The tram is a means of transport that belongs to the history of some fortunate cities, but not to all. For a city to be graced by a tram network is the equivalent of having a noble title. The forms of trams have changed drastically over the last century and modern ones are ever more smooth and silent and the running boards are at street level to make access easier for all. The historical trams were a gymnastic affair: you literally had to climb up onto them and the cars were quite a bit higher than the wheels so that you likely felt as if you didn’t quite belong to the ground. In some trams that feeling remains the same today. On some of the older trams you have the impression of being slightly unstable upon the iron floors, especially in the curves. In truth, the trams of Berlin move along large avenues, in many cases huge ones, throughout the immense peripheral areas of the east and therefore do not have to perform many slaloms or particularly daring turns. Their path is slow and rather straightforward in every sense. Sometimes you even wonder if these long avenues don’t continue on into infinity. And yet, instead of relieving passengers from their daily anxieties, this dogged regularity along predetermined spaces and lines sometimes manages to inspire obsessive metaphysical doubts in even the calmest of souls.
There are different ways of experiencing the trams of the capital. There are the, let us say, softer choices, which allow you to move about the central area of Mitte and there are the indescribable, tougher ones which, departing from Alexanderplatz, will take you toward the eastern Steppes and introduce you to a harder Berlin, one that has justifiably been left off the postcards and any sensible guide.
We shall let ourselves simply be transported by the rails without thinking too much and shall therefore see quite a bit of the former East Berlin.
We find ourselves now at Warschauer Straße, the end of the line for the low-riding and modern tram M10, which transports the greatest number of passengers possible along Warschauer Straße, today a large, colorful avenue with a bit of a punk flair, all the way up to the Frankfurter Tor with the sober and socialistic Karl-Marx-Allee to one’s left and the Fernsehturm off in the distance.
The next stop is Petersburger Straße, in reality simply the continuation of Warschauer Straße. Travelling along these immense streets with the tram for the first time can make quite an impression. Even today, twenty years after the end of socialism, it is an area marked by a distinct lack of shops and too many empty spaces. The tram, as opposed to the train, doesn’t have any stations to welcome it. Instead, it always stops in the middle of the street and almost in the middle of both vehicular and pedestrian traffic and this too makes you feel a bit more exposed to the elements. We’ll get off at the intersection of Danziger Straße and Greifswalder Straße in order to get the M4 towards Hackescher Markt. Slowly, but without any trouble, we arrive at Alexanderplatz.
From up on the fifth floor of the Kaufhof department store here on Alexanderplatz we can look out over the tracks while having a coffee. We’ll have a seat at a table in front of the large window in the Dinea restaurant, which looks directly out onto that part of the square where the trams pass.
The reality of Alexanderplatz is so overwhelming that it is best taken in small doses. Maybe we can place ourselves in all its different angles in order to one day put together all of those myriad observations to see what they all add up to…or maybe not. Today, in any case, we’ll limit ourselves to observing the trams from on high.
If walking about Alexanderplatz makes you feel like an ant in a sea of concrete, looking down on the square from the fifth floor, you recognize that the ants are the others, and this fact is slightly comforting. The ants of Alexanderplatz are all different colors and don’t seem to follow any particularly organized plan of movement. Some have their heads covered and are wearing a kind of tunic that reaches down to their feet, others are moving about on bicycles, others still have shoulder bags and are pushing strollers with other tiny ants. When it’s sunny the ants stretch out on café chairs or on steps just like they were at the seaside. When it’s rainy they all crowd into the holes where U Alexanderplatz is written or open umbrellas. The yellow earthworms, however, represent the true, inescapable vehicular rules of the square in their slow shuffling along the rails…they stop, pick up other ants, then depart again even more slowly than they arrived before, disappearing behind a row of buildings. The ants often cross the rails in a disorderly fashion and the earthworms are thus forced to move even more slowly than the slowest of the ants. Often, two earthworms pass one next to the other in the two opposite directions and seem to be rubbing against each other.
The square is primarily gray and you wouldn’t notice the tracks if it weren’t for the frequent passing of the yellow trains proving their existence. The tram-worms are of a vaguely old appearance with their two separate cars and many-sided form or with all the cars united in the modern rounded version. All around there are large buildings and in the distance, to the east, billowing smokestacks. The traffic outside the rectangular perimeter of the buildings moves slowly. Many cars don’t seem to be going in any direction in particular, just like the pedestrians crossing the center of the square: one stops, another speeds up, one overtakes another, another turns, and they are of all colors and shapes. The trams, on the other hand, are different. They are fluid and regular: they shuffle along and they stop only at their appointed places or directly at people’s feet.
