It’s April, which means Berlin’s most challenging months are finally behind us: subletting-my-flat-on-Instagram-Story season. “Looking for a subletter for my annual winter migration to sunshine”; “subletting my 1br from mid Jan to March!” If you’re not among those who took your company laptop to Mexico City or Cape Town or Porto or Bali or Mallorca during the city’s greyest months, you’re in the majority – but it’s a silent one.
The digital nomads are back, have you seen them? Surely you’ve seen them, with their godlike ability to arrange their life around the weather. Talking about the red-and-green fish, the tacos. The mountains where they cosplayed hiking. The film photography! You can’t do that in Berlin in February – not enough natural light. They’re so excited to return, now that the weather allows for lifted Crocs again, now that you can comfortably sit outside at La Maison again, now that their artist friend is holding their upcycled ball gag workshops in the park again. Get the bike out of the Keller and the orange-tinted sunglasses on your face! It’s fucking spring.
If you’ve now missed both the BVG and BSR strikes, I’m not sure you really live here – maybe you just have a mailbox.
There’s a whole lot of personal exceptionalism around being a Winter Exclusionary Radical Berliner, a sense of ‘well yes, but in my case…’. The only place where people seem to really cop to what they’re doing is TikTok. In one video, Berliner Lucy Huxley, who has 130K followers on the platform, details the things she most hates about the city. The winters come in second (to “the food here sucks”), because, she explains, nobody knows how to make things cosy (unlike in Scandinavian countries, where the steam curling off your morning coffee and children in full-body wool jumpsuits are federally protected concepts). “It honestly just creates such a bad vibe, and I think the only way to stay sane while living here is to leave for two months every winter,” she advises. In another TikTok, @technorella calls Berlin “one of the best places to ruin your life” and reminds people to “have an end point”, which “for a lot of people … is actually after the summer”.
I’m not entirely a Berlin winter apologist; I grew up in upstate New York, and I miss the kind of snowfall that creates a handful of temporary new sports. But the cold (mild, imo) and the darkness aren’t prohibitive factors in my living here; they’re part of why I do. The summer is glorious, but in the winter you can really hunker down and hit the museums and the movie theatres, do a proper Kaffeeundkuchen, swallow an afternoon in a library – things harder to lean into when the lakes are calling. Berlin feels more connected to its history in winter, and it’s worth it to feel rooted in a place.
I hear people talk about the dispositional divide between Berliners – German or otherwise – who know they live in Germany, and Berliners who think of Berlin as an island floating somewhere off the coast of Europe. But the real us vs. them, I think, is between people who use the city the way the US government uses a foreign country for a strategic military base and people who stay (or are stuck) here year-round. The place you live is in part who you are, and flying south for the winter changes that relationship to one of convenience. If you’ve now missed both the BVG and BSR strikes, I’m not sure you really live here – maybe you just have a mailbox.
Sure, poll anyone on the Ringbahn on January 15 and who wouldn’t choose to teleport themselves seaside? But I think that’s cheating, defying the seasonal nature of life. Suffering such cycles feels like a biological imperative to me, the same way I am pulled to the miracle of the full moon even though I’ve seen it a hundred times or how I marvel at the sheer healthful verve of recovering from a bad cold, swearing I will never again take breathing through the nose for granted.
Nothing good comes from skipping – nor seeking out – the darker parts of life. The winter breakers will never truly feel the joy of the first nice day of the year, when the world cracks open and the gelato place has a line and you notice that the grass is just a little bit green and you pull some shorts out from under your bed even though it’s not really warm enough for that yet, and everyone’s outside, everyone in the world in happy surprise. They forfeit that feeling, because they didn’t tiptoe across icy pavement and venture out in the pitch-blackness of 5pm to get there.
That said: of course we hate you cuz we ain’t you. I believe people should only complain about what they can’t control, and I’m a pleb with an office job: if I could hop, skip, jump to Tenerife and Slack my coworkers from the sun-kissed balcony of an AirBnB, you bet your hand-knit bonnets I would (at least for a little bit). Who knows, maybe next year – anyone looking for a mid-January sublet?
