“The Underbelly”
Jake Kramer
The city rises up and sprawls across miles of fields. Its bigness baffles and consumes its inhabitants until the city meets land; where sheep and other chattel mix with stone cottages and fences. The gray river, cool and shallow, flows between big gray buildings and smaller squirrely ones. When the sun shines heat is trapped in apparel—leather jackets, leather shoes, leather pants, leather all over—and every faux-chrome façade of the city’s communist-era buildings. Kebab stands line the streets, the rich scent of lamb meat mixing with streetcar fumes and oil-streaked puddles. Helicopters share airspace with cranes, rising and falling, rising and falling. The older buildings, pocked by gunshots and years of sludge, resolved to remain drafty and romantic. And everywhere, gray. Enter Metropolis, Stasiland, the Gray City: Berlin.
***
The neighborhood near Hohenschönhausen, the old GDR prison whose name translates roughly as to dwell high beautiful, transitions from brightly colored row houses to low-slung communist-era apartment blocks to tumbledown warehouses, dogs, and weeds growing in sidewalk cracks. Middle-aged women with dyed red hair, flats, and jars of rosehip jam give way to old men with canes. Between the warehouses and across the street from the prison is a retirement home.
I brought my camera with me because I expected to take pictures of chipped gray paint on the walls of prison cells, the interrogation room, and sensory deprivation chambers. I wanted to know what it meant to be a prisoner in a regime known for stripping its people of their identities, murdering them slowly, rather than killing them outright. My guide was an animated man who drank three or four bottles of Club-Mate, a German energy drink, during the tour. He had been a prisoner at Hohenschönhausen, he said, though he didn’t know why—the Stasi officers who had arrested him never told him on what grounds he was charged. He suspected it was because a woman he had been seeing was an informant, and had caught him speaking with American students. I decided if he was going to ask, I would tell him I was from the center of the country because I speak German with an Östfrankisch accent—fluent, low, mumbled, and somewhat gravelly.
He showed us the chipped gray paint on the walls of prison cells, the interrogation room, and sensory deprivation chambers. He told us about the building’s sharp corners and the stoplight system in place to make sure prisoners never saw each other, and about a mother, father, and son, all of whom committed suicide in the prison yard. We followed him into a small concrete room, about five feet by five feet, with walls fifteen feet high and no windows. There was no roof. He told us prisoners were put in cells like these during the summer months and oftentimes weren’t permitted to leave. An older West German woman in the group muttered hölle—hell—and turned her camera up towards the sky to take a picture. I did the same. At the end of the tour, he deposited us in the gift shop where we could buy key chains reading Ich überlebte Hohenschönhausen—I survived Hohenschönhausen—and teddy bears with “I heart Berlin” on their bellies.
On my walk back to the Straßenbahn, an old man in a trench coat with several GDR buttons pinned to his lapel stopped me and asked about my camera. I asked him about his accessories. He showed me his service buttons, and how they became flashier with each new rank attained in Der Staatsicherheitsdienst—the Stasi—and about his buttons awarded for loyalty to the communists, being a model citizen, and producing an adequate number of children with his wife, who had died. He beamed the whole time, and asked where I was from. He looked like my grandfather and his German was warm and friendly, so I said America. His eyes lost some of their shine and his face melted into sadness. He said something about my youth, squared his shoulders, and walked away. I should’ve told him I was from the center of the country. Berlin: vorwärts immer—always forward.
***
The major nightclubs in Berlin are in converted warehouses lining the S-Bahn tracks near Warschauerstraße in the eastern half of the city. Banners advertising drink specials dangle off of everything, and broken bottles and drunken Brits line the cobblestone streets. At night the neighborhood’s colorlessness is punctuated by the soft glow of Christmas lights strung up between buildings, and the air is filled with shouting and heavy bass lines.
I came with my friend Chris. He liked bars and strangers and loud music, and I liked the prospect of cheap food at the end of the night. We wandered through throngs of people, losing ourselves in the labyrinth. The Berghain, a power plant-turned nightclub on a rundown lot squeezed between canals and train tracks, loomed in the distance. This, we knew, was a Berlin institution—the beating heart of the city’s frenetic energy. Here, shady men from Belgrade mingled with models from Tallinn, bar tabs regularly exceeded four figures, and a miasma of sex and drugs hung in the air. Something pulled at Chris. He wanted to go in. He also knew we couldn’t because we were drab looking students. He told me he was denied entry to a club earlier in the week because the bouncer didn’t think he looked gay enough. I laughed, wondering what image the bouncer had in mind, and whether or not I would fit. I doubted it. The only other way of getting in was to approach the door with beautiful women.
Chris found me a very nice, very busty Polish woman named Juliana. He was content with Juliana’s friend who had beautiful skin, platinum blonde hair, and stood almost a full foot taller than him. I complimented Juliana’s faux-fur vest that barely clasped in the middle, not knowing what else to say. She knew why we had approached her, acquiesced, and decided I wasn’t worth talking to as long as we had to be together. I felt slimy. Chris, with his big eyes, floppy brown hair, and stoic charm had no issues conversing with Juliana’s friend. We went back to the Berghain, admiring the shades of gray we walked past. Gray puddles reflecting grayer buildings, gray meat wrapped in slightly less gray bread, Juliana’s gray eyes.
The bouncer let us in, though once passed the coat check, Juliana and her friend disappeared. Brushing aside our hurt pride, Chris and I walked past a cross-section of the Berlin clubbing scene—men with heavy makeup in six-inch heels, women in leather with whips in their hands, a few ragged-looking youths in a sweaty pile in the corner—and emerged onto the dance floor. Chris was infatuated with the music and dove in. I was more interested in finding the bar. I walked through one gray concrete corridor after another. I couldn’t say how many staircases I went up, or how many I went down. Light came from glow-in-the-dark everything, people gnawing on pacifiers with blinking LEDs, and cracks in the wall. The bar was one long metal basin. The drinks were cold.
A man in what appeared to be early twentieth-century dress sat down next to me and ordered something. He asked me why I looked so sad. I laughed and told him I got lost trying to find the Kit Kat Club. He curled his moustache, glared at me, and walked away. The seat of his pants was missing, exposing his bare bottom. Berlin: rückwärts nimmer—never backwards.
