B Before I begin writing this text, I first go up to the balcony for a smoke. The sky is gray, and in the bare chestnut trees sit freezing pigeons. They cannot complain about the poor air in the capital. According to the Berlin Air Quality Monitoring Network, the quality today, February 10 at 11 a.m. in the inner city is “sufficient,” toward the outskirts “satisfactory”; according to the Federal Environment Agency, however, inner-city air is “bad” to “very bad.”
Neither is surprising, for firstly we smell that it stinks; and secondly, because of the “Berliner Luft” no one has moved here, unless you are fond of a peppermint liqueur of the same name or a catchy Schlager that linked the local atmosphere “with its pleasant scent” to liveliness and liberalism.
I am more familiar with the technical term “inversion weather pattern.” A few days ago I still looked from a sunny peak down into the dull, overcast Alpine foreland and thought of verses by Hugo von Hofmannsthal: “Some, indeed, must die down there, / Where the heavy oars of ships brush the sea, / Others live up at the helm, / Know the flight of birds and the lands of the stars.”
And just as fatefully resigned as Hofmannsthal sings of the seemingly unchangeable class belonging that determines life chances, we too should deal with the toxic mix that we and our children and the poor pigeons must breathe. The combustion engines keep running—inside the city as well, far too fast—and the fine dust rises from domestic as well as more eastern chimneys. And just like our great-great-great-grandparents, we wait for wind and rain, for divine intervention, so to speak, which alone could bring improvement.
Pushing a Stroller Past Smoky Exhausts
What is fascinating about this quasi Stone Age submission is the fact that in so many, if not all other areas of our (survival) life, we are constantly urged to work things out ourselves. We track ourselves more precisely than the conditions around us.
When, as may still occur, we see people sitting and smoking in a car, we recognize the dangers of this unhealthy, sedentary, smoking lifestyle—and push our little ones in strollers right up to the smoke-filled exhausts. And we congratulate ourselves on our longevity skills, because tonight we will skip a glass of wine with dinner.
Meanwhile, the right to light and clean air used to be the fundamental demand of the life-reform movement that responded to the burdens of industrialization. And as a solidarity demand: not only for mountaineers and villa-dwellers—but for everyone.
Here the wind has, in a rather wind-poor large-scale weather pattern, actually changed. A project like the highly effective, pollutant-relieving Parisian traffic policy is at least partly perceived as elitist—cities are now seen as exclusive zones of the “liberal elites” with their “ban culture.” The right to suffocate oneself and others with motorized pollution, however, remains a freedom reserve in large parts of Germany—and why not in the capital as well.
And now? Back to the balcony: the pigeons have it easy; they simply flew away—probably not into pollutant-free air, but perhaps into a less nourished suburban landscape. City air does not just set you free, it also fills you. The governing mayor today would rather not go for a run outside, but would rather play tennis indoors, which we already know. A year ago around this time Berlin was reported as the national leader in fine dust fatalities. At least—once again at the top!
