The Threepenny Opera at The Brooklyn Academy of Music

When I was in undergrad, my playwriting professor mentioned in passing the unique quality that the Irish can bring to Beckett. Waiting for Godot was never better, he maintained, than when it was performed by Beckett’s own kith and kin. 15 years now, this has stuck with me, despite having no strong opinions about Beckett in any direction. It may be that the idea feels both romantic past the point of all reason and fundamentally true.

Last night, during a riveting production of The Threepenny Opera at BAM, I found myself thinking similar thoughts about the Germans and Brecht. Brecht is notoriously difficult to pull off. The whole point of the Brechtian experiment was—is—to keep the audience at an emotional remove so they think critically about what they’re watching. His work walks a thin and precarious line between absolute irony and uncompromising sincerity. It’s easy for his plays to feel disjointed and uneven, or overly confrontational, as a result.

It was an utter joy to watch for three hours as the members of the Berliner Ensemble weaved their way in and out of the dark corners of Threepenny, effortlessly keeping the audience in the palm of their collective hand by emphasizing the humor and absurdity inherent to the material. I haven’t laughed that much in a theater since James Acaster’s last stand-up tour. Every member of the cast finds humor in what they are doing, and each in their own way. Gabriel Schneider plays Macheath as the naughty five-year old who always gets caught. Kathrin Wehlisch, who plays Chief of Police Tiger Brown, gives a firecracker performance, with unexpected comedy in every line and gesture. This is someone who has seen and studied every Looney Tunes short.

At times broad, at others specific, and never indulgent or unnecessary, the use of comedy in Threepenny provided a stark contrast with another recent and much-lauded production at BAM, the London transfer of A Streetcar Named Desire. I could not stand that production, despite Patsy Ferran’s exceptional work as Blanche DuBois. Rebecca Frecknall’s direction emphasized severity. The show screamed its own importance, not trusting that the audience would notice on their own. Tennessee Williams wrote a serious, heavy play, yes, but god bless him he also made sure it was funny. Not that you could tell.

Barrie Kosky, the director of Threepenny, smartly directs against the grain. He and the cast understand that the show—unambiguously about murder, philandering, corruption, capitalism, and the cruelty of man—will speak up for the seriousness of its themes on its own. The show doesn’t need their help with that. Their job is to pull the audience in, and they do so magnificently.

The finale of Act 2, “What Keeps Mankind Alive?,” was the moment when the production subtly shifted from the very good into the realm of the transcendent. The song, now a hundred years old, decries the comfort of the rich and how their lives depend on the exploitation of the lower classes. There is a staggering urgency, a genuine anger, and a sense of menace. The final line, “Mankind is kept alive by bestial acts,” manages to feel all at once like a warning, a condemnation, and an exhortation. I’m not so sure it’s meant to turn you off the idea, or to convince you that mankind is beneath redemption. It almost feels like encouragement. How else can we protect ourselves? How else can anything change?

Spring, Summer, Asteroid, Bird

I once joked to a friend that every Miyazaki movie follows a similar trajectory: stuff happens, then five minutes before the end, we find out it was about love the whole time. Miyazaki doesn’t build his stories in the way that we’re used to. Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle, and The Wind Rises don’t break down easily into the three-act structure. They feel truly idiosyncratic.

While Miyazaki’s films are remarkable things no matter your cultural background, his story structures are less unusual when considered within the framework of both Japanese storytelling tradition specifically and East Asian narratives as a whole. Henry Lien’s Spring, Summer, Asteroid, Bird is an introduction to those narratives, exploring East Asian storytelling and what distinguishes it from the West. In particular, he juxtaposes the Eastern preference for four-act and circular structures with the Western three-act. 

The West is so steeped in the three-act structure that many people who don’t spend most of their time thinking about the inner workings of stories are familiar with it. A thing happens. The thing intensifies. The thing resolves. That’s the flow of it. Lien uses Star Wars as an illustration, but just about every story we know and love here in the U.S. of A. adheres to the formula.

