I strolled into Cafe-Bistro Bauman for a schnitzel and wheat beer. The car-free island of Juist had me in a state of bliss. I looked out of the window at the slow movement of walkers and bikers, the grasses still sparkling with dew from a brief sun shower. Beside me, old ladies wore flowered hats, everything so meticulous, so deutsch. The waiters with their leather purses, making efficient change, euro coins clicking onto the glass table beside me, the juice and beer precisely measured in fluted glasses of 0.2 and 0.3 liters.
I stepped out of Bauman’s into a blessed silence. I walked beside a horse-drawn carriage that was delivering beer to the island’s taverns. For a block, the carriage and I kept even pace. I was about to cross the street when the driver told me politely that he was going left. Much obliged. I stopped, and he inched around the corner.
But then another day passed. And another. The island started to shrink. The horseshoes, that perpetual metallic tap-tap on cobblestones, began to sound worse than a screeching F train. Stinky horse manure was forever underfoot. The harsh, unchanging ocean mirrored the growing melancholy of the island’s inhabitants as fall deepened.
I tried to cheer myself by biking to the easternmost section of the island, the Kalfamer, but its best feature was a little airport. The last German tourists of the season took 10-minute joyrides in whiny Cessnas. I discovered a dozen earth-movers concealed behind a dune and wondered whether there was anything but the illusion of pristine nature in a country with 230 inhabitants per square kilometer. As the planes buzzed above, birdwatchers with enormous spotting telescopes strained to check another bird off their life lists. I love nature but not birds. They’re neurotic, flitty, skinny little rat-faced creatures, perfect as background—a splash of color, a V against a cobalt sky—but, Gottes willen, not as the subject of sustained attention.
Harmless birdwatchers were irking me. I knew it was time to leave. Perhaps I’m a bit like Geoff Dyer, who writes of the restlessness of travel in Out of Sheer Rage: “All you can think of when you are on a small island is the impossibility of leaving when you want to, either because the island you are on is too big and you want to go to a smaller one or because the island is too small and you want to go to a bigger one.” The Sea Star gossip thickened. Jörg seemed permanently bed-bound. Christina was heading to the German mainland to be with her Russian husband. The Existentialist had left without saying goodbye. The Sea Star and Juist were boarding up for the winter. It was the kind of place where the locals were happy to see the tourists arrive in the spring and just as happy to see them leave in the fall.
I attended an outdoor concert that night, the last of the season. The band went through the motions of “Strangers in the Night.” Only one couple danced, and even they did so halfheartedly. The song ended, and in a German minute the musicians had packed up their instruments and slammed the clamshell stage shut. That’s when I heard the whisper.
Go to Berlin, it said. I bade farewell to Jörg the Depressed, sailed back to the mainland, and traveled across northern Germany to Berlin, stepping out of the train in the new Central Station, an $800 million modernist building and the biggest rail hub in Europe. After my days on the island that time forgot, I was a bit unhinged by the crush of thousands of people. Walking through bustling Potsdamer Platz, I could hardly grasp the transformation since the last time I’d visited, in 1990. Back then I’d come to see Roger Waters of Pink Floyd perform The Wall at the Berlin Wall. Then, the platz was still an empty lot between East and West, the Berlin Wall still very much up. Seventeen years later, there was no trace of it. One of the most expensive construction projects in history had turned the former no-man’s-land into a complex of hypermodernist buildings with the world’s fastest elevators.
I took a subway deeper into the former East Berlin neighborhood of Prenzlauer Berg, where I was going to stay with an acquaintance, a twentysomething psychologist named Lena. I’d known Prenzlauer Berg as a rundown, vaguely anarchist ‘hood, but it was now one of unified Berlin’s trendiest (and priciest) areas. Lena met me on the stoop of her apartment building. All but one of her street’s elegant apartment buildings had been completely refurbished; the sole GDR-relic was charcoal gray and crumbling. Beside it, the freshly painted face of unified Germany.
“The Green Party is in shambles,” Lena said that night after dinner as she blew a perfect smoke ring. She’d invited two friends over to meet me: Kristin was a doctor, Paul a designer. All of them were sympathetic to the Greens. But the scene had a curious feel to it. With St. Germain’s smooth horns on the iPod, and everybody but me smoking, Lena’s Prenzlauer Berg pad had more of the seedy glamour of Weimar Berlin than a crunchy eco-feel.
Kristin explained that the Greens had divided into two rival groups, the Realists and Idealists. The Realist camp was led by former Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, who had caused a stir by supporting Germany’s involvement in the Afghanistan conflict. The pacifist Idealists insist that, given Germany’s expansionist militarist past, it must stay out of all foreign wars.
The music segued to tribal, and the conversation moved on to German designer Michael Braungart’s fascinating idea of “cradle-to-cradle,” where reuse is planned into every consumer product. It’s a noble concept, but Lena and company could think of only one example of cradle-to-cradle in their own daily lives: a biodegradable plastic shopping bag that Paul fished out of the kitchen. “In 13 weeks, it’s soil,” he said.
The next day, Lena and a friend drove to IKEA and binged. “Only 186 euros for all this,” she said, showing me a small mountain of made-in-China junk.
At that moment, I experienced a crisis of faith in the premise of my trip. Was Germany really green enough to make a dent in the global ecological crisis? Only one of Lena’s friends actively recycled; Lena owned a car in a city where you don’t need one, and she practiced American-style retail therapy. Digging deeper into the statistics, I discovered that, while Germany’s per-capita energy consumption was lower than the United States’ and Australia’s, it wasn’t even among the 10 best in Europe.
Considering the potential climate catastrophe portrayed in An Inconvenient Truth and outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Germans seemed to be simply accessorizing global warming. Sure, Berliners love to complain about the Londoners who fly to Berlin just for a haircut. (A £10 Ryanair flight plus a 10-euro Berlin haircut is a little less than a £25 London haircut.) But Germans take those same cheap flights to London. “I simply have to do something about my carbon,” one Berlin friend lamented before heading off on a planet-heating weekend jaunt. Could it be that, in the end, the German eco-miracle was little more than a green-washed McWorld?
