Alone in Berlin (part 2)

So there I am , in the departure lounge of the airport with an internal debate going on "should I buy a copy of Hans Fallada's Alone in Berlin just before I set off for the place by myself, is that a pretentious thing to do?? Blah Blah blah . I think that perhaps this inane internal dialogue will become noticeable to other passengers waiting for a flight , I pull myself together and 20 minutes before the flight I buy a copy . So I now have the book and Bowie's Low and Heroes on my MP3 player but not Lou Reed's Berlin . I used to love that album but have not been able to listen to it in its entirety for a number of years now. I bought that album in my teens and listening to the album on headphones felt like I was living through those songs . Oddly I have only been able to listen to the Heroes album for only the last few years. Something about everyone I knew at the time who was into the album was into some kind of German/Berlin fantasy ...Cabaret ... Isherwood ,Brecht and the rest . Being an abandoned half German unable to speak my mothers tongue felt shameful ,sure I had my own German fantasies , that did include films like Cabaret and a decent knowledge of krautrock bands but it was always tinged with a sense of shame. That whole Bowie Reed Pop exploration was too painful for me to visit.

Alone In Berlin

" Sometimes I feel like a Motherless Child"

I went to Berlin for the first time last October ... perhaps it was a place I had avoided, my Mother is was born in Koln married my Father who was part of the British Forces on the Rhine ... The marriage lasted up until my second week in secondary school then my Mother abruptly decided to leave my father , he was at work , she packed a suitcase ,told my older brother who was about to start his second year of university, to tell our Father that she had left him ... she took me with her to her sisters in Tonbridge. I stayed there with her for about a year until she once again made an abrupt decision to send me on a train back to my Father in Newcastle. I didnt see her for another 10 years. To speak of my Mother at home was verboten or at least to speak of her in a positive light. The connections to my German blood line were severed externally, I forgot how to speak the language or reach into that nations pre Nazi cultural heritage. So the notion of visiting the Berlin (which had crossed my mind) always fell away from my imaginings before they could take hold. Strange to be catching up on time ... a mixture of embarrassment and almost a sense of shame for not have visited earlier , when the wall came down .

So there I am at the airport in the departure lounge and have so far refused to buy a copy of Hans Fallada's Alone in Berlin ... I can be quite censorious over such matters , reading too much into something that I had not read.

" In Berlin by the wall you were five foot ten inches tall" The opening lines of Lou Reed's 1973 album Berlin and a place he had not visited at that point. I like that kind of creative gesture .