Many older citizens of the former German Democratic Republic come to eat lunch at the Kaufhof’s restaurant. It’s a way to meet and talk about nothing, or almost nothing. The most important topic in the month of May seems to be asparagus. Everyone’s dressed in beige or in pastels. The Russians next to us are also talking non-stop, but we’re not too sure about what. The only word we manage to catch repeatedly is Charlottenburg, Charlottenburg, Charlottenburg, smooth with the exception of the run-over l’s and r’s. Maybe they’re in the wrong place and want to go eat oysters at KaDeWe.
Once we’ve finished our coffee we can take our trays to the self-propelled rails that carry the dirty dishes to be washed. From there we’ll go on up to the mattress section in order to look at the S-Bahn station from its window. The rails are covered by a roof so we can only imagine the travelers rushing about with their luggage.
Let’s go back down to the square and take any old tram to see where it takes us. Now we’ve become the ants at the tram stop and the Kaufhof looks a bit like a mausoleum, but a nice mausoleum, an Egyptian one, for example. That stated, the comparison is a bit out of place, so it’s probably a good idea to give up on comparisons.
We’ll take the M6 east. The large avenues full of housing blocks begin again. We enter one called Landsberger Allee and, even if we ignore its true length, begin to imagine that it will finish only once we reach Moscow. The stops and starts on this line are a bit brusquer than those of the U-Bahn or the S-Bahn. The wheels and rails wail crudely, in the curves we feel what physics calls the force of inertia, that is, when the tram turns to the right our bodies continue on in their initial trajectory but undergo the strange sensation of being catapulted to the left toward the outside of the curve. These jokes of movement are a bit hard on the stomach, but we’re strong and up for continuing onward.
You might have thought that the tram was a picturesque way of getting around, but here it is simply the only means of getting around. Here on this endless avenue you only see trams. The fact that communism no longer exists here is a well-known fact, and yet something strange seems to have remained behind. The lively colors of the beehive-like apartment buildings seem to want to play down the context.
Stretches of tall weeds begin, and it seems as if we have really reached the beginning of the Steppes, which will then become the tundra, and then the end of the world. At the end of the Steppes instead of tundra, however, we only find an Ikea. Two elderly passengers get on and yell: “What luck!” Who knows what they mean by that. Could this possibly be the last tram of the day? We continue on toward the countryside surrounded by electric towers, trees, and then factories and more housing blocks. Then the city and the apartments begin to recede into the distance.
We have arrived at S-Bahn Marzahn, which means that we are still in Berlin, and still in the B tariff zone, in other words, within the city limits. So what, exactly, does periphery mean? Suburbs? There’s a lot of green around and tons of tracks but we’re filled by an empty sense of panic, a bit like Little Red Riding Hood lost in the woods. Soon the wolf will arrive. But no, there are still apartment blocks and two futuristic shopping malls. After Marzahn comes Marzahner Promenade which, from the name alone, sounds like something beautiful. At the Freizeitforum Marzahn (literally the “Center for Free-time Marzahn”) a shiver runs up our backs. We’re still in the capital. We cross even more lines and curve to the right as if we were turning around. Incredibly we’re still on the Landsberger Allee.
The number of tracks increases, the apartment blocks thin out, and the dachas and small houses begin. The residents are pure locals, or at least very very white. They seem to speak a different dialect, full of rough edges, just like the buildings. Their eyes are blue, their hair too, or fuchsia, or green. The young mothers often have tattoos, sometimes even on their faces, and the young fathers angelic faces and violet hair. We arrive at a place where there’s a big wholesale shop for products related to fingernails. We’ll never know if the M6 really takes you all the way to Moscow because we’re going to get off at Hellersdorf to take the U5 back to Alexanderplatz.
At the subway stop of Hellersdorf we experience our own personal discovery of the theory of relativity. We understand that a tram line in former East Berlin is a bit like an infinite series of points and that whatever point along that line we choose, there will always be another one further east. At Hellersdorf we finally understand that Alexanderplatz, in comparison, is west. What we’d thought to be a day wasted instead turned out to be very valuable indeed: we discovered the East’s infinity. All the people at Hellersdorf station must have had the same kind of thought, for they all seem a bit lost.
Let’s get off at Lichtenberg, which is a huge station to the east of Ostkreuz, which we had thought to be the biggest rail station in East Berlin until discovering that Lichtenberg is even further east than Ostkreuz. From Lichtenberg at one point there were many trains which left for Moscow. Now there only a lot of empty rails. The S5 takes you back into the west and we want to go as far west as possible so we’ll get off at Friedrichstraße.
Once there we’ll take the M1 tram toward Rosenthal Nord. Trams coming and going next to the S-Bahn bridge of Hackescher Markt meet at Henriette-Herz Platz. There are a lot of tourists up until Rosenthaler Platz. Here the tram climbs up one of the few hills of Berlin: we are now in Prenzlauer Berg and are about to reach the famous street of fashion, Kastanien Allee. We’ll pass below the Eberswalder Straße bridge, see the famous currywurst kiosk of Konnopke’s and continue onward next to the elevated U2 line along Schönhauser Allee.
