There was a time when I enjoyed August in Berlin. Sleepy drinks next to Kreuzberg canals, the city is on low metabolism. Comatose but in a positive way, a kind of opium slumber that brings enlightenment in your dreams. But August is also the month that I was born and it is the time when I become aware that my senses are dulling. I have to wear glasses to read the subtitles of Japanese films; can hardly hear my own voice at a busy vernissage. Other senses compensate, of cause. Now I can smell much better than when I was a 20 year old; sometimes I feel like the murderer in the Süsskind novel. What is my nose telling me at the moment? That Berlin stinks in August.
The U3 from Heidelberger Platz (the station is already famous for its pigeon droppings) to Nollendorfplatz smells of creosote and antiseptic; the after shave lotion from Hell. Don’t ask me why. And the smell of diesel clings to the streets. In a pavement café, the chances are that some pungent perfume rises up from the sewers. To like Berlin in August you have to like the smell of urine: cats, humans. It is warm enough for the homeless to sleep aside, so even posh shop fronts smell, at 10 am, of piss and alcohol. As for the men who change the Dixie Klos, they have gone on holiday (maybe to the same place as the workers who have set up construction works in every major road). When there is a slight gust of wind, the Dixie scent catches the back of your throat like some milder variant of the poison gas used in the First World War (which broke out, of course, in August). Perhaps the Senat should impose a tax on public urine, like the Emperor Vespasian’s law, the vectigal urinae.
Or perhaps there is just a case for going on holiday in August and abandon the idea that there is something romantic about staying alone in the city accompanied only by the tourists in their flip-flops and ill-fitting Zara shorts. “What dreadful hot weather we have!” writes Jane Austen, the English novelist, “it keeps one in a continual state of inelegance.” It’s not just the nose that wrinkles; the whole aesthetic apparatus collapses. You notice things in the end-of-summer light that are best left unnoticed. In the apartment, the piles of yellowing newspapers behind the sofa (not to mention the hole in the sofa), the spiders web, is suddenly lit-up; August sun is as unforgiving as neon, strips away charm. Outside, the trees – you see for the first time – are coated with a thin dust. Birds don’t sing in August. Not in Berlin.
Whoever said August was supposed to be a benign month? Nagasaki, Mauerbau, Jahrhunderthochwasser, S-Bahn strike. It’s the month when nothing is supposed to happen and therefore the perfect moment for bad men to do bad things. Or for the gods to go crazy. It’s the month when you realize that some of the most interesting people in your life have small children and are therefore absent from Berlin, enjoying the fresh air somewhere else. It’s the month when I’m stung by wasps.
Time to surrender, perhaps, and see if there might not be some last minute escape from the city. There is desperation to the mission; like the people trying to clamber onto the last helicopter out of Saigon before the Viet Cong marched in. At a certain moment the August choler defeats dignity and commons sense. You reach for the phone and call a Reisebüro. But the phone rings and rings…and you know, that the Reisebüro people have also given up on the city. I remember seeing a sign on the locked door of a London travel agency: “Please go away”. Like migrant birds the travel professionals have a unique sense of timing. August, they know, is a lost cause. If you are still left behind in Berlin in August, there is nothing further that can be done. You are beyond medicine. All you can do is wait for August, the dumme August, to pass and for normal life to resume.
