Berlin's Butthole
True Story │Video and text│About finding home in all the wrong places.
Thanks to The Bear for creating this video. They are good people.
It was 4pm and the door to my kid’s Kindergarten opened and she rushed out—two years old, her entire face a grin, and said: “Ice-cream. Papa. I want an ice-cream. Papa. Come on. Please papa. Come on. Please. Papa. Come on, Papa. Let’s go. Come on.”
And even though we had nothing else to do—because none of the other parents ever wanted to hang out with us—I sighed, because I knew what her request meant: it meant we’d have to go even closer to Hermannstraße station.
Hermannstraße is part of Neukölln—definitely worse than Oldkölln—the famously poor and somewhat troubled district of Germany’s capital. It is—and I say this with affection—Berlin’s butthole. A concrete, open-air, mental health incident. A place where hope has died, been buried, then dug back up just so they can kill it once more.
We live one street from it.
As we sat at the entrance to Hermann Quartier—part shopping centre, part zombie apocalypse training ground—Runa licking her Schlumpf Eis, a man with one leg wheeled himself slowly past, tipped his head back, and began cursing the sky. A man emerged from the bowels of the subway, clutching his stomach, bent over, and puked into the bin. From our left, a woman ran out of the Quartier carrying a giant hock of ham, chased by two security guards who pounced on her.
I looked down at Runa, watching on, licking her ice-cream, completely unfazed.
Why wouldn’t she be? Hermannstraße was all she’d ever known. But it wasn’t all I’d ever known. And I wondered: why am I raising my child in this big bin?
It wasn’t so crazy a notion. Many of our new-parent friends had recently abandoned Berlin for Spain, Portugal, or the UK. Several had stayed in Germany but returned, tail between their legs, to their cursed hometowns.
As a wall of police sirens crashed over us, I had a brilliant idea: we could also run away!
I went home, put Runa to bed, rushed to find my girlfriend in the living room and said: “I’ve had this brilliant idea—let’s run away!”
She blinked twice and said, “Yes! Great. Parenting here sucks. Let’s move somewhere warm. We could get a house with a garden and a lemon tree.”
And so we opened our laptops and started trying on countries like they were hats:
“Does Portugal suit us?”
“No, I think we’re more of a Canada.”
And then I remembered a place. “Jerez de la Frontera.”
“Where’s that?”
“I don’t really know,” I admitted. “Somewhere in Spain. I was there for three days ten years ago and it was amazing. Empty. They were practically giving city mansions away.”
We dove into research. And it really was so cheap, this Jerez de la Frontera. Quickly, we had a shortlist of properties. The biggest one had fifteen rooms and was 1000 square metres.
“It’s a kilometre,” I said.
“Do you know how square metres work?” my girlfriend asked.
“It’s a kilometre,” I said, too busy running around my fantasy mansion to listen.
And pretty soon, we had to see it, this city.
So we flew there—and it was great. Full of narrow winding streets and stunning plazas where people zipped around on their Vespas and drank laughably cheap sherry, often while laughing and kissing each other’s bronzed cheeks.
We had a whirlwind week of property viewings. And on the final day, we found our dream villa: twelve rooms, a garden, and two lemon trees.
We put in a cheeky offer, which was all the money we had in the world, and then quite a lot more.
They said no.
We returned to Hermannstraße, crushed. Walking past the same vomit-stained bins and broken glass that felt more hostile than ever, as if the city itself was mocking our failed escape attempt. The one-legged man was still there, cursing the sky, but I understood his rage better now because we’d tasted freedom and then been denied it.
A week later, the phone rang.
Not the Spanish agent—but a Kindergarten we’d applied to months earlier and forgotten about. Unlike our current one, this was an Eltern-Initiative—managed by the parents themselves, and so we’d have to cook and clean.
It might be better. It might be worse. And it wasn’t a big change. An exciting change. But we went to view it and the atmosphere seemed nice, and since it was something we actually could change, we said yes.
Runa loved her new Kindergarden immediately.
By day two, we were in three different parent WhatsApp groups. Unlike our old Kita, here the parents didn’t just grab their children and disappear. Instead, they all socialised together. Not just polite small talk, but actual hanging out in each other’s apartments and—if they weren’t full of rats the size of wolves like ours—courtyards. The kids playing, the parents chatting, snacks shared, wine opened.
Pretty soon, we had spare keys to two apartments and our social life was blossoming. Better than before we had a child, even.
Then the phone rang again.
It was the Jerez dream house. They’d changed their minds. We could have their mansion—and its lemon trees—for our cheeky offer. Our escape was finally possible. Here it was, everything we’d wanted: clean, safe, slow, quiet, cheap. The villa, the garden, the space for Runa to run wild.
I hung up and looked at my girlfriend. She looked at me. We looked down at our phones, already buzzing with the day’s various group chats—discussions of what we’d all do together after Kita.
“We can’t,” I said.
“I don’t want to,” she said.
And so we didn’t. We said goodbye to Jerez and committed to Berlin.
Two years later, we’re still here—one street from Hermannstraße. The where is the same, but the how has changed completely. Because when we said yes to a Kita, we didn’t know we were also saying yes to its parents, and their WhatsApp groups. Yes to a community that we care about, and that cares about us.
And how much that would enrich our lives.
Early parenthood can make you forget why you made certain life choices. Before kids, we move to cities for opportunity, culture, chaos, and to find other weirdos of our distinct flavour. We chose complexity over simplicity because we thrive on its energy and possibility.
Then suddenly we’re a parent, and we have no energy. Stuck shepherding a tiny human up and down the same few roads each day, swerving around broken glass and dog poop, we feel like our lives have drained off all possibility, too. The lack of a backyard shifts from acceptable trade-off to unbearable crisis.
It becomes really tempting to just want to burn our lives down.
But we don’t need an escape plan, we need a support plan. Sometimes, a move genuinely improves life. But more often, the impulse to relocate is really an impulse to connect, to find support, to create the conditions where parenting feels less like solo survival and more like a shared experience.
We didn’t need Jerez—we needed people. And once we had that, Berlin stopped feeling like a punishment.
We’re often told that it takes a village to raise a child—and that’s true. We hear less often how much we adults need the village, too.
Even if that village is Berlin’s butthole.
Some essays from The Long Goodbye you might have missed:
The best reason to have children is one no-one ever tells you (the German version of this went mega viral).
A true story about a time I went to an orgy where you weren’t allowed to show pleasure
Thanks for being here and I’m excited to share something else with you next Friday.
Adam