Siri Hustvedt is the author of four novels, The Blindfold, The Enchantment of Lily Dahl, What I Loved, and The Sorrows of an American, as well as two books of essays, A Plea for Eros, and Mysteries of the Rectangle: Essays on Painting.

Robert A. LeVine is an anthropologist and professor emeritus at Harvard University. His most recent book is Anthropology and Child Development: A Cross-Cultural Reader (2008). He lives in Massachusetts but often visits his granddaughter in Berlin.

Please click here to watch a music video of the Hans Beimler song on YouTube!

Portrait of Hans Beimler courtesy of Gedenkstätte Deutscher Wilderstand.

As Berlin upgrades its chameleon wardrobe toward something more sophisticated, it’s tempting to find its bohemian foundations provincial or quaint—in any case, relegated to the pile marked, “donations.” But such a linear notion of progress belies this city’s iconoclastic nature. Berlin is a humane place, scaled for human beings. This is clear to anyone who walks along the stretch of the Landwehr Canal in front of the Vivantes Klinikum am Urban (aka the Urban Krankenhaus). Whether this scrappy swath of nature belongs to the city or to the hospital is unclear. Between Admiralbrücke and Baerwaldbrücke, it’s neither park nor strasse. It’s neither here nor really there. Sure, moored on either side of the hospital bank are two cafes in sailboats, whose colored lights strung from the masts certainly welcome tourists. But in between them sits a fat, abandoned ferryboat whose smashed windows and graffiti silently attest to the legends of yesterday’s parties. Maybe the city’s too broke to move it, but for the passers-by who stop here (and perhaps also the patients behind the hospital’s windows), the trashed boat epitomizes Berlin’s sense of humor; it’s a monument to not taking life too seriously. On warm afternoons throughout the year, adventurous readers climb over the low fence along the northern side of the canal to dangle their legs over the edge and enjoy hours of southern exposure. During long days around the summer solstice, the gravel path is crowded with slow bicyclists, wild children chased by strollers, patients in wheelchairs, and the usual flâneurs. Picnickers and laughing sunbathers, a few strumming musicians, chess players and lovers crowd the patchy grass next to the water. From wooden benches many watch these unabashed displays of life, some in spite of a bandaged eye or half-hidden IV. Swans ornament the shores and aggressively hunt for scraps. Sometimes a tall man on an air mattress floats, napping, in the canal. This un-place belongs to anyone who pauses, enchanted by an unexpected glint of sunlight on the canal or the welcoming mood of a motley gathering. Here is something spontaneous and unselfconscious. Something natural. For this nature to reside within the purview of the Urban Krankenhaus is, for anyone, heart-breakingly humane. (Emily Lundin)

On the rare late fall day when blue sky pierces Berlin’s chronic dark gray, I bike across the river from my Friedrichshain neighborhood to Treptower Park.  Unlike Tiergarten, whose lovely ponds and clumps of flora are constantly interrupted by city streets, the paths in Treptower Park stretch luxuriously for miles, like a good long yawn.  The walk along the river is crowded with others craving the sunshine: blinking older couples with their ancient dogs, shivering teenage girls in thin tights and mini skirts, the odd indie rock band doing a photo shoot for their upcoming ill-fated album (the good looking singer strides out in front, the dumpy drummer skulking in the back, the photographer-girl-groupie clicking away).  When the path dead-ends, I cut across a parking lot to the paved trail that snakes back through the woods, my favorite part of the ride.  The autumn trees are aflame and the leaves churn in clouds of violet, gold and rust under my wheels.  Sometimes I shout things or sing, happy to delude myself with the notion that I am miles from anywhere and not only a few meters from the main path.  Treptower Park’s biggest attractions are its oversized Soviet War Memorial and the creepy abandoned amusement park in its center, but I like it for the most obvious of parkly reasons: its ability to suspend my urban disbelief. (Brittani Sonnenberg)

This is actually a eulogy, for a cafe on Knesebeckstrasse that closed last year. It was called The Kitchen. The food was delicious. The proprietress, Patricia Ferer, a warm and wonderful person from St. Louis via New York City, was always welcoming. But it was more than that. Sometimes the stars align such that a particular place sums up the experience of a generation or at least a neighborhood. The Kitchen was such a place. Open only 2 years and 9 months (almost exactly as long as the original, 1970s-defining Studio 54, as fate would have it) The Kitchen gave Charlottenburg a center where there had been none. People came by to eat lunch, to buy dinner to go, to drink coffee in the morning. But mostly they came by to meet each other. This corner of Berlin is notoriously lacking in community, but for a brief moment we had a real hang-out, where people talked between the tables and made lasting friendships. During the grey winter months it was cozy inside and on long summer afternoons its outdoor tables basked in sunshine. It was the rare place that always felt like home. (Anna Winger)

The phrase “poor but sexy”  has become one of the more tiresome clichés about Berlin, even if there are stretches of Kreuzberg south of the Landwehr Canal that still live up to it. More typical of our hometown’s herky-jerky efforts to be modern and glamorous is Holmes Place, the wannabe upscale gym right off Gendarmenmarkt. Holme’s is the heart of Mitte, ostensibly a gathering spot for media and fashion people, except that here, no one recognizes each other. I’ve been a member for three years. Once people got over asking me how I could stand such a “pretentious” place (hello, people, it’s a gym), they wanted to know what famous people I’d seen there. But I couldn’t really tell – stripped of the cues of clothing, done-up hairdo (and for women, make-up), and covered in a slick of sweat, people don’t really look all that much like their public selves. I think I saw model Eva Padberg there once, and Wolfgang Joop. But mainly it’s the same crew of professionals, including people I know personally – magazine editors, freelancers, photographers. We all ignore each other studiously. I saw a book editor I know sitting on a weight machine opposite to me, which meant that our eye-lines matched exactly; he managed to look five inches to my right the whole time. He may have been embarrassed to see a professional acquaintance while covered in sweat, or maybe my T-shirt was too wrinkled. This gym is the opposite of New York’s Russian baths, where there’s a camaraderie to be found in seeing everyone you know at their least appealing.  Berlin’s rawness is a cultivated art! That studiedly scruffy look takes work. Just keep your head down and it’ll be all right. (Ralph Martin)