the grass banks pockmarked with beer caps and the ugly Späti on the corner, inside walls lined with plastic-wrapped cigarette packs and refrigerators full of beer. You buy a Tyskie or Staropramen, an Augustiner, the best of the Späti beers, and walk to the water. You pop the top and sit on the stone wall watching the water whirl, looking into the leafy, wet scrub across the shore. This is your Berlin, you think; whatever Berlin you’re in is yours.