It's gone. Passed on, in a better place now - however you might like to put it. But it's not there anymore.
You'll still find it on the maps, of course - and journalists and hipsters all over the world will frown at you if you tell them it's not among us anymore. Why, they'll say - don't you know that Berlin has the most fantastic parties, the craziest raves, an unique youth culture flowing strongly through its veins? Don't you see that Berlin never sleeps, that it's a cosmopolitan temple to energy and passion?
That's bullshit. All the drugs in the world- a good chunk of them passing through the veins of the city, alright - won't stop the decay of the city. All of the music and the clubs which have grown like bacteria on an infected wound won't change the fact that they aren't the focus of Berlin culture, they are a distraction from it. The true culture of Berlin isn't the twenty-somethings (often all the way up to their forties, but still twenty-somethings) dancing in some club and getting wasted. They know perfectly why they are getting so fucked up - it's so that they can forget about the streets they'll have to walk back home. It's so they don't have to pick up a newspaper in the morning. It's to forget that they don't have a job, that they don't have a community to fall back on, no ideas and no hope whatsoever for the future.
The true culture of Berlin is the foot stomping on Markus P.'s face for no reason whatsoever - not because we don't know why, but because we know that the question is 'why not?'. When the framework of morality is 'what's legal and illegal', is the answer 'killing a man for no reason is illegal' a strong enough reply to such barbarism? Is it the best we have achieved - to point out an ancient law, afraid that someone will ask what principle was beneath that law -that man ought not be a victim of another man? Afraid that someone will point out that everyone, everywhere, is now victim and assassin of someone else, pushing to steal and take more from someone else to gain more himself?
Politics has failed to safeguard the community, that is to say, the group of individuals that lived here lost everything or escaped as their right to property meant less and less; and how could it mean anything, when a fifth of the population needs the government to buy food and shelter? How can you pursue happiness, if every bum and addict first needs feeding and tending to? But the true failure has been, of course, philosophical: because Berlin has no values to strive towards, it has no chance but to recede in a coma, to stop breathing and to, finally, close down, albeit in a hedonistic, paradoxical fashion.
So here lies Berlin, the great city. Good riddance.
