Emigration
The poem “Charlottenstan” by Ivan Treptow is an uncompromising portrait of Berlin, seen through the eyes of a Russian-speaking immigrant disillusioned with the “European paradise.”
Charlottenstan
Part I
Berlin-Berlin! Berlin-Berlin!
A pandemonium of swine!
The morning hour. The U-Bahn thunders.
The skull thunders with the night’s hangover.
Kit-Kat thunders from behind the gates,
The executioner is tired: he’s got his hands full
With a pile of chores, a crush of bodies,
The executioner is sweating from the work,
He put on his harness once
And just grew dumber, dumber, dumber.
Kit-Kat froze under the whips
While the old man’s trail has long gone cold.
The old man rode around in a wheelchair,
Holding Kit-Kat in a state of horror,
The old-timer kept himself in check,
He fingered himself, staring
Bureaucratically forward.
Ah, old man! Nothing will get through to you,
You took Berlin, you took Kit-Kat,
But the gaze has dimmed, no longer glad
At pale bodies dressed in leather
You’re alive! But praise to the heavens
You’ll no longer give.
Life is dust, life is a louse,
Life is something you can’t make sense of at all.
Naked girls into the pool
Plunged
While young Arabs stared at them
Predatorily
At the bar, a woman of the GDR mold
Threw wrenches into the general fun.
“Here!” — she barked,
With a beer
Pounding the bar counter,
Like a sledgehammer.
I was knocked out, smitten
By the Kit-Kat vibe
And by the cool street
Chilled by a cursed
Cold.
The falafel on the corner was bitter, vile,
But I am dog-hungry and a sucker
For any carrion, for any trash!
Ah mama, what has Berlin done to us!
I’ve been in exile here for four years now,
Not having yet come to my senses.
And during a police interrogation
They’ll beat a confession out of me by force:
I loved Scholz, Bürgergeld, the humanitarian visa,
I wasn’t averse to riding on a Deutschlandticket,
Further away, out of Berlin—just to be gone!
Heels flashing and the backside showing white
Like a lonely sail on the Ostsee,
There is no joy anywhere, nowhere
In this greatest
country in the whole world,
whose name is spoken with bated breath,
Ger-ma-ny.
Search for it! Whistle for it! In the city thicket
I would gladly “clean the cabbage” (smash the face)
Of some swindler
Just like that, for free
Out of good old hatred.
Just for the sake of improving
the city’s appearance,
Which is being fought for by
Our wise father of the nation
Friedrich Merz.
Or out of brotherly tenderness
Bash the mug with a fist,
Smooth out the face’s chronic gloom
With a benefactor-fist.
Because if you look into it
Faith in Christ is fading here,
in Allah, even in Buddha.
Neither in Marx nor in any miracle
Do the people of Berlin believe anymore
I found out! I asked around.
In bars, and in kneipen, and in parks, and crash-pads and at the parade
In Marzahn
My personal sociology
Was working
Until, completely wasted, I didn’t
High-tail it out of there.
But I digress,
I got carried away,
I got fired up,
Like the Spree, I overflowed
With a thought, empty as a Pfand-bottle
I handed it to you for a handful of cents
Or even for nothing
And I’m glad.
Hatred –
That is the new faith of the peoples.
Listen to us
We, the children of Berlin,
Shelterless, prodigal,
We are fools, stupid foreigners.
We thought we were flying/driving to paradise,
They were cackling and mocking us
Right from the plane’s gangway,
We thought fragrant flowers
Ripened here, bloomed here.
We found out: that fragrance was feces,
Substances not noble at all,
By shiny green flies
Besat and gnawed upon,
Oh, we knew absolutely nothing!
Into the whirlpool with an empty head
To get stuck in the silt of Berlin.
And to choke on its blackness,
On the stinking silty grease
To eat one’s fill,
To fall into hibernation for the winter –
Burrowing in,
Like a fish —
To the bottom
That
Is what we’ve been given almost for free.
Come and get it! Grab it!
At Teufelssee, at the devil’s doorstep
Bodies are laid out on the grass
Standing knee-deep in water, a round dance spins
The Berlin steering wheel
A firm grip!
Masculine! Nautical! Tied with a Dutch knot.
English and Spanish chatter flows,
Berlin brotherly love is boiling!
International, inter-gender and such!
Deep and visceral!
Godlike
Are your eyes!
When we ran together, hid
From Sodom, boiling like a cauldron,
Into the bushes of Grunewald!
Looking up at me from below
Bluish-gray
Here is the translation for the second part of the poem and the concluding credits.
Innocently-guilty
Are your eyes.
I will absolve your sins
For I myself belong to the chosen
– Berlin – people
And I regularly speak,
After getting a little high,
Through silly little verses
With the Lord
God himself.
But listen here, my novice,
We shall complete the full cycle
Churching-repentance-communion,
In the end, you shall know bliss,
And taste the body of Christ.
As for the blood, already
Two bottles of zero-point-seven-five
By the lake, among prostrate bodies,
Have been gulped down—
Red blood,
French, Chilean, Spanish
From the “Edeka” store
Given by God
For the euros on the card.
You deserve punishment.
Have you been good?
“Good” is a lie
Itching to get into hell?
Lift up your sundress
Execution is due for deception.
Or if
You are already hardened in sin
“Bad” — you whisper with proud defiance
With lips purple from wine
With rasping, audacious words
If that’s the case — all the more reason
It is time
It is time, sister!
Before it’s too late
Before the last S-Bahn flees
Like a soldier from the battlefield
From Grunewald station
Or Messe Süd.
God’s hand will not weaken,
God’s palm.
Your round bottom is pale,
Your face — from sun and wine — is red.
But soon enough
Your backside, divided
By a black fabric strip,
Like the Berlin Wall
Will light up fiery,
Pink, red, bruised,
Cracking like a voice
Like the sunset
Over the devilish Teufelsberg.
First, two fingers in the mouth
Not because it’s bad
But on the contrary
Because it’s far too good.
Then down below
With fingers greasy with saliva
Stir the embers,
So they burn
Overfeed the little beast,
Stir it up
So it grows hungry, my dear.
Terrifying, terrifying is its grin
Bivalve-like
Scarlet.
On an analogion made of a stump
Of the forest
Wide open
Ready for repentance
Lies
The very most sinful of sinners
Life.
Take it!
Take it quickly,
As if from an old rug,
With diligent movements
Beat all the sin out of it,
All the folly, all the vigor.
Only active repentance
Only diligent prayer
Thickly sown with tears
Will lead, perhaps, in time
With proper long-suffering
To the salvation
Of this sinful
Berlin
Soul.
Bow down to the stump
Roughly chopped
To the foot in a thin sandal
In a white sock, already gray from Berlin’s grayness
The sock
To the black mole on the nipple
To the immigrant longing,
Viscous
God’s joy on the tongue.
To the shock of rye hair,
Like a haystack
Wound into a fist.
Then
Like a beggar on the Ringbahn
I will beg for your love
I will
Rattle a box for change,
Expose my wounds,
Scratch my sores under a dirty yellow bandage
Like a monkey,
Point a finger
At a mouth parched from hunger.
Save me!
I haven’t had
Even a poppy seed’s worth
Of love for three days!
But you will turn away, go about your business
Your adulteries
You will look out the window at naked November Berlin,
With a neck rough and pale
That was recently by fingers
twisted, strangled by me in love
You’ll wave to the side:
“Berlin — will save you!”
For all sins have already been forgiven.
Text: Ivan Treptow
Photo: Alisa Istomina