Thank you to all my neighbours past and present who took me into their confidence and shared with me the history of their lives. This return to the past was often painful. I admire your courage. And if any of you still doubt the interest of your ‘little ordinary lives’, I hope that this book justifies the initiative and actions of the person who listened to you, rapt in attention, for hours and hours.

Thanks to Barbara Wenner, my literary agent in Berlin, who accompanied me and shared in every discovery.

Thanks to Polity Press for taking interest in the story of a simple Berlin street, and to Anthony Giddens for his enthusiasm.

Thanks to C. Jon Delogu for his light and artful translation of the French text into English.

Thanks to Hermann Simon of the Centrum Judaicum who put me on the trail of the Jewish emigrants from my street and was with me in spirit during my travels; to the historian Gundrun Blankenburg, who knows better than anyone how to tell the story of the succession of constructions in my neighbourhood, building by building, between yesterday and today; to the archivist Axel Schröder, the guardian of the memory of my street, who held me firmly by the hand so as to keep me from getting lost in the dizzying labyrinth of the Landesarchiv-Berlin; and to Martin Luchterhandt, the archive director, who pointed me to the exit. Without him, I would still be ferreting about among all those enormous folders. Thanks also to Hannelore Emmerich and Veronika Liebau of the Tempelhof-Schöneberg Archives for never giving up despite my barrage of nit-picky questions. And thanks to Elga Abramovitz, Harald Bodenschatz, Werner and Birgit Simon, and Christian Wülfken for their expert re-reading of the manuscript.

Thanks, finally, to Ingeborg and Georg Ullrich for allowing me to often take refuge in their house in Oderbruch and write far away from my street.

I don’t know why I came to live here. Why this street rather than another? Choosing a street is rather arbitrary when you first arrive in a city you don’t know. The procedure for avoiding unpleasant surprises is always the same: unfold a large-scale map, pore over it to get one’s bearings amid the dense network of streets, intersections, bridges, squares and rail lines, then get out a pencil to circle and label key items – park, underground, rail and bus stations, nice neighbourhood. Then list and rank the areas in descending order of preference – from perfect to it will do, from if I must to no way.

What was the deciding factor that suddenly led me to make my choice? The central location. The proximity of a market and an underground stop. The outdoor cafés in the neighbouring streets. The evening calm. The peaceful shade of the chestnut trees that lined the pavements. Wasn’t I also feeling under pressure to get settled somewhere as soon as possible with no time to spend weeks searching for the ideal location? Maybe it was just a chance harmonic convergence: a flat became available just as I was looking for one. A promising classified ad in the paper announced ‘Ruhige innerstädtische Strasse mit Altbausubstanz in guter Wohnlage’ – ‘Quiet central street, renovated older building, nice neighbourhood’. What more could one ask for? I don’t think I hesitated long. It was my lucky day.

Visiting the flat, I was charmed right away by the ceiling mouldings – garlands of leaves with chestnuts danced above my head. Then by the high sliding panel doors in the living room, the oval panes of old glass above other doors, the shiny wooden floor creaking under my feet, the big hundred-year-old cast-iron radiators hidden discreetly behind ornate covers, the delicate brass window handles, and the little terrace with its forged iron railing all bathed in sunlight. To go back down I took the old elevator, to which only residents of the building had a key – a droll, twisted little key. The compartment of dark wood jerked abruptly between the second and first floors but finally returned me to the garnet-coloured marble entrance hall on the ground floor.

The estate agent who managed the building – a sturdy woman with a cultured pearl necklace, over-spilling F-cup bosom, seventies-style French twist, and a fake-friendly smile – met me again at the front door to tell me of the ‘ex-cep-tion-al’ fringe benefits that came with the place: a meticulous concierge, a team of women who cleaned the common areas thoroughly every week from top to bottom (she pronounced the word thoroughly with such vigour that I had no difficulty imagining this Amazon leading a horde of intrepid women in the battle against dust and dirt), and neighbours with standing – mit Niveau – a term she let slide over her lips like a caramel. There were also private concerts, bridge parties in the afternoon with German champagne and petits fours, as well as chic cocktail parties. And thank goodness there was no pub at street level turning schnapps-soaked drunkards onto the pavement in the middle of the night. There were, however, good schools for children within a quarter-mile radius, she said, while looking me up and down and judging the curve of my tummy but withholding the question that she was clearly dying to ask. Finally, the knockdown argument: the department store KaDeWe was only five minutes away, she exulted, and here was the bus stop directly out front!

