3.
Whether we are polite children of the southern German provinces or bourgeois-bohemian migrants from across oceans, Berlin is not so much a projection screen for fantasies of a life more exciting (and certainly more affordable), but a screen on which to play out these fantasies. A little rebellion here, a little self-invention there — karaoke on the death strip is just the start. In the spirit of the mayor of Berlin’s declaration that the city is “poor but sexy,” we think of ourselves the same way. We don’t wonder whether the one-in-five Berliners who are structurally unemployed would perhaps be happier being a little less sexy, if only they were a little less poor. At this moment Berlin is the ultimate karaoke-city, a place to be “somewhere else, someone else, someone else somewhere else.” As Ugrešić writes, “karaoke culture in all its manifestations unites narcissism, exhibitionism, and the neurotic need for the individual to inscribe him or herself on the indifferent surface of the world, irrespective of whether the discontent individual uses the bark of a tree, his or her body, the Internet, photography, an act of vandalism, murder, or art. In the roots of this culture, however, lies a more serious motive: fear of death. From the surface of karaoke culture shimmers the mask of death.”
4.
Ugrešić’s 1997 novel The Museum of Unconditional Surrender was elegiacally named for a museum that no longer existed. The museum, housed in the building in Berlin in which Nazi Germany signed its capitulation to the Soviet authorities, had closed three years earlier. It re-opened in 1995 with the somewhat more benign name, the German-Russian Museum Berlin-Karlshorst. The barracks surrounding the museum so poignantly described by Ugrešić’s narrator have now largely been torn down, and the Soviet officers’ quarters next door to the museum are currently being converted into luxury apartments. As Ugrešić writes in this collection, “freedom from knowledge, from the past, from continuity, from cultural memory and cultural hierarchy, and an inconceivable speed — these are the determinants of karaoke culture.”
5.
Christoph Koch, a German journalist, has just published a book about his trauma of going forty days and forty nights without the Internet or a mobile phone. Other journalists have been interviewing him about his messianic survival in the wilderness. In recent years hotels, cafés, airports, and all kinds of other places have advertised Internet access as a selling point, but we can’t be far from a time when black zones beyond Google’s reach will be priced at a premium.
6.
Ugrešić the essayist has always been a switch hitter. Within collections, and even within individual essays, she writes alternately as elegist, diatribalist, satirist, ironist, and on occasion, moralist. Her first essay collection was published in 1993, and in the original Croatian was called Američki fikcionar (American Fictionary), but the book appeared in English as Have a Nice Day: From the Balkan War to the American Dream. In response to Ugrešić’s notes on couch potatoes, organizers, shrinks, and jogging, a reviewer for The New York Times wrote “judging by this book, Ms. Ugrešić saw little of the United States, made few friendships of any depth and watched television a lot.” Much got lost in translation with that change of title.
7.
Almost three hundred years ago Jonathan Swift modestly proposed that the starving Irish sell their children as food for the rich. At the time, and in the intervening years, some readers have taken Swift literally, but no one has ever taken these people seriously. In “Assault on the Minibar,” either Ugrešić or her narrator (which?), fed up with the totalitarian assumption of guilt that she is going to steal from the minibar and not pay for it, confesses to scratching “Death to the Minibar!” into the little locked fridge, throwing it in the bath, and turning on the faucet. Thinking about the victimized little minibar in Room 513, the aforementioned New York Times reviewer will no doubt be first to call the police.
8.
In this summer of 2010 Ugrešić presented a version of the essay “The Elusive Substance of the Archive” as the closing keynote address at an academic conference in the United Kingdom. Backed by small armies of footnotes and appeals to the authority of literary history and literary theory, we scholars (and those of us impersonating scholars) had hammered the theme of “Archive” for almost a week. At the conclusion of Ugrešić’s address the applause continued well beyond that required by courtesy. In three-quarters of an hour, the reflections of a novelist seemed to contain more truth about the subject than we had collectively managed, with the help of Benjamin, Joyce, Borges, and Sebald, in days. These lines hit hardest: “We walk through the world with our memory sticks around our necks, each of us with our own homepage, each of us with an archive stored on the web. We, are everywhere. . And the more voluminous the archive that trails us, the less of ourselves there seems to be. . We don’t communicate with each other. . Oh so modern, we put things on YouTube so anyone can gawk at them. We used to send out ghostly signals of our existence, and now we make fireworks out of our lives. We enjoy the orgy of being, twittering, buying new toys, iPhones and iPads, and all the while our hunger just grows and grows. We wear memory sticks around our necks, having of course first made copies. The memory stick is our celestial sarcophagus, our soul, our capsule, our soul in a capsule.”
9.
A visit to the “Foreigner’s Office” (Auslandsamt) in Berlin is a bowel-voiding experience, more like a Battle Royale fixed by the invisible hand of fear than a tranquilized wander through IKEA. My game began on a January morning at 5:30 A.M. The Office is located in a semi-industrial part of Wedding, a Berlin neighborhood that has all the social problems of a Parisian banlieue—with all that word implies about migration and poverty — yet none of the architectural violence. Were it not so poor, Wedding would be pretty. A Bulgarian friend — an experienced player — had given me an insider tip on the unwritten rules of the game. The first and most important rule, she declared, is to be in line outside the building no later than 6:15 A.M. The second is to have memorized the building’s complex floor plan, so when doors open just before 7:00 A.M. you’ll get to the necessary section among the top dozen finishers. If you don’t manage to pull a waiting number by 7:10 A.M., you won’t be among the day’s competitors. The only consolation is that — at least at this stage — disqualification is only temporary. You can get up at 5:30 A.M. and compete again tomorrow.