Berlin aLIVE

Disguised as a guide to Berlin for foreigners, the blog ichwerdeeinberliner.com pokes fun at the scene. Bionade, asymmetrical haircuts, watching Tatort with a pose of ironic distance – all the clichés about Berlin’s alternative elite are put in a nutshell. The author is from abroad himself and speaks no German. And that is pretty much all that is known about him. Wasch Echte is so secretive that he only gives interviews via email.

Why do you want to remain anonymous at any price?

I thought up Wash Echte because I needed an artistic character. Wash Echte absolutely wants to belong, he wants to merge with the crowd of hip Berliners – just like all of the easily impressionable people one meets here every single day. I myself have no such ambitions. If I were to use my real name in my blog, it wouldn’t be all that credible.

And why did you name yourself “Wasch Echte”?

One day, I was sitting in a café in Berlin-Mitte and heard two Germans discussing about who counts as a “wasch echt” (literally, “colourfast,” i.e. “dyed-in-the-wool,” genuine – trans. note) Berliner, and who does not. I liked the way the term sounded. I myself speak no German, but evidently “waschecht” means that someone is so authentic that it can’t be washed out any more.

Can you at least reveal a little bit about yourself?

I’m in my thirties. According to the calendar of the German urban elite that means I am just out of puberty and in twenty years or so will begin thinking about getting a real job. And I am a man. But my nationality remains a secret.

Where did you live before you moved to Berlin?

I move a lot because of my job. Maybe it’s for this very reason that I’ve become immune to the Berlin hype. I have lived in London and Hong Kong, among other places – major cities in which many different scenes and subcultures make their homes. But in Berlin you have this monoculture of attention-addicted, skinny-jeans-wearing, 36-year old hedonists and nothing else. Berlin is really the world capital of the counterculture. But I always ask myself – against whom are they rebelling? There is no financial industry here, no obscene consumerism, not even true urbanisation. In Berlin, subculture and mainstream are so perverted that being a banker is more subversive than being an artist.

But you moved here anyway.

It’s true that Berlin is the world capital of parties and cheap rents. I was drunk on Berlin, too. But sobriety set in when I began to look behind the scenes. Then I discovered that Berlin-Mitte is like a stage-setting, a film set. There’s nothing behind it. I bet someday the Chinese will build a mini-version of Berlin in Hangzhou, just like they’ve done with Paris. There will be a notorious club, a couple of alternative bars and raging bike riders cycling to their unpaid internships. And nobody will be able to tell which is real and which is fake.

In your blog, you never use the word “hipster.” But in fact, everybody knows whom you are making fun of: young alternative urbanites. Why don’t you call a spade a spade?

The hipster notion bores me to death. Hipster satire was already totally sucked dry in 2006. I make fun of a certain mental attitude, namely the utterly unjustified feeling of superiority on the part of young urban dwellers that is in fact a poorly concealed inferiority complex. This attitude was around long before the hipster was invented, and it will outlive this notion, too.

But this attitude exists not only in Berlin-Mitte, but all over the world.

Yes, but the Germans are very German in their hipness. I mean the following here: they take themselves very, very seriously. They grimly and doggedly display how free and relaxed their lives are. Just like everywhere else on earth, young Germans want to break out of their parents’ narrow worlds, out of a world where nothing matters except who has the bigger house and the classier ride. But instead of doing that, they have entangled themselves in an even stricter hierarchy: Who had the wildest weekend? Who has the biggest vinyl collection? Who is going to be the first to open an insiders-only art gallery near Ostkreuz? Young Germans are not making use of their native talent for engineering to make better cars, but to construct the world’s most sophisticated hipness hierarchy.

How did you come to write about it?

On a lazy afternoon in 2008, I was so bored that I began to write a Berlin version of “Stuff White People Like.” Back then, that blog was pretty popular. The author wrote satires about the habits of young, pseudo-alternative higher-income types. I’m just doing a copy. But in principle this was a formula for success, Berlin-style: take something that was cool five years ago, adapt it to Germany, then lean back and wait til you’re smothered in praise.