The Country in the City

Posted by James

China Mieville wrote a detective fantasy fiction novel called The City in the City about a fictional Balkan city that was divided between two different countries, kind of like Berlin during the Cold War. But instead of the land area for one of the countries being a convex polygon, in other words being a closed area like West Berlin was, the city was divided up arbitrarily between the two countries. In some cases, the boundary between the two countries ran down the middle of one street and changed again the next street over in a kind of fractal fashion. In the book, Mieville explores notions of identity and the boundaries between self and other in a creative way, and I highly recommend it if you like fantasy fiction.

I felt a bit like I had landed in Mieville's novel last week when I had to do my "Anmeldung". Anmeldung means something like "report in". Within two weeks of moving to a city or changing apartments in Germany, you need report your new address to the civic office (BurgerAmt) of the city. When I lived in Germany in 1978, this was a pretty relaxed procedure. I went to the civic office of Karlsruhe, sat there waiting for about a half hour or something, and gave my reporting in form to the official. In fact, the procedure was so relaxed I don't even remember in detail what happened, just vaguely that I did it.

Not this time. I found out that most of the civic offices in the city of Berlin no longer take walk-ins, you need to make an appointment. Berlin has over 100 civic offices, since it is a big city, and a quick browse of the city services Web site showed that the civic office in the Neukoeln did take walk-ins. Since Neukoeln was far away from the center of town unlike Kreuzberg and Mitte which also take walk-ins, I figured not many people would show up. If I got there a half hour after the office opened I would have a good chance of getting in, even if I had to wait a few hours.  One day last week I set out around 8 on the metro for the civic office in Neukoeln, with a good book in my backpack to handle the wait.

When I got to the city hall, where the civic office is located, I saw that there was about a 30 minute line waiting outside in the cold. I moved to the end of the line and waited. 20 minutes later a young guy came out of the city hall and told me that they had no more numbers left, so I should come back the next day no later than 10. Since the civic office opened at 11, my strategy of picking a civic office in a remote part of the city to avoid the wait had seemingly failed.

That afternoon on my way home from work, I stopped by the civic office on Wilmersdorferstrasse near my apartment. I thought maybe I could plead a hardship case, but the woman at the desk would hear none of it.

"The earliest appointment I have is June 4," she said.

"But I have to report within two weeks and I arrived last week on Wednesday," I replied, "And I need the form for my visa extension."

"Well, I can't help you. You can try calling the civic services hotline or try one of the walk-ins", she said and gave me the number.

The next day I called the civic services hotline. The woman on the phone was more sympathetic.

"I can't give you an appointment any earlier either," she said, "But you might try getting on the appointments Web site and refreshing it periodically. People do cancel and you might come up with something."

"Thanks," I replied and hung up. I immediately brought up the appointments Web site and started clicking. Periodically, during the day, I would take a click pause, banging on the refresh button and checking for any blue days that might come up (blue means an appointment is open, red that there is none). That night I continued the practice, switching to Chrome because it updates faster. Just before going to bed, I scored: an appointment at the civic office in Buch the next day at 12:40!

But where was Buch? As it turns out, it was in the far northeastern part of the city, exactly on the opposite side from Charlottenburg which is in the southwest:

 The circle gives the location of Buch, the arrow where I live in Charlottenburg.

Not wanting to risk getting there late because I took a wrong train connection, I decided to take a taxi. The taxi driver drove through Wedding and Pankow, two other parts of the city that look typically city-like: densely packed four story buildings with shops on the first floor. But on the other side of Pankow, we popped out into the countryside. He even drove on the Autobahn for a couple exits. I began to get nervous and quickly checked Google maps, but he was in fact taking me on the recommended route.

On the road into "town" I saw a couple cows out standing in the field next to the road. This is Berlin??? It looked more like Iowa. The taxi driver dropped me off in front of the civic office around noon.

The town was not laid out like the small towns I was used to in the western part of Germany or the US. There were no single family houses but rather the living space consisted of huge 11 story apartment buildings, shown in the photo at the top of the post, separated from each other by wide lawns and scattered trees. In fact it looked a lot like the parts of Moscow which were built after WWII that I remembered from my visit in 1991 just after the coup against Gorbachev. Which was not surprising, since this part of Berlin had been in the DDR (Deutsche Democratische Republik, aka East Germany) before the wall came down in 1989.

Since I had some time before my appointment, I decided to check out the "downtown" and have some lunch:

Again, nothing like the downtowns of small towns in western Germany. The low rise reinforced concrete buildings looked a bit like Homestead High School in Cupertino or Cubberly Community Center in Palo Alto.

But there were some shops there, including the ubiquitous doner shop:

Doner shops are usually run by Turkish immigrants and feature a selection of Mediterranean-style "street food": falafal, humus, flat bread sandwiches, etc. Prices are generally low. There's always a huge cone of compressed lamb meat turning on a spit displayed in a prominent place in the store.  I ordered a flatbread doner sandwich, and the proprietor whipped out a big knife, deftly sliced off a pile of lamb for my lunch, then added a selection of veggies and sauce.

Here's my doner partially eaten:

After lunch I walked over to the civic office and did my Anmeldung. The lady behind the desk was friendly and when I told her I would be leaving in September, reminded me to do an "Abmeldung" ("report out") when I left. Fortunately, I could do that by mail.

Going back, I decided to take the commuter rail and metro since I had no afternoon appointments. As I walked to the train station I passed this whimsical statue, a gaggle of geese:

The statue sealed it. I was indeed in Berlin and not in Iowa.