The four-act structure is similar. Similar enough, in fact, that it is often treated as nothing more than a variation on the three-act. People exist in a given world. We see them go about their lives in that world. There is a crisis. We see how that crisis and the world come to terms with one another. From that description, you can see how they might be considered two different ways of cutting the same sandwich.

Whether Lien is aware of their interchangeable status, I don’t know. He doesn’t mention it. Instead, he provides a wonderful argument for how and why the structures are distinct, tying them to philosophical outlooks reinforced by the cultures that prefer them. The three-act structure emphasizes the individual, requires a tidy resolution, and necessitates that everything obey the terms laid out in its first act. The four-act structure, on the other hand, emphasizes communities, tends to leave the ending a bit more ambiguous, and allows for so massive a change in the third act that a story may hop genres—consider the tonal shift halfway through Parasite. In point of fact, Lien says, four-act stories are entirely about the impact of that sudden third-act change, and how the world adjusts or doesn’t.

Though Lien missteps early on with some poor choices of examples, and leans throughout the book on a risible short story to illustrate some points, his observations are excellent. There’s a lot to chew on here. Spring, Summer, Asteroid, Bird better equipped me to think and talk about many of my favorite stories, which is a wonderful feeling. I always knew Miyazaki’s movies suddenly become about love in the last five minutes. Now I know why.

The Seed of the Sacred Fig

The Seed of the Sacred Fig is peppered with actual footage of Iranians taking to the streets in 2022 and 2023, protesting the regime and the hijab following the death of Mahsa Amini. For that reason, it is a difficult film to watch. We see real people getting abducted by police, real people getting beaten and shot at, and I am sure that at least one clip shows a dead man. It occurs to me now, 24 hours later, that the footage showing him was not blurred to obscure his identity, unlike so much of the other footage. Whether I realized it or not at the time, that might be why I knew he was dead.

During one of those montages, I found myself thinking about power, and what it means to believe in a world that consists of nothing but power, or rather nothing but power and its absence. That is, after all, the worldview of the Iranian regime: either my control is total, or it may as well not exist.

That is very much what The Seed of the Sacred Fig is about, power and absolutism and the ways they undermine our humanity. The title refers to the sacred fig, ficus religiosa, which propagates by landing on other trees and eventually choking them out. In the real world, the sacred fig was a metaphor in Iran for the revolution and the regime. As for the movie, the regime may be the sacred fig, but if it is, it’s smothering the people of Iran rather than the US-backed Pahlavi Dynasty. More likely, director Mohammad Rasoulof sees the sacred fig in this story as the inevitability of cultural change and progress. I keep thinking about a single shot in the film, showing a tattooed young woman wearing a baseball cap and driving car, which suggests that the world has already moved on more than even the people in this film care to acknowledge.

The day before Seed, I saw I’m Still Here, which tells the true story of Rubens Paiva, a former Brazilian congressman who was disappeared by the military dictatorship. During a harrowing sequence set in a military prison, I found myself thinking, “Why do you feel so compelled to hold onto power that you would behave this way?” I’ve had the thought before. I do not find meaning in power, and I never have. The only power that means anything to me, the only power I understand people fighting tooth and nail to retain or reclaim, is autonomy, but autonomy doesn’t extend beyond one’s own immediate borders.

I understand power’s appeal intellectually. Donald Trump and Elon Musk are entirely foreign to me, but I get where they’re coming from. Our own little home-brewed fascists share the same outlook as the Ayatollah, the AfD in Germany, Putin, the Communist Party in China, and Bibi. Each and every one of them exists in a world that consists of those who do and those who are done upon. The idea of a world in which we are all equal and we all have dignity doesn’t exist for them, because they do not believe that is possible. They believe power is a zero-sum resource. If they don’t have it, someone else must.

