Eva Biringer is a freelance journalist and author. She writes regularly for the Berliner Zeitung. This text is an excerpt from Eva Biringer’s non-fiction book “Independent: From drinking and letting go”, HarperCollins, Hamburg 2022, 352 pages, 18 euros.
“You’re crazy, my child, you have to go to Berlin”, was written on one of these postcards, which you could buy in the bookshop in our neighboring town, right next to the grab table. That was the plan. It all started with the ARD series Berlin, Berlin, which was broadcast from 2002 to 2005. Landei Lolle moves from Malente – a town in the Mecklenburg Lake District that my mother had to visit with me when we were in the area, just as others make a pilgrimage to Jim Morrison’s grave on Père Lachaise – into a shared flat in Kreuzberg.
A comic artist who wears traffic light man red bangs and ♥ t-shirts and falls in love with her cousin. In this series, Berlin is a place where every day could be Christopher Street Day, colorful and diverse, rough and tolerant.
My three school friends and I were absolute fan girls. So in eighth grade we decided to move to the capital after graduating from high school. We drew a map of our future flat share, with four-poster beds and rose swings, and swore to ourselves, if not as a comic artist, then at least as an actress. For my fifteenth birthday, my father gave my sister and me a trip to Berlin, from which I especially remember our nocturnal wanderings through Königs Wusterhausen, where our decentralized hotel was located.
Florian Reimann
To the author
Eva Biringer, born in Albstadt-Ebingen in 1989, studied art history and theater studies in Berlin and Vienna. She started writing as a theater critic for nachtkritik.de and Die Welt. She was an editor at Zeit Online, then a freelance author. Today she writes about style and culture for Die Welt am Sonntag, Der Standard, Zeit Online, Die Welt and Berliner Zeitung. She lives in Vienna and Berlin.
Not to mention the House of 100 Beers on Potsdamer Platz. Enough, anyway, to seal my decision. In Berlin, that much was already certain back then, I would finally be independent. Shortly after my eighteenth birthday, in a friend’s friend’s living room, I had a phrase tattooed on my upper arm that I had read at Berlin’s East Side Gallery: “Wonderful dreams keep my mind enfolded.”
A bit of green at the Weinbergspark
I gave up on my many career aspirations (forensic pathologist, fashion designer, something with graphics) when I realized how much I liked the theoretical part of my advanced art course. I applied to several cities to study art history and was accepted in all of them, but only in Berlin if I passed the aptitude test for my minor in French philology.
So, in the summer of 2008, I sat alone on the northbound train for almost eight hours. The goal was the Rosenthaler Platz with its mixture of detox bowl hipness and sparingly dosed raggedness. The trams rattled by in front of the Circus Hostel, and right across the street was the already legendary St. Oberholz, the birthplace of digital bohemia, where people spent five hours hammering into their MacBooks while sitting in front of a single flat white, and it apparently still paid off for the operator .
There was a Späti on the other corner, another right next to it, and four more within a hundred yards. Shopping for cigarette butts, toothpaste and Sternburg beer around the clock – for me country pomeranze, sheer madness. There was also a bit of green – in the form of the vineyard park, which could have done with a sweeping week or a whole sweeping month.
Yes, I would move to Berlin
The morning after next, I received the news in the breakfast room that I had passed the entrance test. That was by far the best moment of the year. I would move to Berlin, the crazy good life would begin now. With the Berlin Calling soundtrack on my iPod – the film expressed the capital’s attitude to life like no other – I strolled through the Weinbergspark, between broken glass that sparkled like jewels, and was happy.
Now all I needed was an apartment. My flat-sharing visits weren’t particularly fruitful, but the note I pinned to the bulletin board was. Suddenly a guy named Roland stood next to me and offered me a room in his shared flat on Kottbusser Damm. He seemed nice and I was in dire need of a place to stay. So I came to a room above Berlin’s oldest cinema, to whose performances we residents always had free admission. The apartment that went with it was huge and very far away from Kehrwoche.
Alles war crazy in Berlin
On my second night, Roland, who worked as a bartender in a club popular with party tourists, took me to a boat party. On the way there, he informed me that the punch they were serving might contain MDMA, and I remember looking at him questioningly, “What is MDMA?”