KaDeWe – she spoke these three syllables with deference, her eyes sparkling just like the window displays of this mythical store at Christmas time. Fully conscious of holding my destiny in her hands, the estate agent quickly examined my file – the identity of my employer, pay slips, and other papers were flipped through in rapid succession. She had the habit of placing people on a particular rung within her little house hierarchy. I had no title – one demerit; I was French – did this raise my score a little or cause me to sink even lower? I never found out. We said goodbye at the doorstep. She slipped on her beige leather gloves and with a little honk and brisk acceleration she was off, behind the wheel of her convertible Mercedes that matched her gloves and her handbag, returning to the more distinguished neighbourhood where she herself lived.

Alone on the pavement, I inspected the street for a good long while. It was rather short. It begins at an underground stop built below a red brick, neo-gothic church with three spires, and goes straight until it crosses a small square of scruffy grass lined with a few wooden benches (perhaps what earned it the name ‘park’ according to the map) where the neighbourhood’s drunkards and dog owners congregate. It then crosses another square bordered with plane trees until it runs up against a hamcoloured high-rise of 1970s-era council housing. This meaty block clashes with the grey and beige austerity of the other facades. Satellite TV dishes jut out from the balconies. On the ground floor is the kitchen of Call-a-Pizza. Tins of Marco Polo red peppers are stacked beside the door. Out back along the wall is a little pyramid of cigarette butts that pile up over time when the cook comes to take his break. Motor scooters and a Fiesta used to make deliveries are parked along a low wall next to the garbage bins. Cars cannot go any further. Only pedestrians can slip through the mouse hole – a narrow arch and windswept passageway – that links the street to a major road on the other side. So cars have to turn around. The street is part of an impossible labyrinth for taxi drivers who don’t know the twisted layout of these blocks. No, it’s not even a street – it’s a cul-de-sac.

The displacement of the city centre after the Wall came down pushed the street to the margins of the new Berlin, far from the chic neighbourhoods, far from all that’s shiny and hopping and humming. In my street one can sleep peacefully. Young people from around the world are not partying below late into the night. Tourists never set foot here. My street has conserved a rumpled look that I find moving. Unperturbed, it keeps its distance. It refuses to yield to all the new fashions, and I admire its tenacity. ‘Ah, so you live in the former West Berlin!’ cluck the disdainful bobos who live in the Mitte neighbourhood. Only in the last few years has there been a timid gentrification in my area, as rising rents, higher prices for those who wish to buy, and an overall shortage of housing stock, especially of older units, have caused it to be looked on more favourably again.

The post-war architects, those plastic surgeons of urban planning charged with restoring some kind of face to disfigured German cities, did not help matters. Blocks of four-storey structures with flat roofs stand alongside the few remaining Wilhelminian buildings with voluminous red-brick roofs that survived the bombings, though with extensive damage. They are the vestiges of an earlier bourgeois era. Never would the architects who worked like dogs at the beginning of the previous century to construct this classy street destined for a bright future have imagined for an instant that its history could turn out this way – a street in tatters, rundown, almost pitiful. A street made of patches and repairs. All these buildings squeezed tightly together seem to be holding each other up to keep from falling down. With no shared proportions and no unity of style or time-period, the street’s zigzag roof line testifies to its troubled past. To measure the destruction caused by the hail of bombs that annihilated my street, one has to look at this aerial photo taken in 1928 from a Zeppelin flying over the blue sky of Berlin that day. One sees a clear straight line with stout buildings on either side and tall mature trees – a far cry from its present, halting outline. Several rows of buildings were completely demolished and never replaced. These holes are immediately recognizable, like missing teeth in the middle of a smile. A plaque covered in graffiti says that the so-called park is named after an obscure, Jewish suffragette teacher who died in New York in 1948 – an eminent representative of the bourgeois feminist movement. This is a remnant of the 1990s battle for equality of the sexes, but in the neighbourhood everyone calls it the Pennerpark; i.e., the hobo park.

