The New York Times International - 05.08.2019

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16 | MONDAY, AUGUST 5, 2019 THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION

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“I come here to read my poetry tonight

as a black feminist lesbian poet,” said

Audre Lorde, standing onstage in a da-

shiki and head wrap, to a mesmerized

West Berlin audience at the Amerika

Haus in June 1984.

At the time, the Berlin Wall was still

standing, and the western part of the di-

vided city was a hotbed of radical poli-

tics, Cold War angst and scrappy, state-

subsidized bohemia. But it had never

seen anything quite like Lorde, the poet,

essayist and activist born in New York

City’s Harlem to Caribbean parents in

1934, whose ideas about female rage, in-

tersectional feminism and the political

dimensions of self-care have perhaps

never been as relevant or embraced as

they are today. During Pride month in

New York in June, Lorde and her politics

were frequently invoked. She was ac-

knowledged at the Stonewall Inn rally in

New York City, and her Staten Island

home officially became a landmark.

The 1984 trip was the first of many ex-

tended visits Lorde would make to

Berlin, a city she depicted in poetry and

prose, where she played a pivotal role in

the birth of the Afro-German identity

movement in the years before she suc-

cumbed to liver cancer in 1992 at 58.

Since her death, Lorde’s momentous in-

fluence on the American left has become

clear. But she also lives on in today’s

Berlin, a truly international city grap-

pling with what it means to be pluralistic

and humane.

“The city itself is very different from

what I’d expected,” Lorde wrote in her

journal in June 1984. “It is lively and

beautiful, but its past is never very far

away, at least not for me.” She went on:

“The silence about Jews is absolutely

deafening, chilling. There is only one

memorial in the whole city and it is to

the Resistance.”

The past is still close in Berlin, but

Lorde’s second observation seems al-

most inconceivable today. The Resist-

ance memorial at Plötzensee, which in-

spired her 1984 poem, “This Urn Con-

tains Earth from German Concentration

Camps,” is now one of the least known

Holocaust memorials in a city full of

them — most notably the Stolperstein

project and the Memorial to the Mur-

dered Jews of Europe by Peter Eisen-

man. What would Lorde have thought to

see the Amerika Haus, where she gave

that first public address, on a recent

night, as visitors filed into the modernist

structure to view photographs of Holo-

caust atrocities, part of an exhibition on

images of death? Since 2014, the

Amerika Haus has been home to C/O

Berlin, one of innumerable local venues

now featuring the kind of culturally di-

verse, socially engaged material that

Lorde often found lacking.

WHERE TO FIND LORDE TODAY

The best starting place for any Lorde

pilgrim is audrelordeberlin.com, a com-

prehensive English-language website

created by Dagmar Schultz, a German

sociologist and publisher who helped se-

cure Lorde a visiting professorship at

the Free University of Berlin in 1984.

The two women would become close

friends, and Ms. Schultz recorded copi-

ous footage of Lorde’s time in Berlin,

which eventually became a 2012 docu-

mentary, “Audre Lorde: The Berlin

Years 1984-1992,” screened regularly in

art house cinemas in Berlin and beyond.

The film and its supporting material, in-

cluding photographs, interviews, letters

and posters, now form the basis of the

Free University’s Audre Lorde Archive,

which can be viewed by appointment at

the campus in Lankwitz. Much of this

material is also on the website, as is an

interactive map of significant locations.

During her first stay, Lorde lived in a

red apartment building that still stands

at Auf dem Grat 26, overlooking Thiel

Park, a sloping stretch of green marsh-

land near the university in the lush,

villa-laden western district of Dahlem.

The yellow phone booth that used to

stand on the park’s edge figures in her

haunting 1984 poem, “Berlin Is Hard on

Colored Girls,” which mixes the lan-

guage of border crossings with imagery

evoking the African diaspora: “I cross

her borders at midnight / the guards

confused by a dream / Mother Christo-

pher’s warm bread / an end to war per-

haps... A nightingale waits in the alley

/ next to the yellow phone booth...”

Through her lectures and workshops

in 1984, Lorde began to connect with

young German women of African de-

scent — women like May Ayim and

Katharina Oguntoye — who would later

play important roles in what became

known as the Afro-German movement.

It was Lorde who coined the term, “Afro-

German,” as she encouraged the women

to tell their stories and forge an identity.

The resulting 1986 book, “Farbe Beken-

nen,” translated into English as “Show-

ing Our Colors,” tells the story of black

German women reaching back to the

Middle Ages, a story that had largely

been ignored in the national discourse

up to that point.

“I am excited by these women,” Lorde

wrote in a journal entry that became the

book’s forward, “as they’re beginning to

say in one way or another, ‘Let us be our-

selves now as we define us. We are not a

figment of your imagination or an exotic

answer to your desires.’”

“Showing Our Colors” and the debate

that arose around it, resulted in the

founding of two organizations devoted

to Germans of African heritage, the

women’s group ADEFRA and the Initia-

tive of Black People in Germany (ISD),

both of which are crucial resources to-

day in the wake of the refugee crisis.

One of the ISD’s current initiatives, in

cooperation with the Berlin Green Party,

is the renaming of one of the city’s

streets after Lorde. That street is yet to

be determined, but visitors can already

walk the May-Ayim-Ufer, named for one

of Lorde’s most important protégés, a

poet, educator and activist born to a

German mother and Ghanaian father,

who helped found ADEFRA and the ISD

before taking her own life in 1996.

