"Postcard from the Former East Berlin (Circus Envy)"

by Douglas Coupland

From the novel, Polaroids From the Dead, New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1996. ©Douglas Coupland, 1994.

Berlin, Monday, October 3, 1994: five years after the Wall Thing happened. Shopping is a joke; consumption has not nourished. Five years later the marketplace is a bore. And the Walled landscape - once overwhelmingly tragic and melancholic - is now overwhelmingly ironic and frantic and just plain sad. But then does this come as news?

A free Elton John concert is scheduled for the Brandenburg Gate on October 3. The Gypsy Kings, Paul Young and the Leningrad Cowboys will also be there. Karl Marx Allee is peppered with posters for Barry Manilow and liberal SPD candidate Rudolf Scharping. Wordless Helmut Kohl posters feature a beaming Kohl as Santa-Claus-minus-the-beard flanked by smiling young people. A local artist has placed UNITED COLORS OF BENNETON stickers atop the Kohl posters, and there is no sense of incongruity or any seeming alteration of meaning.

The Saturday afternoon before October 3, I was at a MusicCity in the Alexanderplatz, a former ideological showplace where isotopes of Socialist Modernism compete for Miss Uncongeniality, where plaza sculptures of almost-indescribable dreariness make one ache for the whimsical frivolity of a Richard Serra or a Donald Judd. I asked a sales clerk politely enough, "Hello, do you have the new R.E.M. album?" and was rebuffed with a bored, contemptuous, "Nein." Okayyyyyy. Meanwhile, sitting beside this clerk stood a stack of the same aforementioned R.E.M. album, Monster. So I said to the gentleman, "Hmmm. Well, in that case, I'll have one of those instead." With a gesture blending loathing, ennui, disgust and patronization, the album was hurled onto the counter, the clerk then bracing his arms across his chest in a listless, disengaged challenge. I handed over my VISA card, only to be rewarded with a withering, "VISA? Nein." Cash was proffered and the Monster album and the mingiest of plastic bags thrown into my face. Back in the ex-DDR, the retail concept is still, five years later, something that might need just the smallest splash of Total Quality Management. When I mention this incident to Western Berlin friends, they roll their eyes and say "DDR." As an adjective describing service, "DDR" combines Fawlty Towers with Stalinism.

A mile west, at the corner of Unter den Linden begins the Friedrichstrasse reconstruction - a dead showcase neighborhood transformed once again into a newer showcase neighborhood for a new regime: six square blocks made over with untold billions of deutschemarks. Signs EIN LUXURY HOTEL; French superstar architect Jean Nouvel has designed a new Galleries Lafayette, nearly completed and hemmed at the bottom with strips of marigold, navy and aubergine fabric. In a continent that seems at best hesitant to generate new skylines, the thin chopstick-like forms of the construction cranes over Friedrichstrasse become what skyline there will be in this decade, at least. It is a post-national architecturescape that contrasts vividly with what filled the neighborhood before. The streets are rife with the lawnmower rumbles of Trabants and Wartburgs compete with the thrums of South Beach aqua colored Toyota Supras.

In this epicenter of irony, Havana-caliber consumer time-technology collisions occur every three feet. Along nearby Unter den Linden, ex-Stasi members driving Korean-built taxis gaze longingly at the ex-Stasi disco which is now a T.G.I. Fridays and a Radisson Hotel Plaza. One can only imagine earnest midwestern Radisson executives refitting the hotel and discovering cobwebbed Soviet Beta recording cameras behind cobwebbed bedroom mirrors. The nearby Palast der Republik, resembling a failed entry for an LBJ library design competition and where Erich Honnecker pursued his private realms, is quarantined because of asbestos poisoning and is locally named "der Asbesthaus." Friedrichstrasse's newly constructed landscape is one of infrastructural pornography. Above-ground water pipes punctuate the landscape like the Mad Mouse at the local fun world; pools of silicon resin drip into the sandy Prussian soil like a thousand breast implants fallen off the back of a truck. An Apple computer training school overlooks workers in orange and blue overalls who weld I-beams while Saran-wrap'ing dead socialist architecture in green net veils like the scarves around Grace Kelly's neck. Furukawa backhoes excavate piles of soil of varying historical molarity. There are stacks of gas cylinders and cable spools; on Franzozischestrasse, black telecom cables coil beneath one's feet as they descend into the earth. Stacks of Crisco-smooth Kalksandstein bricks, like Joseph Beuys sculptures, rest beside hexagon-shaped dumpsters filled with dead rusty rebar and sandy, asbestos-choked Eastern bloc cement. Modular pre-assembled window components are lifted into the air by cranes with names like Liebherr. Fresh black pavement is stained with splashes of lime. There are Dixi portable toilets and random sewage odors. Jackhammers drill away at statist architecture; polyurethane foam extrudes from underneath wood planks above the U-bahn.