Keep dogs on a leash! No barbecues! Keep entry clear! Put rubbish in the bins! No noise between 8 p.m. and 7 a.m.! No smoking or consumption of alcohol! Looking around, these signs at the beginning of the path for pedestrians and cyclists seem to have been posted with the sole purpose of offering everyone the joy of breaking the rules. The slides and swings of the small playground show signs of abandonment. The mothers in the area have clearly put out the word themselves: This area is ‘Off limits!’ The ones using the playground are too working class, or in other ways the wrong kind of people, and it stinks of urine! A syringe was supposedly found in the little house where kids can play make-believe, and they say a toddler in its oral phase nearly swallowed a cigarette butt. One cool autumn night, three individuals high on something are said to have tried to burn a bench to stay warm. Among the dead leaves that surround a second bench one can see beer caps and empty mini-bottles of Kräuterfreunde, 40%. The park has its regulars: a man with an apostle’s beard who stirs the contents of the rubbish bins with a stick and places his booty in a shopping trolley; a woman dressed all in black who wanders about the shrubbery in winter. I followed her one day and discovered her secret rites. She suspends sacks of seeds in branches for the birds. She even constructed a little shelter for them out of a shoebox waterproofed with strips of tape. But the strangest encounter occurred some years ago under a birch tree near the playground. I was watching my children going down the small slide when an elderly woman approached me and suddenly recounted how she had been raped when the Russians arrived. It was a momentary loss of composure no doubt, a slip of the tongue, for then she pulled herself together and continued on her way leaving me alone and in shock. I never saw her again. But I wonder how many women in my street lived this nightmare and have never talked about it.

In the middle of the eighties the old buildings suddenly grew one storey higher. Hemmed in on its little island of land since the war, Berlin did not have the luxury of sprawling out and so it sprouted up. The beamy angled attics where renters until then had stored their unused furniture and piled up old magazines and newspapers were transformed into sunny penthouse lofts with fireplaces, marble bathrooms, tiled patios, lush flowering gardens, and large bay windows – in sum, all the signs and symbols of a higher social standing. Placed like a futurist lid over a porcelain tureen of old Meissen, the lofts obliterated the past of these buildings for good. They were foreign add-ons that ended up destroying the unity of the volumes underneath. More chic and much more expensive than the flats on the lower floors, these un-humble abodes that touched the sky became the living quarters of a new aristocracy. The loft clearly marked the beginning of the gentrification of my street.

I grew up in Strasbourg in a Renaissance house built in 1586, where every gable, decoration, oriel window, archway, and stone was original. It had passed through the centuries without a scratch. What a shock to find myself in Berlin on a street that bore so many scars! I have to admit, my Berlin street is rather ugly and very worn out. It has none of the perfectly prescribed regularity and unbroken flow one sees in the facades of Paris streets. Here there are craters and buildings with no style. That architectural harmony in Paris astonishes me every time. Of course, it was never bombed. It wasn’t destroyed during the war. True, there were a few scandalous urban planning blunders, some fires, and some demolitions to make way for a wide avenue, the périphérique, or a shopping centre – but mostly the streets of Paris have not changed much. It’s easy to guess at their former appearance, imagine their past life, and think of passers-by in period clothes filing naturally in and out of the tall Haussmannian flat blocks. The streets of Paris have gently traversed time and tide, and have arrived in our own era having suffered almost no damage. Nothing of the sort can be said about my street. It’s a hotch-potch reassembled after fractures and brutal teardowns with one period built over another such that the later version effaces almost all traces of what existed before. On the pavement in front of number 11, pedestrians still trip over the marble hole, a depression of the surface caused by a heavy shell that fell there during the last fighting in April 1945. In the 1950s the kids in the neighbourhood would store their marbles in it. Not long ago, maybe only five years or so, one could still see bullet holes in certain facades. And before the elevator in my building was refurbished and freshly painted two years ago, you could still see shrapnel marks on its walls.

But these imperfections don’t matter. My street is one of those places one ends up loving warts and all. My affection is the quiet kind that one extends to people and things that have no need to prove anything to us. It’s a love nourished by habit and solidified by simple daily living without hue and cry. Day by day, my street and those around it have remained the constant witnesses of our lives – of births and deaths, love and rejection, holidays and birthdays, boredom and high drama, inscrutable emotions, fleeting nostalgia – and the days have turned into years that have gone by without our noticing their passing. Yes, in a way these streets have become a part of who we are. They were the setting of colourless days passing in single file, of life’s bits of nothing, its blank hours, all the insignificant moments and microscopic events that in time are erased one by one from our memory. It would be so easy to mock these banal streets, although they are fully aware of their modest standing and never pretend to rise above their social station. Their open vulnerability is touching really, and compels a certain sympathetic loyalty.

