The first time I mentioned Bernie Sanders
The first time I mentioned Bernie Sanders to a German friend she groaned. He talks openly about socialism, I informed her excitedly. In America! And he’s very popular! ‘Oh god,’ she said. ‘Now we’ll have Americans lecturing us about socialism.’ I neglected to tell her about my Jacobin subscription.
Quite why I was excited about a left-wing candidate in the US elections is in itself a mystery. Why should I get caught up in this political spectacle? Did I believe that the wave of revolution would sweep across the globe like 1848, or that the United States would suddenly become a benevolent hegemon, and this benevolence would ultimately improve the quality of my life through some sort of trickle-down social democracy? I had always found it annoying that so many people got all worked up about US presidential candidates. Of course, the rationalisation is that the leadership of the world’s most powerful nation concerns the whole world, but I always suspected it was more like pandering to the emperor’s vanity at worst, and just consuming its popular culture at best.
When I was growing up, the context was very different. Politics then meant voting and voting was an all-consuming activity. Of course, in reality, voting was something you only did every few years but it was something that very much defined you. Something you talked about for the few years that came before you cast your vote, and then celebrated and justified for the next few years if your party won. If it lost you said the electorate had been tricked, the districts jerrymandered, and then complained about everything until the next election when the flow-chart would reset. Although all this energy went into voting, your vote could be predicted with a high degree of accuracy. You voted the way your family voted. Not because you were obeying them, of course. You went to the ballot as an independent voter and cast your vote in secret as the rational, educated person you were, who was well aware of both parties’ programmes and had chosen in the most rational, non-fanatical way possible, to vote for one particular party. That it was the same party that your family had always voted for was a coincidence. In the UK, things were not much different. People voted just as predictably, strictly depending on whether they drove a Ford Mondeo or a white van. Occasionally, and perhaps slightly more frequently than they had done in Malta, voters switched sides, and when they did, they did so much more noisily than when they bought a new car. By leaving London in the beginning of the last decade, I left behind me my franchise and now, to me, politics had become even more tangibly a spectacle. Which was very much in keeping with the times, I guess.
Then, when I left Berlin at the other end of the decade it was in fits and starts, haphazardly. For a couple of years I had lived between there and Brussels in that way that we had once believed so plausible. By some miracle of Schengen membership and electronic preregistration, I would cross the thin Mitteleuropean air without once showing anybody a single identification document; just a brisk scan of the boarding pass on my phone. Now the same journey involved last-minute schedule changes and cancellations, ever-changing requirements regarding test or vaccination status, filling in forms that stated why I needed to be in the country, and then why I needed to leave, all negotiated through misted-up lenses because I’d been wearing a mask for hours. In return, I got to walk through near-empty airports and on the plane had five rows to myself as if algorithmised ticket-pricing had never been invented.
Every time I went back to Berlin, it was always the same picture. The only man under thirty and wearing a suit in Neukölln is standing outside one of the larger flats in my building, one of the flats in the front house with the old contracts. He’s talking to the foreman and behind them are ominous sheets of dryboard leaning against the wall. From inside the flat comes the whine of powertools and a white cloud of fine dust. The large man who was bent in such a way that half his back was a perfectly horizontal shelf and his head peered over his walking frame as he tried to negotiate his way down from his first floor flat and miraculously not tumble over—he’s not there any more. Nor is the octogenarian who spent all day smoking at the window in a white undershirt and always nodded hello. In the corridor there’s a box with things for the taking; novelty mugs and ashtrays and a handful of Schlager compilations.
Across the road, against the wall of the Kita, below its large glass window and snaking onto the wall of the now-shuttered Croc’ Odile—a ‘French’ brunch place that never had the time to take off—Rosa Luxemburg’s paraphrase is still there, in painted letters half a metre high. Sozialismus oder Barbarei. As always, I read it in wonder that the choice, given such a dichotomy should have been so self-evident to Luxemburg; that even in those benighted years, she was confident that that it would be an effective slogan. The question I always have to ask myself is whether I can be relied upon not to fancy myself a moderately successful barbarian. Not necessarily a Viking or a Hun, but perhaps a middling Frank or at least a Visigoth.
In these essays I wanted to look not at my political opinions in themselves but more at their edges and contradictions. Examining myself means examining my own ‘side’ and sometimes I let a topic fade from my attention when it felt churlish to examine positions I broadly sympathise with while the other side—in Europe, in the UK, in the US, in Malta—was not just egregious, but obscene, grotesque. I know that this is probably the most pernicious trap of the discourse.
Political allegiance, performed online, means that it’s not enough to just turn up for a meeting and listen, or pay your membership dues and vote. Sides have to be declared, reiterated, even if superfluously. The tone is that of the permanent political; both the best and the worst are full of conviction and passionate intensity. It’s always hard to work out whether everything is different; or whether things have always been the same. Or whether it’s best to assume both things at once.
¶ end of part twenty-six
The image used to publicise this post is a photo I took in Schiller Kiez just before I finally left Berlin in 2022. The sweeping ranking of barbarian hordes is for purely rhetorical purposes.
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