I have this distinct memory of a near-naked guy dressed in nothing but a golden tanga, sun-clad, impeccable haircut, nearly running me over while exiting the business school I once attended in the 1990s. Amsterdam was a different place then. In my early 20s, hailing from a decidedly provincial and rural background, the city was where hedonism and freedom were celebrated. It was Amsterdam’s unique selling point, and perhaps from an outsider’s perspective, it still is.
Strikingly, pushing us city folks across the brink of the new millennium, Berlin slowly overtook Amsterdam in our imagination as the place to be. There, one could still party hard. Amidst the debris of Cold War relics and in the shady context of a bankrupt city, Berlin offered the kind of intemperance that we felt Amsterdam had forgotten about.
Back to the guy in golden tanga, his well-defined buttocks receding in the horizon, me off to the metro to catch my train home, back to the village, a bicycle ride of about two kilometres waiting for me once I had reached the station home. Henri Pronker, I never knew his name, but it is now all-over Dutch media, passed away at 66. It now appears an unfortunate fall did him in, followed by a diagnosis of cancer and then becoming terminally ill. He once told a local Dutch newspaper that he liked to think of himself as a mystery, a flash of a skating man that everyone can make their own minds up about. ‘I belong to the living street furniture of Amsterdam. Who else I am, people can guess.’
But, as I mentioned, it felt that Amsterdam had held a yard sale of such characters years ago. The city has succumbed to mass tourists, stag parties from Britain and Italy, the promise of smoking weed in public (now banned in the city centre) and, of course, the lure of the red light district. Where else could all this be had? Though the ‘natives’ of Amsterdam have long moved on in thinking about their city in these terms. Berlin it is!
I travel to Berlin about every other week to spend time in the smallish eastern German town of Halle, where my employer is located. Like Amsterdam, Berlin is a bit of a misnomer (for what it is held to stand for) within the constellation of our respective countries’ cultural landscapes. Where Amsterdam is not the Netherlands, Berlin hardly equates to Germany. The Halle I have come to know is a stiff, somewhat sourly place, painfully precise and punctual. The frivolity and artistry of Berlin are only a train ride of an hour-plus away, but one would be forgiven if one thought one was in a different country. However, it would be a mistake to think that Berlin itself is still the same city that the Dutch flocked to post-millennium. The people of Berlin now lament the demise of what they once held dear about their country’s cultural capital. It is all so much more modest and commercial now! Tourists have flocked to the place, Das Kapital has taken over. Where could one possibly still have that genuine Berlin experience? A girlfriend who recently returned from a weekend trip to Berlin lamented that it is truly no longer the same. ‘Not when we were there,’ some two decades ago.Amsterdam and Berlin! The stories they could tell. The iconic characters whose life histories we may never quite know. Their stories need to be understood as those cities like to tell about themselves, the way they are shared and repeated, find criticism and ultimately are mourned, a life we once knew that is no longer there, having made way for something we are deeply critical and suspect of. Oh cities, how you make us talk.
