Berlin's administrative processes have always been much the same as other German cities — which is to say, they require a lot of paperwork.
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Berlin's administrative processes have always been much the same as other German cities — which is to say, they require a lot of paperwork. A simple change of residential address can involve several hours of form-filling and queuing, beginning at the local bürgeramt (or city recorder), where every resident of the city, regardless of nationality, is expected to file their current address.
Once, I had to provide an updated proof-of-residence document, an 'anmeldebestätigung', to my local 'finanzamt' or tax office.
I arrived at the office, on the ground floor of a drab, ‘60s Soviet-style block on the east side of the city, at eight a.m. but it was nearly ten before my number was called. I presented my completed form to a stone-faced woman behind a desk in a cramped, windowless office. Without a word, she went through it, line by line, ticking my responses like a grumpy schoolmarm. When she came to the section about my occupation, she paused.
“You have not answered this,” she said, in English. Clipped consonants made it sound like a reprimand.
“Um, no. I didn’t know what to say.”
“Who is your employer?”
“I don’t have one.”
“You are unemployed?”
“No.”
“So you are self-employed.”
“Not really.”
“I see,” she said. But she didn’t. There was an uncomfortable pause. “I should have an answer here, please.” She handed my paperwork back to me and nodded towards the door.
Later that day, I was having coffee with a friend of mine, an American woman who had worked as an art director and events promoter in the city for nearly a decade.
“Lebenskünstler,” she said.
“What?”
“That’s what you should have put down: lebenskünstler. Look it up. It means, literally, ‘life artist’.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“It’s an acceptable occupation in Berlin. Even for legal purposes.”
The concept of a lebenskünstler does not translate quite as simply as the word itself. Neither a dilettante nor a flâneur, that over-hyped archetype of 19th century Parisian literature, the lebenskünstler is someone who has turned living itself into a decadent, artfully stimulating and careless performance – non-art-as-art, a sly hustle, somehow subversively inert. They’re rarely inclined to make or do much; if anything, they prefer to insulate themselves from the stressful Sturm und Drang of actual creation.
No-one I’ve met in Berlin can tell me with any precision, quite where the word came from. There’s the slight whiff of the streetwise about it, which suggests it might have first turned up in the Communist east of the city. After the Wall went up, the arts on the wrong side of the River Spree went underground, and hip, chaos-compliant hustlers, who saw themselves as something akin to performance artists, worked the back-channels at a few border posts to bring in what they could of western jazz and rock ’n’ roll, comic books, and poster art. But the first lebenskünstler, in attitude if not name, were around in the Weimar years. This brief, doomed goldenes Zeitalter between 1918 and 1933 was one of the most fertile, intellectually and socially, in northern European history. Radical new ideas in the arts, architecture, industrial and graphic design, science, and philosophy were conceived and nurtured not just in Berlin but other German cities, notably Frankfurt, as well as Vienna, in Austria. But Berlin was the heart of it.
The lebenskünstler were the first adopters of a polymathic Weimar culture reconfigured as a lifestyle. They were participant rather than productive – this is elemental now to the definition of a lebenskünstler, but inspired then by the unconventional educational experiments of the day. More likely, they emerged, bleary-eyed and debauched, from the ooze of Berlin’s transgressive cabarets (pansexual promiscuity and recreational drugs were no less rife in Berlin then than they are today). Wherever they came from, they were eager receptors of a relentless stream of ideas, adapting them to already colourful, personal intellectual and creative spectra, then transmitting them to disparate, literally subterranean, cultural fringes.
Today, there is nowhere in the world with quite the same spill of interdisciplinary intellect, let alone the same depth, intensity or originality, as Berlin in those heady, if jittery, pre-World War II years, even if it was eventually staunched, first by the rise of Nazism, then by academia. Now, it has all but dried up.
Those who don’t get neue-Berlin’s gestalt might dismiss the 21st century lebenskünstler as con-artists, role-players, or poseurs. But this ignores their enduring presence and influence — as club promoters, social provocateurs, pop-up entrepreneurs, rogue programmers, artful muses, cultural ‘influencers’, salonistes, and street hustlers. Their essential equanimity copes with a post-Wall pace of development that is so fast, everything feels aleatory and impermanent.
Then again, I like to think that all of us who have lived there are, to some extent, lebenkünstler.
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G gustavinobevilacqua@mastodon.cisti.org shared this topic
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Thanks,now I'll define myself a lebenkünstler too.