When you see the world that way, as so many Americans do nowadays, you open yourself up to all manner of horrors. I was reminded of Adam Serwer’s now-immortal line, “the cruelty is the point.” When he wrote that during the first Trump presidency, Serwer was putting the lie to the idea that Trump supporters liked his policies and were willing to ignore his racism. The cruelty of his words was central to why people flocked to him, why they still do. The cruelty isn’t a side affect, it’s the whole point. Poor white people supported the institution of chattel slavery because it meant there was someone beneath them. There are those who do and those who are done upon.

Both The Seed of the Sacred Fig and I’m Still Here were part of a two-day mini-marathon to catch up on new releases. Whether it’s because I started with I’m Still Here or because I’ve been reading Say Nothing, about Ireland during the Troubles, or because of what it’s like to live through this moment in time with even a hint of awareness, all four movies that I saw seemed to be about power, in one way or another. Even Companion, a fun B-movie about a sex robot, can be framed as a story about one man’s inability to accept his own impotence. If he’d managed to find meaning in any other aspects of life, none of [gestures vaguely towards a pile of dead people] would have happened.

The last movie in my two-day marathon was Nickel Boys, which also has quite a bit to say about power, about who has it and who doesn’t, and how those who don’t survive. Nickel Boys is adapted from Colson Whitehead’s novel The Nickel Boys, which was in turn based on a real and highly-abusive reform school in Florida. The administrator of the school, a white man named Spencer, enters the film congenially enough. He talks to the boys about the school, its system, how they can earn early release with good behavior. He then tells them that misbehavior will not be tolerated. “I’ll see to that personally,” he says while patting a ring of keys on his belt loop.

One of the places he takes the boys for punishment is a shed where he belts them. We only see the shed once, though that’s certainly enough. The whole scene plays out like a horror film, enhanced by director RaMell Ross’s decision to shoot the entire movie in POV. Because of that choice, you spend a lot more time observing the details of the world, rather than focusing on the protagonists. When Elwood enters the room, which is dim and splattered with blood, we see Spencer looking haggard, exhausted, spittle or possibly some blood dripping from his lower lip. He looks, in the moment, far weaker than any of the boys. You can gain power if you want. It isn’t necessarily hard. But what you have to give up in the process is almost certainly not worth it, and, if all four of these films are to be believed, it will destroy you.

James

Mark Twain introduces Jim, the slave who accompanies Huckleberry Finn down the Mississippi, at the start of the second chapter of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn:

We went tip-toeing along a path amongst the trees back towards the end of the widow’s garden, stooping down so as the branches wouldn’t scrape our heads. When we was passing by the kitchen I fell over a root and made a noise. We scrouched down and laid still. Miss Watson’s big nigger, named Jim, was setting in the kitchen door; we could see him pretty clear, because there was a light behind him. He got up and stretched his neck out about a minute, listening. Then he says:

‘Who dah?’

James, in which Percival Everett retells The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from Jim’s perspective, announces itself with astonishing clarity. It dropps readers into the opening of that second chapter as Jim saw it:

Those little bastards were hiding out there in the tall grass.

That is such a perfect encapsulation of everything the novel is doing, such a succinct explanation of its tone and its viewpoint, that I cannot help but hope it was the wellspring of the entire project. In my mind, Everett was talking about Huckleberry Finn with friends, joking about how Jim could probably see those little fuckers, only to realize he had something here. I have to believe he wrote that sentence down and the rest of this wondrous novel came spilling out. It’s the romantic in me. 

I was prepared for James to gently subvert the tropes at play in Twain’s novel, to slowly add detail where none had been, but it doesn’t really do that. Instead, James does away with those tropes fully within its first five pages, mostly through Everett’s use of language.

All of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is written in dialect, but Jim’s dialogue is particularly hard to parse: “A harem’s a bo’d’nhouse, I reck’n. Mos’ likely dey had rackety times in de nussery.” A lot of “dey”s, a lot of “warn’t”s, that sort of business. Jim is a comic foil, always an object and never a subject. His dialogue supports that.

Not so the Jim of James. Even if we ignore the timbre of the narration, he says as much in the second paragraph: “[Huck and Tom] were always playing some kind of pretending game where I was either a villain or prey, but certainly their toy.” The narration is so assured, particularly when taken in contrast to the source material, that I was jarred when I turned the page and came to the first line of dialogue: “Who dat dere in da dark lak dat?”