Back at the hotel, like any good pop-music enthusiast, I listened to my new album several dozen times while reading the wrapper notes, in this case a special 48-page mini-book. My favorite song on the tape is one called "Circus Envy," a roaring, secret-agent-feeling number describing jealousy - a monster whose symbol is a headless bear that appears on the mini-book's cover. The title song contains the line, Here comes that awful feeling again, which resonates for me the rest of my stay, reinforced by the image of the bear cub which is the civic emblem of the city of Berlin.

The citizens of former East Berlin have had to make the leap from 1945 to 1995. They never had a 1960s, 70s, 80s or even a 90s. They want what the West has, and they think that they are slowly, grudgingly and surely joining the West every day. Acid-wash denim clothing is seen as a symbol of shooting too far too quickly and has been banished from the landscape, due, no doubt for a revival in ten minutes or so. But there is no language in the East to make sense of Friedrichstrasse's Deutsche Interhotel GmbH, minibars, non-smoking attitudes, baby vegetables or movie-studio-style politics. The people of the East think they are entering the West, but they are actually entering the era of the transnational. It is a mistake to confuse the amoral forces of transnationalism with the West. The instantaneous transfer of capital from one node to another is not what the West was ever about.

The Ossis, the ex-Easterners, greet you, a Wessi, almost invariably with "Hello, I'm confused." The Ossis recognize their own crisis, but explain to them that the West is in crisis as well - a crisis more sublime because the West has already seen a world of desire based purely on consumption - and they know the hollowness lying at its core.

Ossis want what the Wessis have - that's obvious. But try and tell Ossis that what they now think they desire is something pointless, and they will accuse you of trying to deny them the plunder of consumption sheerly out of spite. Try to tell people that they can't have what they think they really want - that just won't work. A big political question currently facing Germany, if not the entire West, is What is it we can now desire now that things, objects - stuff - has failed us? The engineering of sustaining, nourishing new models of desire: that is the new issue. Even the East Germans express fear about the Chinese manufacturing a people's car - a current event that like no other pinpoints the unsustainability of the dream of consumption.

Does the ghost of post-WWII-reconstructionist Konrad Adenauer walk amid this Friedrichstrasse landscape - a landscape more reminiscent of Orange County than that of Frederick the Great? Has the emblematic bear cub of Berlin turned into the bear of the California Republic? No, Konrad Adenauer would not walk here. A spectating ghost would have to be the ghost of somebody transnational, somebody as yet undefined - a Beast whose aesthetic is one of absolute function and absolute function only. A creature of Facadism, of instantaneous transglobal currency transfers - a creature who is hostile to culture and who gives us entry into the realms of surrealism without providing any underlying subconscious. A headless bear of jealousy that slouches through the Brandenburg gate, not knowing what it wants, only that it wants more.

Here comes that awful feeling again.

About the author

Douglas Campbell Coupland was born a Canadian citizen on December 30, 1961 on a Canadian NATO base in Baden-Sollingen, (West) Germany. Shortly afterward his family moved to Vancouver, B.C., Canada where he attended school from kindergarten through high school. In 1984 he graduated from the studio program in sculpture from Vancouver's Emily Carr Institute for Art & Design

He has studied fine art and industrial design at the Hokkaido College of Art and Design in Sapporo, Japan, and the European Design Institute in Milan Italy. In November of 1987, he had a solo sculptural installation at the Vancouver Art Gallery entitled "The Floating World."

Coupland is also a novelist. His five novels to date, Generation X (1991), Shampoo Planet (1992), Life After God (1994), Microserfs (1995) and Polaroids From the Dead (1996) have been translated into 22 languages. He is also a regular contributor to The New York Times, the New Republic and ArtForum.

Douglas Coupland lives and works in Vancouver, B.C., Canada.