I expected a lot from Berlin. I was studying the Berlin airlift, the ultimatum and the building of the wall, Ostpolitik. I was well-versed in the historical interpretations: a microcosm of the Cold War, the physical manifestation of all its absurdity, a beacon of capitalism deep in Soviet territory. They say the Cold War ended when the wall came down. The following two months saw the whole of Eastern Europe implode, its bureaucrats switching to jobs in the new institutions of capitalism. Fukuyama called it “the end of history.” I expected to go to Berlin and find history in the air, to see it on street corners. In this city of upheaval, I expected history to be tangible.
The first dog ever to go to space was called Laika. She orbited the earth for three days before dying due to lack of oxygen. At the time, this was blamed on a fault with the craft. But Wikipedia says this: “The craft was not designed to be retrievable, and Laika was always intended to die."
My hometown is famous for a chain of suicides that hit when I was in year seven, the year that school toilets became shrines to older girls I didn’t know. The doors were covered in RIPs and there were photos stuck to the mirrors with blu-tack. They cleaned it up occasionally but left most of it, I guess out of respect. I sat in my school canteen eating chicken and talking to a friend about the glory of suicide. Everyone was saying the same things. It was a ticket straight to fame, straight out of town. And then the next year we came back and it was all gone. Kids still kill themselves there but the media can’t report on it.
The first time I wanted to die, I was sitting on my bed, facing the window (outside was all movement, that slanting rain that seems to animate everything). I was rationally considering the height of a building necessary to ensure that I would not survive the jump. My first storey window would not be enough. The motorway bridge might be, though. Until I left town four years later, the bridge was always a possibility. I was always a ten minute walk from death. Once, I rode across it in a shopping trolley in the snow, the sides of the trolley slightly higher than the railings. I felt fear, considered that maybe I did not want to die, felt disappointed with myself for this. But I felt, and for years I would seek out similar thrills, skirting death, feeling like the eye of a tornado, wanting nothing more than to be taken by the swirling wind. A friend’s brother was picked up by the police for scaling the outside of the same bridge.
Standing at the Berlin wall felt like presiding over a failed suicide. There’s a stillness, when you’re watching someone in bed, throwing up, feeling with them the mix of stupidity, embarrassment and missed opportunity that follows the attempt. You want to laugh: this is all so ridiculous, so banal. You make dark jokes. The danger has passed. Everyone is trying to forget because they don’t know how to deal with this messy aftermath, like how doctors throw away the placenta before the mother has to see it. In three weeks nobody will remember this night.
The Berlin Wall came down because of a botched press conference. It had been decided that travel restrictions to the West would be eased but the official who was supposed to announce this hadn’t been at the meeting or properly read the document. It was 7pm and he was very grey, very Soviet, like all those men in Brazil but he was the man who brought down that wall when he said that travel restrictions would cease that night. When people went to the wall they were confused; they’d been told they could be through and this permission made them adamant. Never underestimate the power of people who’ve been given permission.
The guards let them through; they didn’t have permission.
The men who ran the project that sent Laika into space have expressed regret about their participation.
I think what I wanted from Berlin was the wall. I wanted to be barricaded in and feel the heavy light from the search towers. But all I saw was Ostalgie: nostalgia for the old East, the fetishisation of the little green men on traffic lights with the wide-brimmed hats; Checkpoint Charlie the Tourist Attraction. Men sell Soviet badges on the pavement in Alexanderplatz. This is all that remains of East Berlin.
I blogged about going to an illegal demonstration and got a week of anonymous hate because it sounded crass and self-involved. But at the demo I had an enemy; I ran; I hated. When I put my hand on the Berlin wall I couldn’t figure out who the enemy was. I consider myself a socialist but saying that feels like empty air. I walked to Lidl and bought some sparkling water and blueberries and ate them on the U-bahn. Sometimes I feel like 50% of my life is spent on underground trains.
Susan Sontag wrote something like “we live in the time that is the end of everything, or more accurately just past the end.” She wrote something like this in the 90s. I think the longer it goes on for the more panicked we all get.
Susan was thirteen in Warsaw when she heard about Laika going into space. For weeks she couldn’t sleep, kept going to the window and looking up at the sky but seeing nothing. She couldn’t stop thinking about this dog surrounded by so much emptiness with meteors and UFOs coming straight at it and not knowing what to do (how could a dog call mission control if something went wrong? What was the Laika thinking, staring at all that space?) She stood by the window even when Laika had died but she didn’t know.
