Last night I found myself stitting in kino 8 at Cinemaxx in Potsdamer Platz, watching a black and white movie made in Potzdamer Platz in the late 1980s, and reminiscing about an evening and morning I spent just down the road in Leipziger Straße at the end of my first year in Berlin in 2002. The evening/morning was that of the love parade and I spent a large part of it in an sitting in an altered state of mind in the garden of the club Tresor. Back then, Tresor was located just at the point where Leipziger Straße turned to wasteland, and as I looked out at the empty space through my altered eyes I was overcome with the beauty of the world in all its broken dimensions. I found poetry in empty space, I understood that these empty spaces were what lent this city its uniqueness. I spent the next month wandering around Berlin finding beauty in places I never expected to find it. I try to carry part of this with me still.

It was a Berlinale retrospective movie that reminded me of all this, ‘Überall ist es besser, wo wir nicht sind’, or ‘The grass is always greener’. The director introduced it and mentioned that he had filmed a large part of it right where we were sitting, before any of those buildings even existed.  We sat down to watch. The movie starts in Warsaw, with bleak socialist buildings and a bare café/bar where our hero sits with friends, drinking beer and vodka and flirting with the waitress for a scene before deciding to leave and go to Berlin. He arrives, falls into underworld type employment and lives in some impossibly dank accommodation before running into the waitress again. They live marginally, keeping fragmented, disjointed contact with each other. Both apply for entry visas to the US.  They fall out, lose contact, and then she is gone. We close with a few scenes of rundown 1980s New York, where our penniless hero re-finds the waitress, marginally employed, cleaning games machines. The film, black and white, Jarmusch-like was pretty well received by all.

The Q and A, though, was almost as rewarding for me as the film itself. The director was candid, in a way that rare, even in this, the bluntest of cities. Discussing the theme of the film, he noted that he is not so sure any more if the metaphor works. The film, he said, was about the search, about how going west and west and west again had a very different meaning, in those days, before the Berlin wall had even fallen compared with now. Now, he said, if anyone said they were going to the USA in search of hope you would ask them ‘have you lost your mind’. I wondered whether there was anywhere on this earth you could go expecting to find hope these days. What struck me even more strongly, though, was how he talked about Potsdamer Platz before the fall of the wall. He spoke of an empty place, lodged against the wall, but one that was full of makeshift life in the wasteland. Communities of Poles and Russians, and strange events. This is a Potsdamer Platz that I have never known – they had already filled the space with soulless buildings like the Cinemaxx by the time I got here. He stated that he hated the new Potsdamer Platz, people applauded.

I understand, I think- I have the same sense of distain bordering on disgust when I look at what has come to fill Leipziger Platz since that evening I spent in awe in 2002. Honestly, it was more beautiful when it was wasteland with makeshift clubs. I can still see it in my minds eye, a Berlin under Berlin, where those ugly, frantic attempts to make empty space vanish can be wiped away. And I guess I partly wrote this in tribute to that Berlin,  The unruly Berlin of empty spaces.