Looking for the heart of Berlin, we arrive at what I read was a community garden only to find it suspended in the air, surrounded by the scaffolding of a giant luxury apartment development. On the day marking Brexit, I find walls upon walls upon walls. I drag my feet from postwar debris into what I was told as a child was my future, finding only hundreds of blockades. The economy is layers of entropy pasted one over the other, a peeling plaster-cast, every door boarded up, every window an ad opportunity.
Nestled amongst tourist traps and the skyscraper built only in a race to pierce the sky is Design Panoptikum, a museum to functionality both real and imagined. Its owner is a former photographer who speeds through a presentation with deadpan wit which turns his depression into character when he laments the move from analogue to digital, and the soullessness and lack of imagination emergent in the expanse of corporate West Berlin. The museum is an underground monument to the creativity and humour found in engineering, the mergence of the biological and the mechanic. It smashes existing objects together to make new ones which both do and don’t make sense in order to (mostly) make visual jokes, but there is a haunting eulogy to abandoned futures. The owner takes pride in claiming no inclusion of any objects used for physical harm or torture, but there are tools used in electroshock and hydrotherapy, repurposed in surreal amalgams which wouldn’t be out of place in a women’s magazine saved forever in a wartime bunker.
The childlike glee evoked in the prosthetic man running through time from a history of early deaths into a transhumanist future and sculptures singing to rudimentary recording devices are offset by the telegraph machine hanging on the wall, and the unavoidable brutality of the steel of war helmets and medical devices. The thin line between ingenuity and extinction, exemplified by the invention of the Atom Bomb, is captured in the tactile and jarring aesthetics of science fiction in a singular way. The very thing which stands to save your life is what is used to torture you, the tools of liberation are the tools of subjugation, and utopian visions are only ever one perversion away from dystopia. We left speculating on what will happen to all of this when he inevitably dies alone (we decided there is no way his genius could tolerate anything else); whether the dreams would be preserved, synthesised into something new, or whether they would be destroyed, becoming a thousand futures which never were.
31/1/2020
There was a series of seemingly spontaneous memorials we found ourselves in, marking farewell to Britain. Since morning I had found it difficult to feel anything. It had been years coming and it was never a thing I felt was clear cut. I don’t want Britain to be an isolationist ethnofascist shithole, but neither will I ever obfuscate the fact that the EU, beyond undeniably good things like the human rights convention, is essentially an imperialist, capitalist structure that needs massive reform at least. It’s hard to weep for something that economically buried Greece. So I float, between being British, Greek, European. None of it means much to me. And no one else cast a glance to the American embassy and its guards, looming in stoic terror. But touching the Berlin Wall for the first time felt real. Jess remarked as we walked its length how cruel it was, that it wasn’t very high, and must have been a constant taunt to those imprisoned on either side. Feeling a cord cut between these symbols felt real by the end of the day, the accumulation of music and weeping at the most protruding site of division I have seen. At the crescendo of all that trauma I felt my heart ache for all the hope lost.