First of all, it is a miracle of book publishing that the first line of dialogue sits at the very top of page 10, and not at the bottom of page 9. Having just finished reading The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in preparation for James—something I don’t think is essential to enjoy it, but which certainly enhanced my experience—I had already noticed Everett’s rejection of dialect, so it was dizzying and exhilarating to turn the page and see it. In that moment, before I knew everything Everett was up to, it suggested a sort of radical egalitarianism, the idea that our thoughts are not bound by the particulars of how we speak.

Second of all, I love that Everett chose not to use the same dialogue as Mark Twain. Both books are explicitly, textually first-person narratives written down after the fact. Huck remembers Jim saying “Who dah?”. Jim remembers it a little different. The choice to deviate from Twain’s/Huckleberry Finn’s account in the particulars while adhering to the broader structures reinforces the conceit behind both books.

Third and lastly, that is the moment in which James announces its love of language to the reader. One of Everett’s primary thematic obsessions here is code-switching, and the ways in which the specifics of the language we use communicate much more than just the words themselves are saying. Three pages later, Jim has a conversation with another slave in which they speak entirely without dialect. A page or two after that, Jim instructs his young daughter on “the correct incorrect grammar” for speaking to white folk. It’s all an act, a façade put in place to make sure the white people feel comfortable and secure.

The rapacity with which Everett acknowledges and discards tropes reminded me of Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave, a movie that burns away all the comforting slave tropes the audience might bring with it. The “kind slaveowner” is kind and good right up until the moment it’s inconvenient for him. The southern belle is just as malicious as her husband. An attempted lynching is slow, aching, and miserable, not a grand and dramatic burst of horrifying cinematic action. For his purposes, McQueen turned cinema against itself, just as Everett uses language here to find what’s at the bottom of one of the Great American Novels.

To say James is a retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a good hook to get you interested—it worked for me!—but the reality is that James is done with Twain by the end of Part One. Everett has his own story, and his own concerns. This is a project of reclamation. It is a strident assertion that black people aren’t, will not be, and never were anything less than just that, people, whole and unto themselves, no matter what the white people write down.

Suffs at the Music Box Theatre

When the cast of Suffs performed “Keep Marching” at the Tonys, I disliked it. It felt smug. Whether or not that was the song’s fault is hard to say. Self-importance has followed Suffs, which tells the story of Suffragist campaigner Alice Paul (Shaina Taub), from the beginning. Most of the marketing for the show didn’t have anything to do with the show itself, instead focusing on how “important” the subject matter is. I don’t have a lot of patience for that.

It wasn’t a false impression, either. The first act of Suffs suffers badly for the creative team’s desire to erect a monument. The story goes by in a flash, with little in the way of stakes or character. This is the leader, this is the friend, this is the wealthy one, this is the loose cannon, this is the quiet fresh recruit. Of course, there are stakes, but they’re abstracted, or buried. Importance and dramatic stakes are not the same thing. Suffs assumes you care rather than making you care.

It was hard not to think about Hamilton the whole time, and that’s not because both shows draw from American history. The score to Suffs is so thoroughly reminiscent of Hamilton that it made me more appreciative of all the things that show does well. At one point during the first act of Suffs, as I was being inundated with plot point after plot point spoken in rhythm over a sparse series of bass notes, I found myself thinking, “Wow, yeah, I guess Hamilton does have a lot of exposition.”

The bones of a great show are in there, I think, but they’re buried. Suffs would need to be less worried about relating facts, and more concerned with character. The central relationship to the structure of the first act is between Alice and the doomed Inez Milholland (Hannah Cruz), but the through line isn’t quite there. When Inez tells Alice that she’s leaving the movement to start a family, Alice convinces her to continue. That moment is crucial to everything that comes after, but it doesn’t hit. Inez doesn’t feel like she needs much convincing. Inez dies while campaigning in the midwest. She had a chronic illness that she’d known about for years. A version of Suffs in which the audience knows that while Alice tries to convince her to stay would probably be great.

