Berlin airports and Weltschmerz

I’m writing this from Berlin airport, where the myth of German efficiency goes to die.

Berlin has two airports, which makes sense because for nearly four decades Berlin was two cities. The clues to that past lie everywhere, but they make themselves felt most pragmatically in the infrastructure. Tram lines stop abruptly, at the moment that it makes the least sense. The old West is served mostly by buses, because the Americans wanted to fulfil a big contract with a bus company. Nothing links up the way it should.

So there are two airports, serving two different ideas of what a city ought to be.

There’s supposed to be a new, big, flashy airport - Berlin Brandenburg - to serve a big, flashy idea - a proper European hub - that seems to have fallen out of date before it even happened. The project’s been in the works in some form or another since reunification. Building an airport is never a straightforward project, and I’ve learned since living here that if something’s worth doing, it’s worth mummifying yourself in red tape for. The project is ten years behind schedule. It’s supposed to open at the end of next year. Maybe it will.

Schönefeld Airport, where I’m writing from, was the airport that served the old East. It’s been here since 1934, which means the Nazis used it, and then the Soviets used it, and now we’re using it - whatever ‘we’ will mean when history comes to classify us. I’m in Terminal B, which was mostly used by West Berliners who used it as as a transit airport, taking advantage of the cheaper package holidays that were available.

I’m feeling melancholy - or maybe that’s too Latinate. I’m feeling sad. Weltschmerz, maybe. Airports make me sad these days, because I know that my experience of them will be different in a few months, and I feel stupid that I didn’t previously appreciate the lightness that freedom of movement conferred. And then I feel embarrassed for feeling sad, because having a passport - any passport - is a gift, and there are people in the world who’d cut out their hearts for a British passport, Brexit or no Brexit.

I don’t wholly feel like I’m going home, because going home implies return.. I grew up in what I now realise was a lightning-flash of optimism, and I’d like to return to it, but we aren’t an optimistic country any more. Or at least, the people I know aren’t optimistic, and we all tell ourselves and each other that anyone who’s optimistic about our political future is kidding themselves. Maybe they used to say much the same about us when the roles were reversed. But I refuse to equivocate, I rank my optimism above theirs, because it wasn’t based on fear of the other, and that, to me, is axiomatically good.

I grew up going to schools where a lot of people didn’t look like me, or speak the same language as me at home, or eat the same kind of food. That was fine. In fact, I thought it was really cool. It was probably Blair years glibness, a slightly fatuous veneration of a thing called Multiculturalism, which is a great word for making complexity seem simple.But I grew up believing in it wholeheartedly, just like a kid raised in the church believes in God. That seems pretty naive from the outside, too, but the myths you’re raised with are hard to shake off.

I know that this is all very earnest, but I feel earnest. I think it’s a problem that on Twitter etc. serious conversations are given the same weight as silly cat photos and memes. All the joking about Brexit is partly gallows humour, but it’s also partly a failure to acknowledge that this is real, it’s happening, it shouldn’t be happening, and it’s our fault.

Berlin’s a city that has deliberately been taken apart, so maybe it makes sense that people are working just as deliberately to put it back together. If Berlin’s the tired alcoholic sitting in a drab church hall, taking his moral inventory, then London’s the florid-faced City boy snorting cocaine at lunchtime. They’re both in trouble, but I know which one I’ve got hope for.
There was another airport in Berlin - Tempelhof. It was built by the Nazis and then it was used as a military airport, but it hasn’t been in operation in years. After it stopped being operational there was a referendum on what to do with the land, and Berliners agreed to open it to the public. The airport hangar itself is now used as a refugee camp. The expansive fields around it are open to the public, and have largely been allowed to re-wild. Berliners go there to fly kites, and skylarks nest there. The real estate is worth a fortune, of course, but that isn’t the most important thing.