My (Brief) Life in Berlin

Berlin, 2019-02-10

Berlin

A while ago I saw a luggage cover with a slogan on it that made me laugh. "If you can't make it in Berlin, you won't make it anywhere."

There is so much truth in this statement. From the HR department in your start-up company that confuses your social security number with somebody else's, to the waiting staff in restaurants in Mitte or Kreuzberg that would be put to shame by any fifth-grader playing kissaten at the school festival, to the musicians in the subway that make you want to offer them money if they just stop – in Berlin the standards are so low that anybody doing a proper job would probably appear as if from Krypton.

I suppose that can be a good thing. It means that there is not much pressure in the market to succeed. If in New York quality is the norm, in Berlin it is the exception.

Where all the investor money comes from – I have no idea and it is a miracle, although it is put to perspective knowing that while Berlin's economy grows faster than the national average, it still needs to catch up to that average, and we will see whether the money currently in the market will be enough and whether the growth will be substantial.

Myself, I have been working here for two years now and I recently looked back on some notes I wrote down about my impressions when I moved here. Right now I am in my last two months at the company, after which I will go back to my old workplace in Frankfurt.

What struck me first the moment I stepped out of the train back in 2016 was how drab everything looked. Where I had expected at least some grandeur or artsy cool, I found something that looked like an average neighborhood in the Ruhr. Parks devoid of plants but filled with garbage. Kilometer-long stretches of allotment gardens. Expansive waste land. Derelict infrastructure. Make no mistake – that is what Berlin looks like, then and now.

The second thing that was surprising was that prices in Berlin were actually rather high. Daily cost of living, and in particular housing. In the rest of Germany, Berlin has for a long time been perceived as a disorganized, but cheap place to live. While the former is true, the latter is not. I have lived in Düsseldorf for ten years and nearly everything is cheaper there, despite its reputation as a posh town. This didn't feel like a good deal at all!

Thankfully all of this was not tremendously important, because I moved for a new job, and the fact that I got that job was a fairy-tale, a dream come true. At the time I had grown a feeling that I was slowly getting stuck in a frustrating, archaic old boys environment. Only the open-mindedness of the people at OUTFITTERY (probably true of Berlin's young tech people in general) made it possible for me to start a new life outside the financial sector and in the fashion industry where I had always wanted to be.

A view from a balcony

How was the new life? Much baggage was gone. In the true sense of the word, actually. Week two my bag was stolen around Kottbusser Tor with the papers for my scooter in it – I never managed to get new ones thanks to Berlin's incapable authorities. Annoying, but why did I need it. I cycled to work along the blasted allotment gardens and a mess of a bikepath network, and it felt right and wrong at the same time in its simplicity. The next weeks were a peculiar adventure, discovering spots and things to do, while cleaning out the last bits from my old apartment. The crowd at the company was international and refreshingly uninterested in traditional German employee behavior, like fighting the management through the Betriebsrat, generally fighting every new idea that touches their job role, or leaving five-thirty sharp no matter what. Everybody liked to party with their colleagues, the climate was friendly and respectful. Having two female CEOs and a sixty-percent female workforce was a revelation, too. If only to see it and wonder why it's so different elsewhere – there is no rational explanation, everybody else is just twenty years behind and they should get their act together to move themselves into the 21st century.

With all that bliss, I am still leaving. Partly simply because of engineering differences. In my old job, people were very interested in building sound solutions that would work 100% of the time. That, I suppose, is just different in a young, fast-moving company with a lot of young, inexperienced people, and it may just also be different outside the financial sector in general. I dislike the way people hop on every new bit they read in some blog somewhere. The result is a complex, heterogenous system that is fragile and does not perform very well for even the (comparably) little workload we put on it.

That is one thing. The other thing is, despite the new life and the cycling and the fun colleagues, I still don't like the city. After all is said and done, living in Berlin means looking at three million people that dress as if they had found their clothes in the dumpster. Working in a fashion company doesn't change that, and for sure this city is not a fashion capital, despite what other people say. That is just nonsense.

So should you go to Berlin? Maybe the answer lies in a conversation I overheard last year between two girls talking in the hallway outside my office. They were talking about how liberated they feel now, in Berlin, in this life, compared to the place where they came from. There might be something in this that I am simply unable to appreciate adequately. It is true, life in Berlin makes you feel free, makes you feel you are alright the way you are.

So if you are in a situation where you think you need to live up to somebody's ideas that are not your own, and where somebody interferes with your things, I can agree and only give you the advice: Come to Berlin, there you will be free. Just don't expect everything to work perfectly, or everything to look super neat. It does not. But that may not be the most important thing.

Last change 2021-01-23