Dana Vowinckel writes about New Year’s Eve in Berlin

Dear Zelda,

I’m writing to you between feverish dreams, they banged, it’s January 1st, banged so loud that Ruben and I ran to the window, and I wished I’d only be dreaming, like the guys in front of the building who were going crazy with testosterone Firecracker guns fired at homeless people, but it was real, kept banging, and this morning the bus stop was in shards of glass on the sidewalk.

Then I woke up and my New Year’s gift was the first sleep paralysis of my life, although when it happened I didn’t know the word sleep paralysis, I just lay there conscious and couldn’t control my body, couldn’t open my eyes, couldn’t call Reuben. I thought back to how my grandma used to warn me not to climb into the freezer to play hide and seek because you can’t open it from the inside and you’ll choke to death in minutes. My body was the freezer. At some point I was able to fight my way up, open my eyes, notice how feverish I am and that it’s finally quiet outside. To fall asleep again, I followed the stupid tip of my first therapist and imagined a beach, more specifically: Frishman Beach, sunbeams that caress your skin, Tel Aviv that you curse about but also seem to love, otherwise you wouldn’t be desperately looking for the next cockroach room. Do you actually have one now?

I had to think about cities, about Berlin, the city where I’m lying in a district, an apartment, a bed, a city in a democracy where you’re not allowed to have sex in public, but you can light firecrackers until birds fall dead from the sky until someone weeps and calls the police because of the shooting at defenseless people, aiming at windows, banging on buses, and there are cities with beaches where it’s forbidden. Is Tel Aviv just a better city, fuck central heating?

Then I remembered Katharina Hacker’s book, published in 1997, called “Tel Aviv. A City Tale» and is a delicious, stubborn tale about the concept of Tel Aviv and the inhabitants of that concept. Katharina Hacker writes: “The utopian layers are peeling off, just as the sea eats into the outer layers of the house walls at every moment, eating away at the house before you know it.”

I like the utopian layers that were already being eaten away by the salty air thirty years ago, that of the houses and that of the political situation, the constant, desperate renewal of the Israeli house eaten by the sea or by the right-wing extremists, by the settlers , from the terrorists.

What do you think, Zelda, has Tel Aviv been eaten up once, twice, three times, is your city completely different from that of the narrator, just as we humans are no longer the same as when we were born, because every cell has changed a hundredfold renewed?

I have always seen Tel Aviv as an uninhabitable place, too hot in summer, too leaky in winter, the language is closed to me. No, I only ever miss New York, and in my next sleep paralysis I’ll be wandering the streets of the West Village. As a Jew in New York you have also left the diaspora, that is clear, you are just as surrounded by Jews there as in Tel Aviv.

your dana

Dana Vowinkel, Born in 1996, is a writer and lives in Berlin. Her debut novel will be published by Suhrkamp-Verlag in Berlin in 2023. Zelda Biller and Dana Vowinckel write letters from Tel Aviv to Berlin and back on a weekly basis.