I remember a story in the paper of a girl who hung herself with the tie of her dressing gown on the top of the stairs and her mother came home and found her there. She probably stopped on the bottom step and her life probably ended on those stairs too. Maybe I’m imagining all of this.
When I was thirteen I was thinking about suicide and researching American boarding schools because I wanted to go somewhere very far with solid walls that would stop bits of me breaking off. My mother loved the beach and went there every day. My grandma would pick me up from school sometimes and say “let’s drive around and see the sea” and I would sink down in my seat and not look out of the window and feel all stuffy and prickly. I hated the sea.
If I go in the water now I get heart palpitations and have to sit down for forty minutes to an hour. A chiropractor told me it’s because my ribcage is too small for my heart to pump but I don’t think that’s it. I think my heart feels the water against it and it gets confused about its rhythm and tries to be the sea and a heart at once. Sometimes this happens in the bath. Sometimes my heart tries to be the wind. This is why the sea and the sky terrify me and I like to be in cities with tall buildings and no air. Berlin has too much air.
If you go to my hometown you can feel suicide in the air in a way you can’t feel history in Berlin. I don’t know how they did it. How can you erase history from a city but keep the wall, keep the museums and the old airports? Maybe it’s because they painted over the wall. After going to the East Side Gallery and taking photos I tweeted two of them and said “my favourite piece of art is the Berlin wall.” It got some retweets and lots of favourites. Maybe the way to erase something is to turn it into something else. Or turn it specifically into art. You can’t turn suicide into art but you can turn something that caused 251 deaths into a gallery. Maybe I can feel the suicides at home because nobody talks about them.
In Centre de Pompidou and there was footage of Ceausescu’s execution interspersed with footage of a dog and other adverts from the 80s. I couldn’t work out what the dog was advertising. The dog went to sleep as they covered the Ceausescus’ bodies with a white sheet. Their bodies didn’t look like bodies at that point but I guess that’s what they were. It faded out afterwards. There was a video of Regina Jose Galindo carving “PERRA” into her leg with a blade. In front of the video, two young men were grinning at her. Her face was invisible, focusing on keeping her thigh skin taut to make straight lines. “Perra” means bitch in Spanish. I had a panic attack and left.
When I go home I feel uncomfortable going outside so I stay inside and get depressed. I slip too easily into my past. I can still see the blood in my wardrobe. I smelled you once, in a charity shop in town. I haven’t visited our old places. It’s not raw any more. It’s scar tissue. It doesn’t grow or heal: it stays; it shines and softens.
Living alone in London, I would leave college and feel so overwhelmed by all the potential routes home that I would black out and find myself in the middle of the city hours later with no idea how I got there. In Daisies the two Maries goose-step down the street chanting “We exist.” I can’t say we because I get me and them confused (I keep slipping into “we” while writing this essay; I have trouble understanding that my experience of the world is not totalising). When I was a child I suspected that everyone else was a robot who only switched on to create an elaborate illusion of there being a universe outside of me. Now I have to write down everything I think on the internet for other people to see so I know I’m real. I still can’t look in mirrors because I don’t recognise myself. I’m still stuck in the mirror stage. I need another person around me all the time so I can say: “that is them, they are not me, I am myself”. I don’t know if I’m an introvert or an extrovert. I stick every orange train ticket I have ever bought on my walls so I can wake up and think, that was the past, today is now, I am here, that is another place. I exist, I am, I was. I can’t tell if these are coping mechanisms or ways of maintaining a delusion. I used to self-harm to bring myself back into my body but I have learnt healthier ways of doing this now.
I googled historical forgetting and this came up: “it seems to be rather strange that no one has really set out to explain why exactly during this particular period, from 1980 or so on, there has been such an obsession with memory studies.” But really this field should be called forgetting studies because that’s what we’re doing. That’s what I felt in Berlin. The forgetting was tangible. I tried to ask a German girl about it on the balcony of a party, sounding earnest and smoking my cigarette. She left after telling me that maybe Berlin needs to forget; maybe memory is more dangerous. I spent the rest of the party iMessaging my friend about this:
Lana: omg I feel this so hard. I feel like we were born in such a limbo state of history.
