Mein Geburtstag

August 17, 2007. Is how you spend your birthday indicative of the coming year? I spent mine with a new acquaintance, a video artist I met through an art history professor at Smith College on the Berlin Scholars list. She and I started the evening at the beach bar at Monbijou Park, across from the Museum Island, and then had dinner in the garden at Clärchens Ballhaus in the Auguststr. When they closed the garden to dinner guests at 11 pm, we went inside, where there was dancing. The video artist said many of the people here come all the way from the “Plattenbausiedlungen,” the high-rise neighborhoods of the former East such as Marzahn and Hohenschönhausen. We hadn’t been standing at the edge of the dance floor for more than 10 minutes when a man asked me to dance. Sure enough, he came from Marzahn. A former officer of the National People’s Army (East Germany) I met at a dinner party the next night said “you were where?!” That place is notorious! It used to have telephones on the tables!” Presumably it kept its pre-war character even in East Germany, and its décor has changed little even today. But the table telephones are gone. The librarian at the Film Academy explained further: “the people who go to Clärchen’s Ballhaus are the ones who used to live in the immediate area – before it became really artsy and too expensive for them in the years after the Wall fell. They’ve been driven out into the high-rises, but they come back to dance.”