View from my window overlooking inner courtyard parking garage
The view framed by the window in my room at the Whyndam Garden Berlin-Mitte Hotel was of an industrial style back courtyard with a brick outbuilding used as a car park for hotel guests. The shared hotel room I looked out from, on Osloer Straße in Berlin-Gesundbrunnen, was where I spent six weeks in the summer of 2022. Through an unconventional arrangement with the hotel’s owner, 7 rooms were booked to accommodate my Field School cohort of 12 . My roommate and I rearranged the furniture so that both our beds would get a breeze next to the generously sized windows, then settled in with our jet-lag and two döner from the nearest kebab stand. Two nights later on a whim, several classmates and I got off the U8 at Alexanderplatz to explore. We ate overpriced Vietnamese food, and took pictures of the TV tower against a sunset that spilled fuchsia across the dusk.
The next morning, three days after arriving in Berlin, I felt like my throat was lined with peach fuzz. I tested positive for COVID-19, the strain of Coronavirus currently causing a global pandemic. In Berlin at the time, a positive test meant required isolation for 5 days. No one else got the virus, but my roommate changed rooms and my experience of Berlin shrank to the view of the parking garage. This view did little to hold my attention while waves of fever broke over me, but across Berlin directly south from my COVID isolation room was where Kirsty Bell had been captivated by her view over the Landwehr Canal.
The first chapter of The Undercurrents is ironically titled “Ditch.” In it, Bell lovingly described the Landwehr Canal from the room where she wrote. “I can see over a dozen different species of trees,” she writes, “each one a different shape, a different leaf, a different shade of green that turns a different gold or red once summer slowly fades.” She concluded the chapter with, “I turned the table away from the window to face the bookshelves instead. The view was far too distracting. But by then it was too late; the view had become my subject.” Unlike Bell, for me it was only happenstance and boredom that provoked me to spend any time looking out of my window. While in COVID isolation, I looked out of that window from many different angles. I stared out of it when looking at my laptop screen aggravated my headache, and leaned out to take in as much fresh air as my sluggish lungs could take in. Even though the neighbourhood activity was just beyond the walls of the courtyard, I felt kilometres away from daily urban life.
Alone in my room, I prepared for the coming week when I could leave my room to pass time. I found the locations of all the planned Field School Outings. All of them were at least half an hour away by train. I concluded that nothing was happening in Gesundbrunnen, and by the end of 5 days I was sure that I had taken in all that the view from my window had to offer.
Photos taken during COVID isolation
Released from my self-isolation by a negative COVID test result, I turned to The Undercurrents for inspiration. “I decide to walk to canal’s banks.” She writes, “It helps to have a clearly formed task, with well-defined start and endpoints.” I was searching for a direction for my studies of Berlin, and Bell’s description of her route was temptingly specific. I rode the train for forty minutes to the banks of the Landwehr Canal to retrace Bell’s steps, in the hopes that I would be captivated as Bell was with this slice of Berlin. “Bell’s descriptions of the Canal are true to life” I wrote in my notes. I take in the Tempelhofer Ufer as it changes from a closely treed promenade high above the canal water to a footpath along wide green slopes near the Urban Hospital, just as Bell had described. The walk yielded only disappointment for Bell. She writes, “these excursions are an attempt to bear witness, to plot a walked experience onto my poring over printed maps….But the experience turns out to be strangely flat.” Bell searched for a narrative revelation and came up empty. I was also disappointed by my walk along the canal. I longed to experience being entrenched in Berlin as a true resident, but as I photographed the swans on the waterway near a group of teenagers who sat next to their discarded bikes, I felt more foreign than ever. I realized that despite my certainty that my view of a parking garage was not the right subject for a captivating experience of Berlin, I could not simply discard it and plunge into the view from Kirsty Bell’s stately apartment on the outer edge of Kreuzberg. To truly gain the sense of placement that I sought, I was going to have to work from my own unique vantage point. I rode the train back to my house to look out my window with new intention.