Me: yes!! It’s like we have no real culture/history to hold into and everything feels brand new and disconnected. maybe fresh starts are good? Regeneration etc. But I am disturbed by it.
Lana: it’s too swift. I feel like its just happening to quickly, like ripping off a plaster before the wound has fully healed because you need that finger for something else
Me: yesss I agree. like surely this never happened before? Countries took hundreds of years to digest, heal, evolve
Lana: the Berlin wall fell 25 years ago??? There are people who’s lifespan is that long like wtffff I can’t
Me: Yessss but it’s already SO distant
Lana: I think they need to take that time to evolve. There feels like a gulf between reality
I woke up in the morning with no memory, threw up in a plant pot and caught my flight to London. I wonder what happened to Laika’s body after she died. I wonder what happens to corpses in anti-gravity. Do they decompose or remain forever, empty-eyed and circling?
Susan was twenty-one when she caught the trans-Siberian railway to the sea and saw more sky than she had ever imagined. Staring at all this space, she thought for the first time that she would like to be pregnant.
We’ve gone to war six times in the last decade and I can name two of them. Knowing about where your country is bombing is a voluntary act. Our politics is history before it is history and our history is ancient after twenty-five years. When it gets to the hour and a new programme starts on the TV, that’s a suicide. Suicide is walking into another room and forgetting what you came there for. Suicide is this era’s necessity.
When I was sixteen I bought a one-way ticket to London and committed identity suicide on the Great Western. I don’t remember anything prior to this except by reading diaries and blogs. My personal history erased itself while I travelled through the Midlands. I’m recreating it in therapy because I’ve learnt that you can’t be a sixteen year old newborn and get away with it. But it was necessary at the time. The suicide and the rebirth are as important as each other. I’m learning how to forget and to remember.
David Maljkovic’s Scenes for a New Heritage III shows people standing around a monument erected in the 1970s in Yugoslavia. They are not looking at it. They stand in groups, they dissolve, they kick a makeshift football and then give up, rearranging into small groups, drifting. The suicide presides over them. They are trying to keep it dead. They are trying to forget but they can’t help remembering. There are cars and a camper van covered with tin foil. This is an attempt new rituals on the dead bodies of the old. But the wounds are still too raw. The foil reflects the monuments; it reflects memories which should be erased. The people can’t look at the monument but they can’t look at the foil and they can’t look at each other because they’re all thinking the same thing and they’re afraid to say it aloud. There is lost significance and yet they can’t create anything to fill its space. There are no new rituals. There is forgetting; there is survival.
Apparently art ended in the 1960s. Susan Sontag ended art. There are no artistic movements now because there are no more walls to tear down. Everything is permissible. Susan Sontag wrote in her afterword to Against Interpretation, “We had entered, truly entered, the age of nihilism.” I can’t figure out if Nietzsche thought nihilism was the end goal or just a necessary stop on the way, after which we find real morality and a real way of living. But Susan was right when she said that we’re just past the end of everything and there’s nothing new in sight. I am drowning in broken glass with no idea how it got broken. More windows are shattering all the time. I can’t see the missiles.
Susan the thirteen year old girl drew dogs in her notebook, dogs in astronaut suits, dogs running through the air after astro-mice. She dreamt of Laika and flashing lights. She dreamt of the surface of the moon and compared it to her thighs which were covered in chicken pox scars and stretch marks from her last growth spurt. She dreamt of Laika re-entering the atmosphere and plunging into the middle of the Pacific Ocean where she could live out the rest of her life on a desert island with other retired service dogs.
Susan only found out about the craft not being retrievable when she was sixty and had forgotten that she’d ever dreamt of Laika but she felt a knife right through her heart. She realised that the knife had been poised over her heart for forty-seven years. She realised that she had never really hated anything before.
Susan had a nervous breakdown shortly after this event.
The wall isn’t rubble; the wall still stands but it doesn’t mean anything anymore. But if I break a bottle I can pick up a shard of glass and dig it into me and see blood and that feels continuous. With self-harm, with suicide attempts, we maintain faith in cause and effect.
Susan couldn’t escape the sentence “The craft was not designed to be retrievable, and Laika was always intended to die.”
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