My street has none of the pretensions of the prestigious grand avenues such as the Wilhelmstrasse and the Kurfürstendamm, which overflow with horrors and frivolity. Until 1945, the Wilhelmstrasse was the address of the Chancellery of the Third Reich. The Kurfürstendamm was the leading nightspot during the 1920s and later functioned as the West’s ostentatious showroom during the Cold War. There are no world historical events attached to my street. I’ve found only one photo depicting an event that someone wanted to remember. It is dated 8 May 1911 and shows the guild of the master bakers of Schöneberg on parade. The canvas awnings lowered over some balconies give the facades a certain Mediterranean look. The street is brand new, as one can tell from the young trees that have just been planted along the pavements and stand protected by iron corsets. Curious locals have come down to get a closer look. They are watching this rare show on their street that is usually so calm. One can see girls in white ruffled dresses holding on to their mothers’ arms, and boys in the sailor suits made popular by Wilhelm II, the Flottenkaiser who was so enamoured with the naval power of his country. The children follow behind the formation of bakers each in his frock coat and top hat and sporting the extravagant upturned moustache that they all copied from the Emperor. Each also has a light-coloured sash across his torso, and a fancy ribbon pinned over his heart, a sign of Berlin’s mania for decorations and medals during the Empire. One fellow near the front is holding a flag, but it’s impossible to make out the inscription on its cloth as the photo has faded with age. The men go by with chests straight but no smiles as they stare into the photographer’s lens. In three years they would go off to war and many would never return. Was my street used regularly for these sorts of parades that the Empire so admired? It’s unlikely. I imagine it was rather just a chance occurrence, the outcome of the parade organisers wanting to use it as a convenient shortcut to join up with the large neighbouring avenues.

Come to think of it, I hope my street is aware of its responsibility toward me, since, for a foreigner especially, one’s place of residence is like a shortcut into the country, a miniature mirror of its customs and character traits. It offers the possibility of a manageable field study – a synecdoche that’s small enough to be easily covered yet vast enough to offer representative parts that can stand for the whole. I have spent lots of time observing my street and thinking about my adopted country through its lens. It has taught me how the Germans relate to nature, order, authority, and to their difficult past. Living here, I have observed how their democracy functions, what being in a community means to them, and their vision of social justice. Also the way they resist or allow themselves to be carried along by the acceleration of time. Yes, all that is readable in my street. This microcosm helps me understand the entire country. I don’t think it fully appreciates the weight that rests on its shoulders.

My street has no outstanding features, just the usual stuff: streetlamps, advertising columns, circuit boxes, manhole covers, the gaping entrances to cellars and underground parking lots, and the homeopathic medicine sign planted in the front garden of number 26. There are pergolas covered with ivy or other vines to hide the ugliness of a row of rubbish bins. The paving stones and granite slabs of the pavements are laid out in the customary pattern. Customary as well are the signs in modern hieroglyphic code listing all the undesirables: dogs, bikes, ball playing, and pedlars. And then there are the other improvised signs stapled to the plane trees, such as the one advertising ‘Math tutoring’, or this innocent plea to a chance benefactor: ‘Young married couple, kind and discreet, hoping to find three-room flat in older building with sunny balcony – contact us!’ Of course there are also pictures of lost dogs and cats and below them crude pronouncements – Call now! Reward Guaranteed! – that suggest a child’s hope against hope. In the last few years a new ornament has begun to take over our street: brass-topped cobblestones placed in the pavement in front of blocks of flats from which Jews were deported. I have counted eight. Sometimes in the middle of the afternoon a penitent ceremony blocks the entryway into a building. Standing in a semi-circle or prostrate with eyes on the ground, today’s Germans struggle with their past. Someone places a rose. Kind words are spoken about ‘our Jewish fellow citizens’ – unsere jüdischen Mitmenschen.

