I first realize what freedom means when I rent a bicycle and turn onto the runway of Berlin’s former airport. From a bird’s-eye view, the airfield resembles the open palm of a god, which promises to lift you into the air the moment you step onto it. The runway stretches across this palm like a fate line. I speed up, take my feet off the pedals, spread my arms like airplane wings, and feel the wind licking my face like an excited dog. The pavement glistens under the midday sun, and the markings flicker beneath the wheels reminding me of the landing gear that once touched down.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This freedom is not granted, it was fought for. Not me, I’m just reaping the benefits.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The first passenger plane departed from Tempelhof Airport in 1923, and the last one on October 31, 2008. 22:17, Cirrus Airlines flight from Berlin to Mannheim. At midnight, the lights on the runway turned off. As I watch the archival footage of Tempelhof’s final day over and over again, the empty board made my eyes water. However, I suppose it’s partly due to the manipulative Time To Say Goodbye soundtrack. To be honest, having an airport in the city center is a dubious pleasure. The nearest neighborhood Neuk\u00f6lln with its grand stucco and roofs, as if carved with scissors, after the Second World War turned into a German Harlem: only immigrants and poor students agreed to live under the airplane bellies. During the blockade of West Berlin, when the Soviet invaders cut off all communication routes to the western sector to force the inhabitants to surrender, airplanes took off and landed here every ninety seconds\u2014the Tempelhof \u201cair bridge\u201d remained the only way for the Allies to deliver food to the city. American pilots came up with the idea of dropping candy to children in Berlin using parachutes made of handkerchiefs. The first pilot of the Raisin Bomber was Gail Halvorsen, known as Uncle Wiggly Wings by the children. He wiggled his wings on approach, allowing them to distinguish his plane from the others. The 1948 blockade was remembered sixty years later at a gala held to celebrate the closing of the airport. Newspapers describe the buffet on luggage tapes and report on the menu, including salmon in oranges, roasted venison, and Parisian chocolate tarte. I want to believe that among the guests are the same grown-up Neuk\u00f6lln children who once awaited American bubblegum and Hershey’s bars like manna from heaven, and who now discuss the ingredients for the Calvados sauce served with the venison. But the cold German press does not mythologize reality, unlike me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the midnight champagne-flavored speech of the airport representative there is a word that first comes to mind when I think of Tempelhof: \u201cFor the whole world, it has become a symbol of Berliners’ aspirations for freedom.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The tails of kites are fluttering on the horizon, gracefully dancing like predatory birds over their prey. Along the fate line, I pass by two girls on roller skates squealing with excitement. A jogger in an acid-green T-shirt smiles reflexively as our eyes casually meet. In the distance, a guy on a skateboard lets the wind pick up his surf sail and surrenders himself to the flow of air. The colors of the sail remind me of the flag of my native country, and I remember: \u201cOh Russia, where are you rushing?\u201d The guy on the skateboard is almost lifted off the ground. Gravity is weaker here. Scientists just haven’t figured it out yet. After its closure, there were plans to develop the tidbit of the 386-hectare with elite housing. The title of the project unironically included the word Freiheit<\/em>, \u201cfreedom,\u201d but it was precisely the opportunity to experience it that they wanted to take away. Berliners went on a mass protest. Almost six hundred demonstrators faced two thousand police officers. Water cannons, tear gas, arrests. Mass protests are all alike as happy families. After a failed attempt to tear down the fence around the airport, paper airplanes flew over the barbed wire. In my imagination, Demokratie<\/em> is written on their wings. Perhaps, if someone had a pen, they might have left the traditional ACAB. Not all mass protests are alike\u2014this one made the authorities change their minds. Tempelhof should belong to everyone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Everyone. And to me, too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Berlin was born in a struggle\u2014the citizens saved part of the Wall with the kiss of \u201cdiese t\u00f6dliche Liebe\u201d from demolition and prevented a new church from being built on the site of a bomb-damaged one so that its ruins would be a reminder of the unacceptability of war. And now the former airfield is an open park with grilling areas, miniature golf, and dog walking areas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I call Tempelhof my favorite place in Berlin, maybe even on Earth. I’m lucky: in 2023, I’m settling into a lacey, lime-shaded \u201cHarlem\u201d that, in the absence of noise pollution and exhaust, is transforming from a godforsaken hole into a hipster’s paradise. But its reputation is still questionable. \u201cNeuk\u00f6lln?\u201d, ask my acquaintances incredulously, who live in well-established Charlottenburg and probably drink royal china coffee in the morning. I know what’s on their minds: rumors of shootings in kebab shops, police operations that statistically take place here every seven minutes, the overpopulation of immigrants from Turkey and the Balkans. But we are immigrants just like them, I think, just like them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It’s a ten-minute walk from my house to the former airport. Hof<\/em> means \u201ccourtyard\u201d in German, and Tempel<\/em> refers to \u201csanctuary.\u201d Tempelhof is my temple, where I go on Sundays to hear the liturgy of the wind. But no temple leaves a parishioner without an affectionate reminder of suffering, and the Tempelhof that I’ve christened my temple is no exception. In Christian tradition, as well as in modern Russian media, the concept of obscurantism is associated with the West. Therefore, large-scale murals on the western temple walls depict vivid details of hell, where tongues of flame lick human figures like lollipops. Sooner or later you’ll stumble upon them with your gaze. In my case, later, when I had already named Tempelhof my favorite place on Earth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As I turn from the fate line to the heart line, leading to the curved, semicircular terminal constructed during the National Socialist era with monumental and impressive architecture, the first thing I notice is the linens drying on the ropes. A sign of life, like water molecules on Mars, where there shouldn’t be any.