Kirmizi_ada

It is still warm enough to buy a caramel corduroy overcoat for 4 Euros and then lavishly salt it away in the closet for later. Warm enough to walk down Kreuzburger Strasse comfortably humming “Zug es mir noch amool” by the Barry Sisters.
Radio Berlin Brandenburg, which is almost as endearingly staid as NPR, is still describing the weather as spätsommerlich freundlich. It is indeed still warm enough so that tonight around 11:30, on the empty fleamarket lot across Langenscheid Bridge from Red Island, a high school student was practicing the Aşık Veysel song “Gündüz Gece,” thinking he was alone. The singer stopped and waited for me to pass, I slipped behind an empty trailer and pulled my feet up onto the trailer beam to wait for him to continue. I am still waiting.

Does anyone know the Mozart opera Idomeneo? The Deutsche Oper (German Opera) in Berlin decided today to cancel its production of the piece, because it anticipated retribution from political Islamists. Apparently the staging was to include Jesus- and Mohammed-heads, which were ostensible fodder for terrorist attacks on the opera house. During the past 24 hours, a strange yelling pageant has ensued locally between apologists and chest-beaters—about art, freedom, and cowardice. Germany’s Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble (CDU) was one of the first incensed citizens on the scene, poised to call the decision “ridiculous.” Press commentators grimace and mull “ob Selbstzensur auf der Grundlage eines diffusen Bedrohungsgefühls gerechtfertigt ist” [“whether self-censorship based on a diffuse feeling of being threatened is justifiable.”]

I fear a new trend in which liberal policy-makers and art-promoters are seeing wisdom in steering widely around the “Pope Benedikt syndrome,” around the vague eventuality of being called to account in an unpleasant way. No net increase in respect issues from this approach, just a lot of opera singers with extra songs to hum on the subway home.

So: two beautiful things no one will get to hear tonight: the end of Gündüz Gece out on the fleamarket lot and the beginning of Idomeneo in the Deutsche Oper.

NEXT TIME: Gooski’s on Polish Hill?

Hi friends, and welcome to my blog.

If you are having difficulty believing that an Inscrutable Codger like me is suiting up for this particular dive into the empty swimming pool of twenty-first century culture, please know that I share the concern. On the other hand, there is a shortlist of noteworthy benefits: 1) It's free, 2) It is way more fun than writing my dissertation, and 3) It might turn me into a better storyteller, such that when you and I are reunited, you may no longer have to do all the talking.
KIRMIZI_ADA is the name of my blog. The three i's in "kirmizi" should have no dots above them, but free blogging software can't be expected to honor such diacritical opulence. With the underscore between the two words, Kirmizi_Ada looks kind of like my neighborhood: "Kirmizi" would be the modest skyline of Berlin-Schöneberg around Kleistpark & Hauptstraße (Main Street), and "Ada" would be the narrow triangle of Schöneberg Island, where I live—somewhere in the upper third of the "d" in "Ada."

Many of 19th central Europe's working class neighborhoods were built to the east of middle-class financial centers, because the soot and debris from the train lines would blow eastward. The districts of Friedrichshain, Neukölln, and my little Schöneberg Island are living exemplars of the history of wind. When the Socialist Law (Sozialistengesetz) was lifted in 1890, the Social Democratic Party (SPD) gained a new stronghold among the Schöneberg Islanders. When the Kaiser paraded through Berlin, it was not uncommon for the folks in my neighborhood to hang red flags out their windows, instead of the bourgeois black-red-gold.

Hence, Schöneberg's East End came to be known—with equal dashes of mockery and curiosity—as The Red Island, and it's inhabitants "Rotinsulaner."

But back to the underscore "_" between Kirmizi and Ada. North-south "Stromtäler," or electrical power corridors, used to run on either side of Red Island from the Anhalter Train Station to South Crossing. No longer used for trafficking electricity, those valleys are now the S-bahn trainlines to Wannsee and Marienfelde. On either side of the island, there are train trestle overpasses, where you can gaze down at the underscore "_" until a ten-car northbound train heads up to Potsdamer Platz, like a coral snake on its way to a clogging party.

These days, a fair plurality of my neighbors and fellow Rotinsulaner are Turkish in some way or another. So after 130 years of Kiezgeschichte (neighborhood history) it's about time that the Rote Insel be translated into its turkish "Kirmizi Ada." pronounced "Kuhr-muh-ZUH ah-DAh". I don't think anyone will mind.

My voice is a bit scritch-scratchy today after Madonnamania at the Schwules Zentrum last night, so the audio transcript of this inaugural entry will be read by Arianna Huffington.

I don't know what the procedure is for signing off from a blog. I wish there were some decadent hand gesture, like the pope does. But for now, I hope you pass this day in love and good company. Till soon!