Berlin, Germany

There’s no place like home – and to me, Berlin was a surrogate hometown. I’d been to Berlin five or so times over the last ten years, and I absolutely loved the place. It seemed as good a choice as any to become my next temporary office.

I took an InterCity train up across into Germany once more and into the new Berlin Hauptbahnhof, a brand-spanking new train station complex of gleaming chrome, metal lattices and glass panels. The station was multi-levelled, and looking down from the highest platform, the S-Bahn, you could see trains on the tracks far below.

The S-Bahn whizzed me to my preferred home in Berlin, the Sunflower Hostel, located in the youthful, vibrant district of Friedrichshain. I had spent so much time there over the years I recognised the staff, although it soon became apparent they didn’t recognise me.

With my small backpack on my back and a German supermarket’s carrier bag in hand I approached the owner behind the counter, whom I recognised from previous visits, and asked cheerfully in German if they had space for two nights. The chap looked me over carefully and replied in English:

“Sorry, we only let people stay here who have proper luggage.”

I did a quick involuntary impression of a fish gulping air as I processed this entirely unexpected response. “I’m sorry?” I managed, bewildered.
“What are you doing here in Germany?” he queried.
“I’m a tourist! I’ve just come from Prague!” I blurted, offended and ever-so slightly angry, as I had worked out where he was coming from. The owner had seen me come in with a huge beard, deerstalker hat, big jacket and carrier bag in hand, and had assumed I was not a backpacker, but rather… homeless and looking for a bed… I normally wouldn’t have minded, but what made it extra painful – and deliciously ironic – was that the guy wouldn’t have looked out of place in a cardboard box himself, seeing as he had a huge, pointy unkempt beard, long hippy hair and was wearing something The Dude out of The Big Lebowski might have stashed in the wardrobe.

Within seconds he was turning beetroot red and apologising profusely. He said he hadn’t seen my small backpack on my back and thought I only had a carrier bag of possessions with me. By then I had laughed it off and told him there was no need to apologise, although when he started going through the hostel rules I did make a point of telling him there was no need as I had only stayed here five times already, which led to him starting another round of apologies!

Despite the suspect welcome, I still loved the Sunflower Hostel. The rooms were colourful, clean, spacious and airy, they had free wifi, an all-you-can-eat breakfast for three Euros, and staff with brilliant taste in music which was pumped through the communal areas for everyone’s enjoyment. It was a perfect place to re-establish my mobile office.

I made the hostel my working location for five days, continuing with the burst of productivity I had started in Prague and progressing well with some freelancing work I had for a client as well as working in parallel on my own websites for variety. Sightseeing was low on my list of priorities, having seen so many of the sights in prior visits to Berlin, but I did make a point of walking around the former Berlin wall area under the Brandenburg gate and south to Potsdamer Platz past the Holocaust Memorial, a mass of gravestone-like rectangular slabs in a gentle curve which you could walk between. The slabs started out shallow, and small, but as you walked into the structure, the ground looped downwards and they towered far above on all sides. Far be it from me to claim to know the subtext of the structure, but apart from the hundreds of gravestone structures clearly symbolising the millions of deaths of Jews at the hands of the Nazis, I also wondered whether the unexpected depth of the monument when viewed from the outside might symbolise how the Holocaust was perceived by ordinary Germans – that they knew there was persecution happening, but never realised the full extent of the Final Solution: how deep it truly was.

I had sought out Potsdamer Platz because of a exhibition that was running at the train station I had read about in a recent BBC news article. It covered the complicity of the railway company Deutsche Bahn in the Holocaust, with pictures of the company’s then-chiefs standing shoulder-to-shoulder with senior-ranking Nazi party officials, and detailing how Jews were transported on the death trains (and even charged a fare for it) to concentration camps outside of Germany. According to the article, DB hadn’t wanted the exhibition to be situated somewhere so prominent, but the German government and Jewish groups had pushed for it to be displayed publicly. It was a simple, but effective exhibition of boards with information in German, culminating in an upsetting display of photographs of a selection of Jewish children who had died in the Holocaust. They all had innocent, happy, smiling faces, and a little paragraph beside each of them described their short lives.

In a sombre mood I returned back above ground to the thankfully very different Berlin of today, an electrifying, vibrant, cosmopolitan, diverse Europe city in which I felt truly at home, but which I would be leaving tomorrow, eastwards into my first completely new country for this post-Christmas leg of the trip.