Everything was so CRAZY. I kept my hands off it, but helped myself all the more freely to the free drinks. The night ended in the club where Roland worked. I fell asleep drunk on one of the sofas, in the following time this should happen more often. We took the taxi back at dawn, exhausted and euphoric, and I could feel the city shimmering on my skin.
Bad feelings that are easy to drink away
“The constant, bottomless drunkenness in Berlin”, is how the protagonist in Christian Kracht’s novel “Eurotrash” remembers his time in the capital. So he’s in good company. Nowhere in Germany was the proportion of male high-risk drinkers higher in 2017 at 22 percent than in Berlin (on a par with Thuringia and Saxony); for women, Berlin was second to Hamburg at 16 percent.
That means: One in six occasional drinking Berliners has a problem with it. It can’t be due to the northern air, after all, Brandenburg of all places has the lowest proportion of high-risk drinkers at nine percent. Why is there so much more drinking in the big city than in the countryside? One factor is certainly the lack of social control.
Everyone in the village knows everyone. People tend to drink in company there, and a secret problem does not remain undiscovered for long. In a big city, on the other hand, caring neighbors tend to be the exception. And who has a regular supermarket where the same cashier would always be suspicious at the sight of schnapps purchases?
Another factor is the influence of cities on the human psyche. The risk of developing depression there is 40 percent higher than in rural areas, and it is 20 percent higher for anxiety disorders. There are various reasons for this: increased noise levels, a lack of closeness to nature, the feeling of anonymity and social isolation – being lonely among many. All feelings that supposedly can be drunk away well.
HarperCollins
Eva Biringer: “Independent: from drinking and letting go”
Sometimes we watched dirty dancing while lying on mattresses
I had plenty of opportunity. The university wasn’t too demanding, not too formative either, apart from the fact that – cum tempore – I’m always fifteen minutes late everywhere. I spent large parts of my first semester either hungover in seminar rooms or at student special parties in clubs.
There was a right one for every day of the week. Tuesdays a battered villa on Landsberger Allee, Wednesdays Roland’s workplace, where I never had to pay for a single Sambuca shot, Thursdays a closet-sized hole under the Jannowitzbrücke S-Bahn station. And on a couple of Sundays we even managed to get past the inhuman bouncer at Bar 25.
If I stayed at home, there were usually people visiting, Roland’s double head group or the people I gradually got to know at the bar and on the dance floors. There was always drinking, mostly beer and cheap wine. Sometimes we watched dirty dancing while lying on mattresses.
The alcohol had literally diluted my personality
In those first few months, I caught up on what eighteen years of country life had apparently denied me, also in terms of men. I’d often forgotten their names before we left the club. Roland’s circle of friends turned out to be very fruitful, men who were ten, sometimes fifteen years older, invited me to Berliner Weisse bars and then had to quickly steal a roll of pub toilet paper because theirs had run out.
Some of these encounters were funny, some inspiring, many totally unnecessary, but that didn’t bother me. I fell in love with some of these men in my usual random fashion, cried my eyes out to “(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life,” then slipped my number to the cute waffle seller.
The longer I lived in Berlin, the more confusing the whole thing became. Who was I and where did I belong? To the gallery staff wearing acne boots? In some theater science doctoral cluster? Or the techno veterans who went to war every weekend to lick their wounds for the next half week?
Was I the eloquent two-glass-of-wine style journalist, the shot drinker determined to escalate, the melodramatic red wine drinker, the glamorous champagne girl? Or just sober, gloomy Eva? Did I feel too much or too little? The alcohol had literally diluted my personality. My bedside table was the upside-down wine crate from my favorite South Tyrolean winery.
My memory ends in the afternoon in the marquee
Now and then I had blackouts. Some of these evenings began with a self-imposed glass of wine—according to my diary, I thought I had previously established “that I wasn’t in the mood for alcohol”—and ended in the fifth or sixth bar or my bed, where people close to me slept had brought.
Worst of all was the Oktoberfest thing: my empty stomach and I, three liters of beer. My memory ends in the afternoon standing on a beer bench in the marquee and begins the next morning hanging on the passenger seat, just before Berlin. A good friend was behind the wheel. With an experience like this, I was always tempted to say, “Someone must have put something in my glass,” but in fact it was always just me, namely alcohol.
Book premiere: Thursday, May 12, 2022, 8:00 p.m. Literature LIVE at the Pfefferberg Theater, Eva Biringer: “Independent. Of drinking and letting go”
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