The buildings along this stretch have by now almost all been renovated. We arrive at Schönhauser Allee, which you’ll recall is also a station of the Ring, and pass in front of the Arcaden shopping center, a breeding ground of pleasure and good prices. And yet, no matter how much the East has been renovated and filled with fashionable stores, it will never be like the West.
Schönhauser Allee is pretty long. As we inch closer to the outlying areas little by little the stores begin to thin out again, and the buildings get smaller but remain well taken care of. Soon we arrive in Pankow, an industrial, working-class area and see its immense redbrick Rathaus. Close to it there is a lovely toy store called Wilde Schwäne (Wild Swans), which pours all of its colorful merchandise directly onto the sidewalks and even upon its walls, just like in the emporiums of countries in the south.
At Schillerstraße the buildings are small like those in the suburbs. We are well into the peripheral areas of former East Berlin now but there aren’t any Plattenbauten, those frightful apartment blocks we saw on the M6. Here the buildings are at most four floors. At Hermann Hesse Straße there’s another shopping center, but it’s only one floor and the people waiting for the tram are angelic country dwellers. The tram arrives at the last station in a street of pebbles and small redbrick houses. We are now completely in the provinces, just as if we were in the heart of green Germany, and here at Schillerstraße there’s a smell of flowers and meadows.
On 18th Street there are tiny houses with sloping roofs, probably made by hand and with a lot of love, just like we can gather from the care dedicated to the little gardens. We are still in the periphery of former East Berlin but the M1 unexpectedly brought us to a bucolic little village far from the Steppes and from Siberia. But now we’ll turn around and take the same tram. However, we’ll get off at Pankow and then take the S8, paying attention to all the wonderful green.
We’ll go back to Alexanderplatz one more time, but this time we’ll take the M5 into an outlying area different from that of the M1 or M6. Now, this eastern periphery is truly, truly eastern. We’ll skip over Berlin, Poland, Russia, and arrive in China. Soon we begin to see a vast collection of multi-colored and monstrous apartment blocks with old redbrick smokestacks scattered here and there. It’s bewildering, so we start to try and divide them by color: the red and salmon-colored monster, the blue and gray monster, the chestnut and red monster, the abominable gray and green-striped one, the frightening ochre one with orange borders, and in this way they even start to become familiar. We cross the S-Bahn of Landsberger Allee and a series of car dealerships – Renault, Peugeot, Toyota, and Mercedes – as well as a colossal carwash. The most characteristic trait of this tramline is that it passes through a huge Oriental market and seems full of workers from the far East getting on and off at its different stops. In just a few seconds the M5 turns into a Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese, and Korean tram. A great surprise of the M5, however, is the stretch between the leaves of woods that hide the park with the beautiful redbrick evangelical hospital KEH.
The Allee der Kosmonauten then brutally takes us out of the world. Continuing onward in a straight line into infinite space, leaving the shopping center Linden to our right – the only sign of life in this universe of apartment buildings – we finally arrive at the end of the line at Zingstenstraße. Here we find a square surrounded by tram tracks and working class buildings, which, as opposed to the others we’ve seen, all have enclosed terraces, an atypical feature for such buildings. Another singular fact is that a lovely little Chinese restaurant, Bao Fang, was opened in a former breakroom of the BVG drivers in the center of the small square. It seems like a Lilliputian version of a beer garden with its little kitchen and tastefully done room. At the entrance there’s even a giant gold, laughing Buddha. If we turn and put our faces up to the windows we’re confronted by a thick hedge, which blocks the coming and going of the trams and gives us the feeling of being in a garden in some unknown corner of the world.
The tram lines that take you east without a doubt have a certain relentless and rough way about them, a bit like life, really, when it sometimes seems as if it were truly predestined. If every person could freely choose where to be born and where to grow up in Berlin, these districts would probably not exist. The lines, however, if we think about it, always go in two directions and can also take us far away from these places, toward a different Berlin and a different life. If these peripheral areas become too much, you can always think of taking off with the tram. The tram, unflappable superhero, would pull its residents out of their little burial notches and take them toward Alexanderplatz, then the Fernsehturm, the Marienkirche, the Rote Rathaus, and finally, as only he knows how, throw them into the international crowd around the Hackesche Höfe.
We shall conclude our wandering around the central tramlines of the Hackescher Markt in front of the modern and functional double security gate surrounded by security cameras and signs asking you not to lock your bicycle to the grating. It’s not a high-security prison, nor the German central bank, it is only the Jewish High School and adjoining cemetery.
Next to the cemetery a lively and colorful mosaic shows peace as a bridge spanning a field of flowers, doves flying through the sky, and frogs and nymphs filling the rivers all beneath a bright sun.
Translated by Alexander Booth
