Why are we drawn to certain cities? Perhaps because of a story read in childhood. Or a chance teenage meeting. Or maybe simply because the place touches us, embodying in its towers, tribes and history an aspect of our understanding of what it means to be human. Paris is about romantic love. Lourdes equates with devotion. New York means materialism. London is forever trendy.

Berlin is all about volatility. Its identity is based not on stability but on change. No other city has repeatedly been so powerful, and fallen so low. No other city has inspired so many artists and witnessed so many murders. It’s a capital city made up of villages. An island long adrift on a foreign sea. A city where history broods. Its legends, both real and imagined, stalk the streets: Lenin drinks at the same café as Bowie’s heroes, Wim Wender’s trench-coated angels wing above torch-lit Nazi processions, Speer conjures myths from the same canvas as Georg Grosz, Dietrich shops alongside Sally Bowles at Ka De We, le Carré’s George Smiley watches the packed trains leave for Auschwitz.

I’ve been coming to Berlin for thirty years, falling in and out of love with the brash, volatile city, moved again and again by its Walls and open doors. I first came here as a young assistant director on a David Bowie movie. I was fresh out of film school and Bowie, wanting to initiate me in the ways of the city, invited me and others to his favourite transvestite club, the Lützower Lampe. The club’s star, a sixty-year-old drag queen named Viola, sat on my knee and crooned German love songs in my ear. Over the next months we worked with Marlene Dietrich and, at the end of the shoot and Bowie’s Berlin sojourn, in a secluded restaurant in the Grunewald, he and I sang a duet (or, at least, two lines from ‘Good Golly Miss Molly’). Berlin was the place where I decided to become a writer, where I grew up. Thirty years later I’ve made it my home again, like so many outsiders.

I'm here to research and write my new book, and Goethe Institut has invited me to record the experience in a weekly Berlin blog. My journey into the city is proving to be unexpected, exciting, moving, frustrating and often hilarious. Come discover with me the truth about Ostalgia, bureaurcay, memorialisation and those damn Christmas markets, as well as the particular German passion for nudism, sex and stealing shopping trolleys.

Click here to join me in Berlin.



By the way, those of you who want to get under the skin of the city may also enjoy reading CityLit Berlin, a fine, new collection of extracts from over sixty writers, living and dead. I've written the Introduction to the book (note: I'm one of the living contributors).