Paul Scraton reports on life in his Gesundbrunnen kiez…
I
It is just past midnight on the Osloer Strasse. I emerge from the U-Bahn station onto the wide, dark boulevard. There are not so many people about. At the corner of Drontheimer Strasse, a couple of drunks stagger out from their smoke-filled corner kneipe, bellies full of gassy pilsner and cheap shots of korn.
The lights in the kebab stand across the street burn brightly but there are no customers. A few steps up the street and patients stand on the steps of the hospital, smoking inadvisable cigarettes. I am about a hundred metres from home when a couple of young men approach. At a guess I would say they are of Turkish origin and they are wheeling a bike.
We pass without eye contact and then one of them turns to call me back.
“Excuse me,” he says, “Would it be possible to ask you a question.”
“Sure.”
I am wary, but he is extremely polite.
“Do you want to buy this bike?”
I smile and give him a thanks-but-no-thanks, and he wishes me a pleasant evening. They wheel the bike away into the gloom. It’s a good story, I think, as I push open the heavy door to our building and its three courtyards, nine staircases, and almost a hundred mailboxes nailed to the wall.
I climb the five flights of stairs and a story of Liverpool comes to mind, of a man parking his car and leaving his dog behind.
“Mind your car for a pound?” a little boy says.
“No need. I’ve got the dog.”
“OK.”
The boy pauses, scratches his head.
“He can put out fires then can he?”
Positive and negative stereotypes, all present and correct, packed into one tiny story. What more could you want? I have no idea where I heard it first. In the apartment I tell Katrin (my wife) about the boys and the bike, and the story about Liverpool. She smiles
II
Typical Wedding, we might have said. Typical Liverpool. Places with reputations, and not always positive ones. The neighbourhood of Wedding, to which we moved in autumn 2010 is one of those corners of Berlin that gets written about in the tabloids and provokes mutters from your German acquaintances when you tell them you’ve found an apartment in the district.
“Wedding…really?”
Then you tell them about the rents.
This is a poor neighbourhood, with a large immigrant population. The Gesundbrunnen quarter of Wedding where we live has around 35% residents of foreign origin, still one of the highest in the c…