As the show stands, it feels manipulative. I say that fully believing that the creative team is deeply sincere. Achingly sincere, even. When I saw David Byrne’s horrendous Joan of Arc at the Public back in 2017, the audience was greeted with a giant, hastily-assembled sheet that said, “Nevertheless, she persisted,” a phrase which had just entered the lexicon. I believed the people involved meant that sincerely. That was the story they were telling with their show. I also believed that they didn’t trust in the work to make its own point. Given how little meat is on the bones of Inez as a character, it’s hard not to roll my eyes at the decision to end Act I with a massive photograph of the real Inez Milholland filling up the stage.

The second act is much improved, with more attention paid to stakes and less of a breakneck pace. The show ends with an older Alice talking to a college intern. Much as Alice threatened the supremacy of the Suffs who came before her, this young woman can’t help but point out all the ways in which Alice’s beliefs about the Equal Rights Amendment are flawed. In that moment, realizing and accepting that she has inevitably fallen behind the times, Alice begins to sing “Keep Marching,” a song about the importance of doing the work for its own sake. Within the context of the show, it’s a great song. I’d even go so far as to say it’s important.

Conclave

Conclave is, first and foremost, fun. Too long, yes, but fun. Nothing I’m about to write will make it sound fun. I’m about to bleed all the joy out of what is, despite the moments when it gives in to its loftier intentions, a trashy arthouse thriller. This is a B-movie shot by a prestige director. That’s not a compliment. We don’t get enough of those nowadays.

But I cannot help where my mind goes. Whenever I encounter a story involving high-level religious bureaucrats, I wonder to what extent they believe in the whole [gestures vaguely] thing. Are the rituals truly important to the people who participate in them? Do they do the rituals out of habit? I understand the power and importance of pageantry and public perception, the idea that rituals convey legitimacy over time, etc., etc., but the Cardinals at the center of Conclave are doing all this behind closed doors. When the Pope dies, the Cardinals could call a conclave, choose the new Pope via a round of Heads Up 7 Up, then hang out playing X-Box for three or four days. We would never know.

Conclave seems to ask similar questions. For the duration of its two hours, the pomposity of these men, the self-absorption of those who would be Pope, runs up against the mere materiality of their world. Early shots of the elaborate ribbon-and-wax seal tied around the door to the Papal residence are intercut with paramedicos zipping His Holiness into a body bag and clumsily loading him onto a stretcher. The title card, “Conclave” in yellow letters that take up the whole of the screen, is shown atop an overhead shot of that bodybag in the back of an ambulance, rocking side to side every few seconds with the motion of the vehicle. Director Edward Berger holds that shot for a while. This is not a movie that is concerned with the sacrosanct. At least, not in the sense that it wishes to distinguish between what is and isn’t.

There’s a world in which a movie about Catholics that emphasizes the material could be on the side of the Catholics—the material world holds us back from transcendance—but here it mocks. For all of the presentational severity, the stark lighting and intense close-ups, Conclave finds every possible opportunity for quiet, needling comedy. We are at all times kept aware that these are merely men vying for an office position.

Conclave doesn’t embrace comedy to the extent of, say, Iannucci’s The Death of Stalin, nor does it have anywhere near as much to say about the nature of power, but it does have serious matters on its mind. Ideas about the nature of sin and doubt ooze out of the quieter corners of this movie. Its outlook is Humanist. Better to have sinned and learned than to have never been tempted, better to question the things you hold dear than to take them for granted.

I keep coming back to how firmly the movie is rooted in the material world. We see the immediate destruction of the Ring of the Fisherman, the ballots threaded together and burned, the cans that serve as the source of the legendary black/white smoke that concludes every vote, the liver spots that convey the age of most involved. Even the film’s final twist, an absurd attempt to give this delightfully glossy bit of eurotrash (non-derogatory) real heft, is rooted in the material.