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In that city plan with the word \u201cFreiheit\u201d in the title, five thousand buildings were to be constructed in Tempelhof. Instead, there are now four hundred containers. An eyesore on the green eye of the airfield. Barracks. Shacks. Temporary homes, whatever you want to call them. White boxes that resemble freezers, and I can’t help but imagine the interior covered in ice, impervious to the summer heat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n White hell is an unfair hell where the innocent are sent for the crimes of sinners.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the German press, there is a debate about the correct word to call refugees: the politically correct term Gefl\u00fcchtete<\/em> has not yet taken hold in the official language, while the former Fl\u00fcchtling<\/em> has negative connotations because of the ending -ling<\/em>, similar to Sch\u00e4dling<\/em> \u2014\u201cpest\u201d or Schreiberling\u2014\u201cscribbler.\u201d The humiliating words are not the first words you learn in a new language, although \u201cscribbler\u201d is something I should memorize as a writer just in case. So far, I’ve only learned positive ones with the same ending, such as Liebling<\/em>, \u201cfavorite.\u201d Lieblingsort<\/em>\u2014\u201cfavorite place.\u201d Lieblingsort<\/em>\u2014Tempelhof.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Tempelhof’s vocabulary is full of verbs of motion, but the refugee camp is motionless. The bed sheet is blown by the wind like a sail, as if it wants to match the one running, soaring, rushing on the other side of the fence, but of course, it remains in place. A woman with white pigtails, as if molded from plaster, sits on the step in front of the entrance to the container and smokes, putting her crutches on the ground. A white cat sleeps at her feet. In Russian the word \u0431\u0435\u0436\u0435\u043d\u0446\u044b<\/em>, \u201crefugee,\u201d has the root \u0431\u0435\u0433<\/em>, \u201crun,\u201d but now they are the opposite of their definition. A radar tower rises above the camp, also white and immovable. It looks like a dome without a cross.<\/p>\n\n\n\n My temple is their white hell. In Tempelhof, I realize for the first time what unfreedom is, and the palm of a god’s hand clenches into a fist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I pedal fast, as if instead of spokes on bicycle wheels, the dial hands spin, and I can fast-forward time to the day when the camp is empty, rusty, and unnecessary. Gravity is weaker in Tempelhof, as we’ve found out, but time seems to play tricks, too, just like in Alice in Wonderland\u2014the faster you run, the longer you stay in place. That’s why I can see the details that burst through the white space in flashes of color: mottled clothespins, baby carriages in delicate shades, yellow and blue flags on the windows, geraniums in pots.<\/p>\n\n\n\n No one in a temporary house is going to grow houseplants, I think. No one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The daily routine is spreading in the waiting room like mold.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A birdhouse is nailed to the wall of one of the containers, on which a child’s hand has drawn a house. A house on a house on a house. I try to understand what it’s like to live in an airport from which you can’t fly away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 2022, according to official statistics, more than seventy thousand Ukrainian refugees were registered in Berlin. There are about four hundred people in the Tempelhof camp. I learn about their lives from Euronews reports, hesitant to ask directly, even though we share a common language. But there is no mention in the press of when they will have a permanent home instead of a temporary one. I would like to make a paper airplane, write one word on its wings, and fly it over the fence to the other side, but I would be justly called a Schreiberling. This city knows about walls better than any other.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Tempel, \u201ctemple,\u201d comes from the Latin templum<\/em>, which means a limited and separate place. In ancient Roma, an augur<\/em>, an interpreter of the gods’ will, raised a staff carved from wood into the air and delineated a sacred space for auspicia<\/em>, the divination by the flight of birds. I turn from the heart line to a thin, nameless line that winds through the sun-whitened grass. The wheels rustle, scaring away grasshoppers. I drop my bike to the ground and face north, as the rules of auspicia<\/em> dictate. Birds flying from east to west were believed to be good omens, while birds from the west brought not bad news.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Birds can predict the outcome of a war.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Like a Roman augur, I gaze into the horizon. Invisible skylarks chirp in the field, seeking shelter from the heat within the weeds. Their voices are like the sound of an ancient radio receiver when you try to catch the proper frequency, and it seems to me that the ghosts of the Tempelhof dispatchers are transmitting through them a message that cannot be decoded. I stand for a long time, listening to the liturgy of the wind, but no birds fly over me. Only an airplane pierces the blue sky like a needle, leaving behind a thread of condensation trail. The airplane is coming from the east.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I first realize what freedom means when I rent a bicycle and turn onto the runway of Berlin’s former airport. From a bird’s-eye view, the airfield resembles the open palm of a god, which promises to lift you into the air the moment you step onto it. The runway stretches across this palm like a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":21361,"template":"","categories":[57,12],"class_list":["post-21418","stsp_text","type-stsp_text","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-issue-27","category-non-fiction"],"yoast_head":"\n