To Prussia With Love (eBook)

For an expatriate, New Year's Eve is a troubled occasion. Often you have spent a claustrophobic Christmas at home in Britain confused by how the family seems to have shrunk. Irritated, too, by the fact that your mother still searches through the pockets of your discarded trousers looking for recreational drugs. So on Boxing Day, approximately twelve hours after watching The Guns of Navarone for the sixth time and The Great Escape for the ninth time, you clear your throat and announce that you are expected at a New Year's Eve party. Back home. 'Home'. Abroad. Your parents make no effort to conceal their relief and you too tread with a spring in your stride as soon as you reach the railway station. Yet once you have arrived at the asylum of choice –, and for me this has been Berlin for more years than I can count on an abacus –, all the buried questions are dug up, like a dog searching for a bone under a rhododendron bush. How does that Clash song go again: 'Should I stay or should I go now?' Where will I be at the end of the year? With whom? Having achieved what? These were reasonable questions for a man of a certain age, a man who was tired of his profession and increasingly uncertain as to his place in the world. Berlin? Well, Berlin had become a home of sorts but nothing confirmed its alien status, or my own estrangement, more than New Year's Eve. The wrinkled and the sad stayed at home to laugh at an unfunny 1950s television sketch starring Freddie Frinton. The funky twentysomethings sweated in warehouse clubs or in seemingly spontaneous but actually precisely planned parties in apartments with bicycles in the corridor and parquet floors that threatened to give way if more than a dozen people danced at any one time. Over in the west, the burghers of the city –, the architects and the playwrights –, staged dinner parties in high-ceilinged salons. Twenty minutes before midnight the guests would finish their chocolate mousse and dutifully recite their wishes for the coming year. Sometimes that had entertainment value –, a husband, for example, blurting out that his special wish was that his wife would stay faithful in the coming twelve months. Yet none of this ritualised exhibition was really for me and though I had been happy to escape Incredibly Shrinking Britain, I did not relish the evening. Outside, on the streets of the German capital, New Year's Eve is little better. The city briefly, suddenly, appears to be in the throes of a civil war, 365 days of urban anger concentrated on one evening of dull explosions and flashing lights. The Turkish kids of the battered Neuklln district setting up their rockets in bottles and firing them at other kids on the other side of the street. Smoke rising between buildings. The hiss of a Bengal Tiger hurtling upwards, then briefly pausing and, in a moment of brightness, releasing a green sparkling rain over the city, illuminating faces, flattening them as if they had no history, no problems. What do you do? You cower under your bed, perhaps. But my dog, Mac, a West Highland terrier with the steely nerves of an organic chicken, was already there. Or you shower, dress up, pay 500 euros, and dance in the New Year. But I dance like a zombie, like someone who has just been freed from a crypt, and should not be seen performing in public.