Cinnamon buns, doughnuts and plenty of coffee.
There is a very vibrant speciality coffee scene in Berlin with plenty of excellent cafes offering an interesting variety of coffees and pour overs. A city break of just a couple of days is nowhere near enough to even start to scratch the surface of the city. Coupled to that, we arrived during the Berlin coffee festival so many cafes were participating in public cupping and tasting events. So much to explore. But if you are rushing around, can you really stop and notice things?
How can you experience a place when you travel? Carl Jung pondered this very point when thinking about Rome, he wrote:
“I have travelled a great deal in my life, and I should very much have liked to go to Rome, but I felt that I was not really up to the impression the city would have made upon me…. I always wonder about people who go to Rome as they might go, for example, to Paris or to London. Certainly Rome as well as these other cities can be enjoyed aesthetically but if you are affected to the depths of your being at every step by the spirit that broods there, if a remnant of a wall here and a column there gaze upon you with a face instantly recognised, then it becomes another matter entirely.”*
We may not all have the sensitivity of Jung towards visiting a place but it can nonetheless be illuminating to reflect on the sentiment. This is particularly true of a city like Berlin where the remnants of walls are an ever present reminder of the dangers of ideologies, as well as the ease with which they can seize us.
How do you visit a cafe so that you can appreciate the space beyond the aesthetic? We visited several cafes including Brammibal’s Donuts, Common Ground, Oslo Kaffeebar, the Refinery and Roststatte. We also attempted a visit to The Barn (Mitte) but it was sadly too crowded on our visit. Each cafe revealed something unique and each was memorable for its own reasons. The lovely pour-over at Roststatte, the long black with character at the Refinery, the vegan doughnuts during a heavy rain shower at Brammibals. And yet we know how many cafes we missed (as you can see in this guide here or here).
And yet, what stood out as something to stop you in your tracks? What can you sit and dwell with as you savour your coffee? In hindsight, it is interesting that the connections at Oslo Kaffeebar were both very much connected with nature. It was not the wood lining of the cafe and the plentiful wooden furniture around the cafe but the spiders web style tiles on the table and something we saw at the window.
The tiles on the table at the Oslo Kaffeebar were a regular array of spider’s webs. Each identifiable immediately as a web and striking for its regularity. The surprising uses of spider’s silk have featured on Bean Thinking before in a cafe that sadly no longer exists, but it was the regularity of the webs that prompted thoughts about the effect of different drugs, sadly including caffeine, on the behaviour of spiders. But it was a visitor to the outside of the cafe that struck us. A bird, silhouetted against the light, was perched on the (vertical) brick wall outside the cafe. What was it doing there? After it flew off, it was back, again in the same awkward perch but then it darted into the corner that the window made with the brick wall exterior to the cafe, could there be a nest there? The decline of bird species in our world as industrial scale farming has replaced hedgerows with monotonous fields of crops is well documented. But there is more to the bird-human interaction than that. Some bird species have adapted to the way we have traditionally built our houses, the problem being that modern building methods and renovations can threaten their ability to share our space. Other bird species have evolved to adapt to the way humans want to interact with birds with Great Tits for example apparently evolving longer beaks to make it easier for them to access the food put in bird feeders. What do these considerations reveal about evolution and our place in the world?
On the other side of the Tiergarten, the pink tiling of Brammibal’s Donuts contrasted with the teal tiling that had been ubiquitous on the U-bahn line 5. The teal tiling somehow highlighted how even strictly utilitarian architecture nonetheless evokes an emotional response. In addition to considering how this challenges our understanding of architecture as representative purely of form, it can prompt a question: is a utilitarian philosophy consistent with an environment that allows science, (and the pursuit of knowledge for curiosity’s sake) to flourish**? (a question with repercussions for our own, consumerist and atheistic society). To what extent is our scientific development dependent on the prevalent attitudes of our culture? To be somewhat hyperbolic about it, is it possible to continue to do science, as we have traditionally understood it, in a consumerist society that demands constantly new entertainment (itself a form of consumerism)? Do we not replace ‘science’ with ‘technology’ and replace those questions that ask about our place in a world of reality and truth with questions that ask how we can better manipulate our world (where truth and reality as such no longer matter)? And what, in turn, does that do to our understanding of humanity’s place in the universe and so back to our cultural outlook?
We are then left with a couple of questions for ourselves. When travelling, can we allow the space to affect us with, as Jung says, “the spirit that broods there”, or do we take ourselves, imposing our own lens on another space? Can we open ourselves to encounter and is it not urgent, lest walls arise in our minds as well as our countries? I do not have any answers to such questions, but the cafes of Berlin, of London, and of many other places around the world would be a great place to ponder them.
*C.G. Jung “Memories, Dreams, Reflections” Fontana Press, 1961 and reprint editions.
**The question really is, if we consider that the best thing for society is to maximise the happiness of the maximum number, this could tend to promote the sort of science that produces results, technology or devices quickly. This short-term investment in science is contrary to the ideal of funding science for the sake of knowledge and arguably against the idea of being able to investigate the world as it is as opposed to merely developing the technologies that we can use. Is this true? Does it matter?