|
|
|
|
|
|
A Refuge from the Heat
|
|
|
|
|
This weekend, Berlin braces for the climax of a record-breaking heatwave. While many are planning to escape to a lake, or to pass the hours at one of the pools, I will be going to the library.
|
The Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, or Stabi for short, plays an outsized role in the lives of many Berliners, and the city’s cultural ecosystem more broadly. It is where hundreds, probably thousands, of books have been written, and even more dissertations. The Stabi is the unofficial headquarters of the Diasporist, where many conversations that helped create the magazine took place, and where the vast majority of pieces you’ve read have been edited. For many, it is an office, social hub, and, for better or for worse, dating pool. On days like these, it is also a refuge: the Stabi is one of the mercifully few air-conditioned spaces that do not require the purchase of anything.
|
And so it was a particular joy when Mitch Speed approached us with an idea for a piece on the library and its cultural and socioeconomic significance to Berlin, at a time when rental prices are at an all-time high and the city’s cultural institutions are facing steep cuts. The piece took on a new edge earlier this year, when it was announced the Stabi would close for an 11-year renovation in 2030.
|
In “The Renoviction of the Intellect,” Speed offers a powerful love letter to the Stabi, its architecture, and its inhabitants, accompanied by photos from Bahar Kaygusuz. “I’d risk a controversial thesis,” he writes. “Across its reading rooms and massive lobby, and its corresponding — though unequally distributed — populations of academics, students, unhoused people, librarians, physical laborers, security staff, and gig workers — the Stabi houses a more diverse cross section of life than any other building in Berlin, save hospitals.”
|
I met Mitch Speed through the library, because of our attachment to the library. Thankfully, we have a few more years before the closure becomes a reality. But in the meantime, I’ll be here, along with my fellow Stabi patriots.
|
If you enjoy this piece, please consider making a gift to the Diasporist. Essays like these are the kind of original storytelling your contribution helps bring to life. Plus, in three years, we’re getting evicted from our office…
|
|
- Julia Bosson, Editor-in-Chief
|
|
|
|
|
|
Mitch Speed
|
|
|
|
|
|
On my last visit to the Stabi — pet name for the western branch of Berlin’s state library — I saw an elderly woman wearing a white mink coat and hat. It was like a visitation from another time. The library’s reading rooms, which seem like sets in a work of open theatre, do things like this. One of my favorite characters dresses in smoky black. For months he sat there, scrawling indecipherable wave-form stenography. He’s been gone for a while now.
|
The building, as they say, has character. Its shabby-chic modernism is oddly ravishing. Concrete does things it shouldn’t be able to. One spiral staircase descends like a giant orange peel, through circular cut-outs in overlapping mezzanines; rippling lines evidence the wooden-slat form which — before computerized modeling programs — allowed this feat. Details proliferate. Sticking with fruit, how about the banister knobs on the wide entranceway staircase? They look like silver heirloom tomatoes.
|
Other details are worrying. Drip stains trace the building’s carpet, which was once pistachio green. Sometimes, a powerful fragrance wafts from the toilets. The smell leaves for a while. Then it’s back!
|
Yellow tape often bars the washrooms.
|
Yellow tape often bars the elevators.
|
Yellow tape — combined with thick plastic sheeting — often covers the men’s urinals.
|
Turning on certain bathroom faucets causes others to spew, like a scene from Disney’s Fantasia. Calcium stalactites hang from sink pipes. Fortunately, discourse holds strong. In the bathroom stalls, dialecticians explicate the Middle East: FUCK ISRAEL; FUCK I̵S̵R̵A̵E̵L̵ HAMAS.
|
I’ve neither fucked, nor been fucked by anyone, in the Stabi. But I once met someone who knew someone who had. Rumors of sex in the stacks circulate. And fair enough; so much space, silence, ethereal light, and juicy ornamentation have a way of winding people up. One well-traveled walkway, bisecting the enormous main reading room, forms an unofficial catwalk, for peacocking PhDs, novelists, and students. Clearly, the bathrooms are no place for trysting. Would-be lovers would be better off visiting one of the abandoned control stations. With their disused pneumatic postal tubes, and banks of colorful lights, they look like spaceship consoles in old movies.
|
Although I don’t have the data in front of me just now, I’d risk a controversial thesis: across its reading rooms and massive lobby, and its corresponding — though unequally distributed — populations of academics, students, unhoused people, librarians, physical laborers, security staff, and gig workers — the Stabi houses a more diverse cross section of life than any other building in Berlin, save hospitals. For all their gorgeous bacchanalia, Berlin’s clubs are restricted by cover charges, unspoken codes, and formidable coolness. Squats are the city’s most radical spaces. But that radicalism, though admirable, disqualifies them from providing a practicable model of pluralistic coexistence.
|
|
And so the Stabi emerges as an unlikely candidate for the city’s most socially heterogeneous place. For years, there hasn’t even been a fee. Once, you had to scan your library card at these electronic turnstile devices. Then those devices stopped working. Now they’re also covered with tape.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Donate to support our work.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Follow us on social media to stay on top
of what we’re planning.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