THE LORDE HAUNTS

But it’s farther west where Lorde spent

most of her time. Alone, with her part-

ner, Dr. Gloria Joseph, or with the entou-

rage of women that had begun to co-

alesce around her, she loved to explore

the city’s bucolic western edges, a part

of Berlin that has changed less dramati-

cally since the 1980s than much of the

rest of the city.

One of her favorite walks is likely

much as it was then: through the

sprawling Grunewald forest, where the

novelist Vladimir Nabokov once hunted

butterflies and wild boars still roam un-

der the towering pines, to the Châlet Su-

isse, a traditional Swiss restaurant in

the middle of the woods still popular for

its rustic surroundings and Alpine fare,

and on to the Jagdschloss Grunewald, a

striking lakeside 16th-century hunting

lodge that is Berlin’s oldest preserved

palace, home to its most extensive col-

lection of work by the German Renais-

sance painters Lucas Cranach the Elder

and Younger.

Lorde also loved the wooded lakes

west of the Grunewald in the suburb of

Zehlendorf — Schlachtensee and

Krumme Lanke — both of which still fill

up on summer days with sun-seeking

Berliners, many entirely in the buff.

“Don’t you think that’s a uniquely Berlin

phenomenon?” Lorde asks in a clip from

the Audre Lorde Archive, while eating

an ice-cream cone against a backdrop of

sunbathing Krumme Lanke nudists.

In an earlier still image from the ar-

chive, taken when she still had a thick

head of hair, she rows an inflatable boat

over the lake, wearing a red T-shirt em-

blazoned with a quote by the anarchist

Emma Goldman: “If I can’t dance I don’t

want to be part of your revolution.”

Lorde held true to Goldman’s credo.

Even as she grew increasingly ill, she

was a fixture on the lesbian bar scene

that thrived in the 1980s, particularly in

the district of Schöneberg, often dancing

until dawn at bars like Die Zwei (Those

Two) and Pour Elle (For Her). Both

closed years ago, with the last of the

city’s 1980s-era lesbian bars, Serene,

shutting its doors for good in 2015. Yet

today Berlin abounds with lesbian par-

ties. And even if the city’s night life still

lacks the ethnic diversity of Paris or

London, there are far more women of

color involved in the scene now — some-

thing Lorde doubtlessly would have cel-

ebrated.

Only one of her former nocturnal

haunts remains: Begine, a Schöneberg

cafe and cultural center founded in 1986

by female squatters that hosts work-

shops, classes, concerts and other

events; Lorde rented an apartment in

the building in 1988. The district of

Schöneberg, with its used book stores,

Jugendstil fronts and tacky gay bars,

was where she spent much of her time

when she returned to Berlin in the late

1980s and early 1990s, often for readings

and events organized by Orlanda, her

publisher. One of her favorite spots was

the open-air farmers market that still

takes place every Wednesday and Sat-

urday on Winterfeldtplatz.

POST-COLD WAR VISIONS

After the Wall fell, Lorde was one of the

first Western writers to give a reading in

the former East, appearing in 1990 at the

Frannz-Club in a converted brick brew-

ery in the district of Prenzlauer Berg.

The original Frannz-Club, a seminal

East Berlin music venue, was forced to

close in 1997 because of rising rents but

reopened in 2004 under the same name

as a restaurant, bar and biergarten.

In her poem, “East Berlin 1989,” Lorde

beat back against the Cold War tri-

umphalism of the times with a dark vi-

sion of discord and racial violence, an-

ticipating the surge of far-right hostility

that would emerge in the reunified for-

mer East: “Already my blood shrieks /

through the East Berlin streets / mis-

placed hatreds / volcanic tallies rung

upon cement / Afro-German woman

stomped to death / by skinheads in Al-

exanderplatz... ” At a time when the far

right is once again on the rise in Europe

— and in eastern Germany in particular

— the poem feels as trenchant as ever.

It was “East Berlin 1989” that Lorde

read aloud at her final reading, which

took place in September 1992 at the

Schöneberg home of Dagmar Schultz,

continuing to the end of her life to speak

out for the disenfranchised. Two months

later, she died on the Caribbean island of

St. Croix. One of the places her ashes

were scattered, in accordance with her

wishes, was the lake at Krumme Lanke.

“We all have to die at least once,”

Lorde wrote in her journal while sitting

in Dahlem’s Thielpark during that first

fateful summer in Berlin, mere months

after her first diagnosis of cancer as she

began one of the most productive peri-

ods of her life. “For the first time I really

feel that my writing has a substance and

stature that will survive me,” she wrote.

“There is a hell of a lot more I have to do.

And sitting here tonight in this lovely

green park in Berlin... I feel I still have

enough moxie to do it all.”

Berlin through the eyes of a noted feminist

Following the footsteps

of Audre Lorde, a black poet

who caught fire in the city

BY CHARLY WILDER

The May-Ayim-Ufer, named after a protégé of the black feminist and poet Audre Lorde, runs along the Spree River, opposite the longest remaining stretch of the Berlin Wall.

ANDREAS MEICHSNER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

PHOTO BY JACK MITCHELL/GETTY IMAGES

ANDREAS MEICHSNER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

From the top: Audre Lorde in 1983, the Resistance memorial and the Begine cafe.

ANDREAS MEICHSNER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

“The city itself is very different

from what I’d expected. It is lively

and beautiful, but its past is never

very far away, at least not for me.”

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