Given my issues with Berger’s last film, All Quiet on the Western Front, I don’t find it surprising that the movie gets stuck on trying to make a statement. By the end, Conclave has become too consumed with making a point to remember that it used to be fun. Unless you are conveying something, well, transcendental, better to tell a good story that makes some good points on the way, I think, than to force it.

American Saturday Night

The most recent episode of Last Week Tonight included an extended segment about naturalization ceremonies, focusing specifically on their use of Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.” Oliver made the argument that Greenwood’s tacky ballad has no place in a naturalization ceremony, especially given Greenwood’s political beliefs. I don’t disagree, and I happen to know the perfect replacement.

In 2009, Brad Paisley released the album American Saturday Night, possibly the single greatest album in all of contemporary pop country. The title track, a diamond-cut ode to multiculturalism, is exactly the sort of thing we should be blasting at naturalization ceremonies. Though wrapped up in all the aural trappings of a “girls, beer, and trucks” song, “American Saturday Night” has a lot more on its mind:

She's got Brazilian leather boots on the pedal of her German car,

Listenin' to The Beatles singin' "Back in the USSR.”

Yes, she's going 'round the world tonight, but she ain't leavin' here.

She's just going to meet her boyfriend down at the street fair.

And it's a French kiss, Italian ice,

Spanish moss in the moonlight.

Just another American Saturday night.

The album as a whole was unobtrusively progressive, and that was cool. This was an artist at the absolute peak of his creative and commercial powers—from 2005 to 2010, Paisley had ten straight number-one hits—pushing the boundaries of what mainstream country audiences were willing to hear. “American Saturday Night” wasn’t all that long after The (Dixie) Chicks were immolated for telling a crowd in England that they didn’t like George W. Bush. For a major recording artist who existed firmly within the same milieu as Toby Keith, Paisley’s stance was quietly brave.

I’ve written about Paisley before, albeit in a different life and on a different blog. His 2012 album Wheelhouse included two of his biggest swings, “Southern Comfort Zone” and “Accidental Racist,” but neither clicked with audiences. To be fair to audiences, the latter song is truly awful, though the intention remains exceptional. Since then, he has retreated into girls, beer, and trucks, losing the freshness that made him stand out. Meanwhile, the country audience has moved on. Paisley no longer charts the way he used to. An Imperial phase can only last for so long.

American Saturday Night will always be there, though. Looking back at it in this moment, with the election a week away, both album and song feel like artifacts from a lost world. For an instant, Paisley advocated for a turn a lot of the audience didn’t take. It’s not that simple, of course. Nothing is. But if I had to pick one message for newly inducted American citizens to hear, to say nothing of the rest of us, you could do much worse than:

Everywhere has something they're known for,

Although usually it washes up on our shores.

When my great-great-great-granddaddy stepped off of that ship,

I bet he never ever dreamed we'd have all this.

Berlin im Licht

Komm, mach mal Licht,

Damit man sehn kann, ob was da ist,

Komm, mach mal licht,

Und rede nun mal nicht.

Komm, mach mal Licht,

Dann wollen wir doch auch mal sehen,

ob da ‘ne Sache ist: Berlin im Licht.

- “Berlin im Licht,” by Bertolt Brecht

Turn on the light,

So we can fin’ly see what’s inside.

Turn on the light,

And keep those lips shut tight.

Turn on the light,

Because we all just want to take in,

Whatever’s really there: Berlin in Light.

It’s rough, but you can only ask so much of me on a rainy Tuesday morning at the end of a week spent walking around Berlin. My shoes, my feet, my right hip, and my brain are all tired.

The original German lyrics come from “Berlin im Licht,” Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s 1928 novelty song inspired by a festival of the same name, which aimed to show off what electric lighting was capable of. The goal, the marketing said, was to turn nighttime in Berlin into day. It’s a funny thing to consider, given that I can’t think of another Western city more associated with nighttime in the cultural imagination than Berlin. Paris is gorgeous at night, and New York is famous for refusing to go the fuck to bed, but when I think of Berlin, I think of nightclubs. I think of bars, and drugs, and fetish. That can’t be wildly off. I’m not drawing from anything approaching personal experience (I have been in bed no later than 11:00 pm most nights of this trip, thank you). That association has to be coming from somewhere. It has certainly been supported by the hundreds of posters for an upcoming leather party that I’ve been seeing throughout the city.

