For the first time in our relationship I am mad at London. It’s been over a year now, and we’ve been really happy with each other. But one thing keeps on coming up: It doesn’t like me hanging around with my friends. so it makes them move away.
Very early in our relationship I decided to confront that problem rather radical, and denied to become friends with new Germans. I preferred British people. I was told this is racist, of course, and ‘you can’t do this’, so I made a few exceptions. It was in vain anyhow. Lately, London has send C to Graz, S to Pasadena, A to Hamburg, and is even threatening to send my best friend A, British, to Africa. By now I stop finding it funny, or losing people an interesting challenge to coup with. I simply pout.
Everyone who has been longer in London knows that here “flexible capitalism” can still be observed in its natural surrounding, and more directly than in every other European city. It comes as no surprise that Marx wrote the Manifest of the Communist Party in London, in which he was taken away by the crassness of capitalism. Also Darwin developed parts of his evolutionary theory on the survival of the fittest after being back to London from the Beagle; less known, he also wrote about the survival of the prettiest, for which I am convinced he travelled secretly into the year 2010 to study the Hackney hipsters on Broadway Market. (This part of the book is also known as the bible of Shoreditch.)
Finally, after London already killed lots of productive debates that can only badly be replaced by a glass of vine on Skype, and drove the test objects of my wild assumptions into exil, this late capitalist bitch of a city, as my friend Andre likes to say, decided to steal one of my flatmates. I am not amused.
In Germany, you only live with flatmates when you are a student and can’t afford a flat on your own. In London, the housing situation is different. Everyone is quite focused on work all the time, plus transport is so slow that they ask you to top up your patience if you buy a ticket, and friends live far away as the city is huge. Here, flatmates are a wonderful social condition of their own. Necessary, good, comforting, a bit like having brothers and sisters living with you, being in a certain way very close, albeit independent beings with different interests.
They are not friends – I wouldn’t like to live with my best friend, I rather keep him as a best friend – but in a certain way you feel as close as you share the bathroom, meet late at night in the kitchen and know each other with swollen morning eyes. They are an important part of your life. Good flatmates are a gift. Mazen, we miss you.
- Hackney Hipster Hate
- Winfried Menninghaus: The promise of beauty
If I may say, your observations about living with flatmates seem greatly imprecise.
In Germany there are vast numbers of people living with flatmates who are not students. Some live with flatmates because they want to live with people who share the same social or political engagement. Others have just not been able to find a partner for a family life yet and do not want to live alone (by the way I believe in London there are lots of people who share flats because of the same reason). Actually there are many more groups of people to be named like the ones who live with flatmates because they share a vegan lifestyle etc. I `m astonished you draw such a shortened picture of the present German society. Being a former resident of Berlin, you should know better, I think.
I like the photo of you and your flatmate though. The picture radiates a nice and convenient relationship between you and your flatmate.
I’ve lived in both places in various setups and completely agree with Mercedes.