Roundabouts

For whatever reasons, still not that clear to me, there are loads of roundabouts where I come from. Everywhere and of any size and kind: majestic, beautiful, distasteful, uninteresting, ridiculous, anodyne, really small, simple, practical, looking like a luxurious garden, with a single tree in the middle or showing off challenging art, musty art, discreet art or no art at all, totally empty or almost invisible roundabouts. In big cities or villages as much as on the road. If comparing, there are not that many in Berlin. My favorite one is in Kreuzberg, really close to the famous Admiralsbrücke at the Landwehrkanal, where diverse people still sit on the ground in the afternoon, alone or in groups, either on the cement bollards, the asphalt or the pavement, not paying to consume something, but blocking the traffic while reading, talking, eating, drinking, writing, playing or listening to music, but also just being. Before the pandemic, some people used to say that the place had become, more or less recently, a random spot for gathering hordes of insupportable loud party maniacs on warm summer nights, but I still preferred them to comfortably sitting, silenced masses with the indelible smartphones on the top of their fingers. Or to uniform hysteria on techno cathedrals. I wonder how the scene would look like with half the flights in the world and another sort of tourists. I wonder if Berlin could ever go back to something similar to what it had to offer to anyone free of consumerism before gentrification and savage individualism invaded every aspect of public life. 

This peculiar roundabout has an interesting bronze sculpture which was done in the 80's by a Czech woman who first managed to move to West Berlin to study art in 1967. I wouldn't call it particularly stunning or genius, maybe I just like it so much because it displays two things I have considerable sympathy for, apart from the harmonica musician: an original punk and a sandglass that used to be white but that has meanwhile been painted with different shades of blue, I have no idea by whom. It now looks like the world is dripping its remaining time, teardrop to teardrop. I heard somewhen that the punk used to hold a walkman on her right hand, but she is one-handed nowadays and the remaining left hand is empty. There is also, and maybe more importantly as it gave the title to the sculpture, an admiral back-to-back with his doubleganger peering the sky at the top of the sandglass; it took me years to realize that they’re supposed to be invisibly rotating the whole time. The piece kind of always made me feel at home, even when these streets were not that familiar to me yet. I think that it might be because it has been giving me the impression of somehow being part of it.

I came to realize that I greatly appreciate the perception of belonging organically to an ecosystem, that is by nature and interconnected, without the need to perform a continuous and lonely Herculean effort in order to maybe remotely feel so one day. Is this an universal feeling?

Double Admiral, 

Ludmila Seefried-Matějková, 1985

Admiralstraße/Kohlfurther Straße