Lustgarten
In the two decades I have lived in Berlin, one of the few places that has held an unusually magical vibe and meaning for me is the immediate area around the Berliner Dom, that monumental cathedral on the Museumsinsel in the heart of the city. Its voluptuous neo-baroque appearance contrasted sharply with the socialist architecture of nearby Alexanderplatz with its iconic TV-tower punctuating the skyline, especially during the years when the brown, glass-clad, monster of the Palace of the Republic still cast its shadow over the area. The church overlooks the geometric Lustgarten park stretching toward the column-lined, Roman temple like, Altes Museum. The atmosphere has always seemed strangely out of place to me. Like fragments of imagined cities thrown together into one almost dreamlike landscape.
A particularly unforgettable moment tied to this place was one July afternoon in 2002. The weather was unusually bad for mid-July, with occasional rain showers and gusty wind. My girlfriend, a handful of old friends, and I sat on the grassy area north of the cathedral with a hundred or so others, drinking beer, smoking cigarettes, and listening to the concert of French electronica/dream-pop duo Air, from afar, the music drifting across the park from the Museumsinsel Festival just a few hundred meters away. Their music had played a crucial role in all of our late coming-of-age. I recall letting myself get caught in a gripping swell of Air's ethereal soundscape, the music building tension in complete synchronicity with the increasingly violent bursts of wind tearing through the chestnut trees, swaying them in a dance to the beats, carrying hundreds of leaves into the sky and sending them spiraling around the oxidized copper tips of the cathedral's towers. The harmony between the elements felt so perfectly choreographed that people in the little park began clapping and raising their voices in spontaneous joy.
Several years later, on a late summer evening, crossing the Lustgarten with my iPod on, emotionally shaken and lost in anxious thought after the end of a five-year relationship, insecure and afraid of what lay ahead, I found myself suddenly transported back to that moment. The gritty big-band horn hook of The Prodigy's "Stand Up" faded into my consciousness when something in the sky caught my eye. Above the cathedral that was glowing in the evening light, an enormous flock of thousands of birds was murmurating. Just as the track's breakbeat and fuzzy bassline kicked in, building toward the first drop, the fluid mass of birds shape-shifted into a tongue-like wave painting a black-speckled upward spiral into the orange sky. The convergence of image, sound, and my own emotional state hit me with such force that tears sprang to my eyes and I had to sit down. It was a moment of simultaneous grief and breathtaking joy, instantly resonating with that afternoon with Air years earlier, and I lay down on a stone bench and kept watching the birds, the track on loop, for I don't know how long, crying, desperately trying to hold on to the moment for as long as possible.