Peter Schneider

In Berlin, the prevailing winds are from the west. Consequently a traveler coming in by plane has plenty of time to observe the city from above. In order to land against the wind, a plane from the west must cross the city and the wall dividing it three times: initially heading east, the plane enters West Berlin airspace, banks left in a wide arc across the eastern part of the city, and then, coming back from the east, takes the barrier a third time on the approach to Tegel landing strip. Seen from the air, the city appears perfectly homogeneous. Nothing suggests to the stranger that he is nearing a region where two political continents collide.

The overriding impression is of a linear order, one which derives from the rectangle and rules out any bending. In the center of the city, the apartment buildings are massed like fortresses. For the most part they are built in squares enclosing an inner courtyard, each with a chestnut tree in the middle. When the top of one of these chestnuts begins to move gently, residents can assume that a force six to eight gale is sweeping along the streets outside. Berliners commonly call these apartment houses apartment barracks, an expression which accurately conveys the architects' inspiration. And from above, their jagged chimneys awaken memories of the broken glass cemented into backyard walls for protection against the neighbors' cats and children.

The new houses on the edge of the city do not seem to be built from the bottom up. They resemble cement blocks dropped from an American or Soviet military helicopter; even as the plane begins its descent, the stranger still can't distinguish the two parts of the city. While the Eastern countryside was recognizable by the uniform color of the crops and the absence of artificial boundaries between fields, the cityscape offers hardly any guide to political affiliation. At most, the duplication of public landmarks - television tower, convention hall, zoo, city hall, and sports stadium - prefigures a city in which the same taste has brought forth the same things twice.

Among all these rectangles, the wall in its fantastic zigzag course seems to be the figment of some anarchic imagination. Lit up in the afternoon by the setting sun and lavishly illuminated by floodlights after dark, the wall seems more a civic monument than a border.

On a clear day the traveler can watch the plane's shadow skimming back and forth across the city. He can track the plane closing in on its shadow until it touches down right on top of it. Only when he disembarks does he notice that in this city, the recovered shadow signifies a loss. After the fact, he realizes that only the plane's shadow was free to move between the two parts of the city; and suddenly the plane seems to him a vehicle like those Einstein dreamed of, from which laughably young and unsuspecting travelers emerge to tour a city where, since yesterday, a thousand years have passed.

I've lived in this Siamese city for twenty years. Like most of those drawn away from the West German provinces, I came here because I wanted to move to a bigger town, because a girlfriend lives here, because survival in this outpost counts as a kind of alternative service and saves one the years in West German barracks. Like most, I stayed on initially from one year to the next; but the truth is too that after only a short stay in Berlin, all the cities in West Germany struck me as artificial.

I like Berlin, really, for the ways in which it differs from Hamburg, Frankfurt, and Munich: the leftover ruins in which man-high birches and shrubs have struck root; the bullet holes in the sand-gray, blistered facades; the faded ads, painted on fire walls, which bear witness to cigarette brands and types of schnapps that have long ceased to exist. Sometimes in the afternoon, the face of a person appears over two elbows propped on a cushion in the only window of those walls. It is a face framed by twenty thousand bricks - a Berlin portrait. Berlin traffic lights are smaller, the rooms higher, the elevators older than in West Germany; there are always new cracks in the asphalt, and out of them the past grows luxuriantly. I like Berlin best in August, when the shutters have been rolled down and handwritten signs hang in the shop windows announcing a now hardly plausible return; when the 90,000 dogs are on holiday and the windshield wipers of the few remaining cars clasp sheaves of leaflets for some Live Entertainment; when the chairs stand empty inside open barroom doors, and the two solitary customers no longer raise their heads even if a third one enters.