There is also the usual cast of characters: the majestic platoon of dustcarts that pull up at dawn with all their lights on, including the rotating roof light that sends long stripes of orange over the still sleeping street. Later on comes the postman, pushing his post cart in front of him like a carefree dandy walking an important dog. And there is the snow-plough man in winter and the sweepers all year round. My favourite is the tall African-looking one who appears on Mondays folded up like a wooden ruler inside the tiny compartment of his sweeper-vacuum machine. This Sisyphus is condemned to endlessly suck dog poo from the pavements with its long plastic trunk and make it disappear inside the vehicle. Passers-by scrunch up their faces in disgust while giving him a wide berth to pass on, but he always nods respectfully and gives way to them. There are package delivery vans, door-to-door salesmen, Jehovah’s Witnesses and other pedlars of some higher law, groups of kids disguised as vampires on Halloween night, a procession of lantern-holders on the night of Saint Martin, Romanian accordion players with gold incisors serenading under street balconies on Sunday afternoons, graffiti artists spraying a furtive ‘Fuck you!’ or ‘Nazis raus!’ on some facade in the middle of the night, rousing the loud indignant swearing of the building’s owners the next morning, travellers dragging suitcases with rumbling rolling wheels loud enough to wake the dead, and the thin voice of the Pakistani distributing flyers who yells ‘Advertising’ into the intercom to get you to open the door. A few businesses are gathered together at the end of the street near the entrance to the underground, from which one can occasionally hear some sad violin music rise up. Among the stores there’s a copy shop, a speciality shop for snowboarders, a hardware shop, a café-bar where Berliner retirees meet up in small groups for ham and beer at around five on a Sunday afternoon, a co-op day-care centre – and that’s it. At the other end of the street there’s a restaurant that has changed hands many times and gone from Greek to Australian-Asian, to Italian. The mainstays of daily city life – post office, newspaper kiosk, bakery, supermarket – are all missing. It’s a purely residential street.

My street has its gossip and odd characters. A burlesque dancer who was a recluse lived on the top floor at number 3 for years. Found dead dressed in black tights, this person had left marks from many pas de bourrée all over the wood parquet. There was a suicide victim discovered with open veins in a bathtub, and a cabinet-maker at number 15 who in the late seventies took his wife down into his basement workshop and sawed her head off. There was even an article about it at the time in the Berliner Morgenpost. There’s also the story about some roommates who, having neglected to take their rubbish down to the back courtyard for several weeks, finally did so and discovered that their potatoes had grown sprouts several metres in length.

When it comes down to it, I know fairly little about my neighbours. Who is that couple that often walks up the street holding hands? He’s dark, tall and stiff; she’s short with dyed blond hair. They hold onto each other like Hansel and Gretel walking through a dark forest. And who is that stocky man who always wears his green felt hat with a little feather and never goes out without his German Shepherd? And what about the elderly lady who sets off in small nervous steps each morning to make the interminable expedition to the supermarket? And the short man in his tweed jacket who tips his cap at me when we meet? (An old-fashioned gesture that makes me melt each time.) Who’s the couple with the three children at number 5 . . . newcomers? I haven’t seen the handsome man at number 25 for weeks now – why? Has he gone on holiday in his sports car? I would also like to know who the self-appointed policeman is who two times now has stuck a little note on my windshield to say ‘You suck at parking!’ I imagine him leaving his place at night with a stack of such notes in his pocket. I can see him in the dark handing out his special citations to every vehicle not perfectly parked and thus, with this modest gesture, relieving the frustrations of his day. How I’d like to meet him in broad daylight and give him a piece of my mind – ‘Rigid bastard! Parking Nazi!’ But I do hope he’s given out one of his ‘You suck at parking!’ cards to the BMW with Munich licence plates that once a month is parked for several hours right on the pavement in front of number 26.

My street bears the dull habits of a middle-class community of people thrown together and forced to get along. Neighbours who live on the same floor might let out at most a brusque Morgen! between clenched teeth, give a slight nod when sharing the elevator compartment, or perhaps initiate a curt exchange, most likely a lamentation about the weather (bad) or the times (tough). Between one floor and another, one might borrow an egg, sign for a parcel, water the plants or feed the mice or cats during the holidays, but also go up and complain about excessive noise. That’s all.

It’s an ordinary street. A street like hundreds throughout Germany that were built in the early years of the twentieth century and then mostly destroyed during the war. In a way it is completely interchangeable with its earlier incarnations, and in fact it has kept the same name since it was built. Even in 1945, no one saw a need for any palimpsest. It never gave passing honour to any great man of the past. It never bowed to any discredited despot after a change in regime. My street’s name is so insignificant that it’s not even worth mentioning. Its fate is an exemplum that could serve to illustrate many others. It’s easy to go by it without even really paying attention. Easy to pass its facades without even raising one’s head – hurrying on, absorbed in one’s own thoughts. At first glance, it looks like a street with no history, for who could imagine the stories woven behind those smooth stone surfaces? Who could guess the underground tremors that would shake the apparent stillness of it all?