“Berlin im Licht” is a novelty, but it takes on new meaning when considered within the context of German history following its publication. What was a jaunty tune about a light fair carries with it the implication that there’s more out there in the darkness. It’s not much of a stretch to assume some of that “more” could be sinister. Hitler was already a national figure by 1928, after all. There was a lot hanging out in the darker corners of Berlin in those days. Turns out the light didn’t help much.

The city as it stands today is full of museums and memorials dedicated to remembering, to keeping those lights on. The Jewish Museum, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, the series of parks commemorating the Wall, and the Soviet War Memorial exist to keep fresh in the mind all the ways in which things can go horrifically wrong. At times, I can hear Germany as a country frantically turning through her notes and asking if it would possible to do any more extra credit. Berlin is the most guilt-ridden city I’ve ever been to, which is not to say that guilt is undeserved, and not to say other cities shouldn’t be guilt-riddener than they currently are.

To what end all that guilt, though, I’m not sure. The synagogues are under 24 hour police protection and the AfD (Germany’s leading far-right party) keeps winning more seats in parliament. There was a teacher with a group of young students at the Soviet War Memorial. I wanted to ask him how he teaches World War II to his students. How do you thread that needle, making sure you relate the stakes of something without burdening students with a sense of guilt that could ultimately prove counter-productive? What’s the emotional experience like, going through that material? As an American, I should be in the best position in the world to relate, but we don’t teach slavery as something that Could Come Back, do we? That’s something that’s over now, we’re pretty sure, thank you.

The most effective exhibit I’ve attended in my week here was Otto Wendt’s Workshop for the Blind, a modest free museum tucked away in a courtyard just past the entrance to die Hackeschen Höfe. It commemorates the efforts of Otto Wendt and a large number of his collaborators (non-derogatory) to save the lives of as many Jews as possible, hiring them to work in his brush factory.  There are many such stories from that time, of ordinary people doing extraordinary and selfless things in the name of righteousness. It is always, that museum drove home, a choice.

That is what gives the best parts of historical Berlin their particular flavor: You see the best and the worst in people all at once. These memorials and parks and museums, when they’re on their game, make it clear that there is always another choice, and that it is right to make that choice. There were several biographies in the Workshop for the Blind that ended by noting those individuals never received acknowledgement for their actions during their lives. How entirely beside the point.

On Sunday, I went to Mauerpark. Deep in former East Berlin, Mauerpark is a wonder. Every 150 feet, you encounter a new musical act, all of them earnestly plying their trade. At the back, on a cobblestone platform surrounded by a half-circle of large stone stadium seats, a prickly Irishman runs karaoke every Sunday.

When I got there, I was thrilled to see the seats completely filled. Hundreds of Berliners had gathered to sit, to listen, to sing. What struck me most about it, coming from karaoke in the U.S., was the complete lack of irony. There was no self-consciousness permitted. Nobody seemed aware of or concerned about the quality of their singing. The audience couldn’t give two shits about anything other than the enthusiasm with which the performers took to their tasks. People cheered consistently and joined in singing when performers grew nervous. During my time on stage, I received reassuring eye contact from a number of people. Berlin, as a city, separate from its history, is fantastically alive.

I do wonder to what extent the implied menace of “Berlin im Licht” was intended. It was written by Bertolt Brecht, after all, so anything is possible. It could very well have been just what it says on the tin, a fun and breezy tune meant to entertain on its way in one ear and out the other, but it’s also entirely possible that Brecht was being, well, Brecht. To me, the German lyrics don’t carry much of a sense of foreboding. They were written in 1928, though, and I’m translating them in 2024. It’s hard not to let the intervening century creep in.