Yellow Sand of Berlin

Abstract

While conducting fieldwork in Berlin in 1996 and 1997, I encountered a Zeitgeist of `becoming' enveloping all aspects of my life in the city - from the sensory experiences of walking a metropolis under intense revision, to listening to public discourse on the future of the `New Berlin' as symbol of German cosmopolitanism, to hearing my East German interlocutors recount the erasure of the GDR past from the historical narratives of unified Germany. This essay in literary ethnography seeks to capture this collective mood and sense of simultaneous historical becoming and erasure by weaving anecdotal observations, encounters and reflections oriented by the metaphor of shifting sands. It recalls a host of dialectical apparitions in the politics of German unification, in contemporary East-West relations in the profession of journalism, and in the ratio of historical effacement to futurological manifesto in the built environment of the city itself.