Nothing Happens on Time, Everything Happens Anyway
★ The March Issue
WHY DID THE BERLINER CROSS THE ROAD? HE DIDN’T. THE ROAD WAS CLOSED, ACTUALLY. AND THE BUS WAS CANCELLED. AND THE APPS LIED.
“Hey, F. and I are running a bit late, see you soon :)”
I got a few variations of that message on my 21st birthday—the first one I ever celebrated in Berlin. A BBQ at a rooftop near Rosenthaler Platz. One of those textbook spring afternoons you picture when you think, fuck, I want my whole life to feel like this. Or so I’d imagined it.
I made cheddar sauce, and bought micro-chives. A., the only person in Mitte who knows how to work a grill without burning down the building, arrived first—90 minutes past the official start time. The second guest followed with a two-hour delay.
As the sky bled pink, the three of us were stuffing our faces with hot dogs, Róisín Murphy’s siren song humming softly in the background. My aforementioned digital penpal and her lifelong companion F. materialized shortly before midnight. The micro-chives had given up on life by then.
Rage? Futile. That’s not how it works here. Berlin doesn’t do punctuality. It does entropy. It does “see you soon” with no ETA.
This March, the BVG abandoned the pretense of ETAs, too. Again. No buses, no trams, no U-Bahn. Just feral cyclists, stranded tourists, and Berliners power-walking, unfazed.
Overheard at HoBB’s Berlin Salon at Eoin Moylan Studio:
“Berlin’s basically LA now. It’s nice out, and you can’t get anywhere with or without a car.”
The strike had teeth: 16,000 employees. Verdi demanding a raise. BVG countering with “unfinanceable.” Arbitration talks. The kind of thing that, elsewhere, might’ve become a catalytic rupture. Here, it just folded into the rhythm.
“I no longer have any use for the sweeping gestures of heroes on the global stage. I’m going for a walk,” journalist Joseph Roth wrote in one of his 1920s newspaper reports.
The push and pull of modernity and madness, trains filled with people who didn’t know where they were going, bureaucracy bloated to the point of absurdity—nothing ran smoothly in Roth’s Berlin either. But it moved. Sort of.
Nearly a century later, the city is still jerking between momentum and inertia. And yes, we still walk. By choice, at times.
Remember BER, the illustrious new airport that opened nine years behind schedule? A shrine to infrastructural irony that launched mid-pandemic, when no one was flying anyway. The joke landed better than any plane.
So no, lateness here is not failure. It’s a vernacular. A dialect of the damned. A predicament that exist in the space between “sorry, traffic was crazy” and “don’t worry, I'm not even sure what year it is.”
Overheard at Slowness’s Flussbad Campus:
“We were supposed to have olive focaccias, but the neo-Nazi protest blocked the delivery, so it’s just croissants for now.”
You realize that many are not even aiming for “on time.“ They’re aiming for some shared present that begins whenever enough people are late to the same thing.
Is it a middle finger to German obsession with efficiency? A low-grade burnout disguised as nonchalance? A side effect of too many all-nighters? A self-fulfilling prophecy making everyone feel off-balance? The answer to this, like the answer to most things, is probably all of the above.
Of course, lateness has its politics. If you’re a caregiver, a cleaner, a courier—it is a liability. That magical Berlinese time-as-a-construct only works if someone else is on the clock.
Someone has to fire up the grill. Someone has to wait for you, so you can be late and all charming about it.
It’s not fair. But somehow, it works. It comes together. Eventually. Right on time.
And by “right on time,” I mean four hours late. When the cheddar sauce is sentient and the birthday candles have melted into the abyss.
Overheard at a Torstrasse Späti:
“I just want to lock myself in my apartment and never, ever leave. Like, for a couple of days, at least.”
This month, the clocks jumped forward. Did anyone notice?
★ TBD Excitement
According to Mitte Daily’s founder, Dima:
The exquisite torment of the U8. Cherry blossoms, finally. The problematic diva that is Azealia Banks performing at Columbiahalle (how late do we think she will be to her own show?).
According to Mitte Daily’s intern, Katoo:
The first open-air cinema of the season in Kranzler Eck. FLINTA-only Celtic mythology workshop hosted by Klub Write. “Bingo and Bling” night where winners get hairdresser appointments and/or free piercing. Asian street-food festival in Friedrichshain, maybe?
★ IRL of the Month
There are two kinds of people in Berlin: those who don’t need to print something at 9:47 p.m., and those who absolutely do. Solid Earth is for the latter. Two locations (two blocks apart from one another), no fanfare, no attitude. You walk in with a file and a vague sense of panic. They nod. They print. That’s it.
It’s the kind of place you only discover once you’re in too deep. You’re hosting a dinner and the chef switched dishes an hour before guests arrive. You’re organizing a reading and forgot the damn brochure. You simply want to print something pretty because you can. Solid Earth says: sure. How many copies?
Share this with someone who's always late. Or someone who's always early. Or someone who exists in a different dimension of time altogether. In Berlin, we don't discriminate against temporal anomalies.