Eric Schnall has worked on and off Broadway as a producer and marketing director for more than twenty-five years. He won a Tony Award for the Broadway revival of Hedwig and the Angry Inch and a Lucille Lortel Award for Fleabag. He has also written about techno and electronic music for Billboard and Revolution, profiling DJs and musicians from around the world. His new book I Make Envy on Your Disco was published by Nebraska in May and is the second title in the Zero Street Fiction series.

It’s the new millennium and the anxiety of midlife is creeping up on Sam Singer, a thirty-seven-year-old art advisor. Fed up with his partner and his life in New York, Sam flies to Berlin to attend a gallery opening. There he finds a once-divided city facing an identity crisis of its own. In Berlin the past is everywhere: the graffiti-stained streets, the candlelit cafés and techno clubs, the astonishing mash-up of architecture, monuments, and memorials.

I Make Envy on Your Disco is at once a tribute to Berlin, a novel of longing and connection, and a coming-of-middle-age story about confronting the person you were and becoming the person you want to be. 

Everything is a puzzle. The windows open differently here, from the top, the corners slanting inward. There’s no radio, no clock in the room, yet the floors in the bathroom are heated by a switch next to the door. To flush the toilet, I must step on a metal lever. There is no UP or DOWN button on the panel beside the elevator. Instead, I punch in the number of the floor I’m going to. I’m on the third floor, but I press 0 to get to the street. When I ride the train, I buy my ticket from one machine and get it stamped by another, but no one checks my ticket. I just get on the train and sit. When the train reaches my stop, I push a button so the door slides open and I can exit. I’ve forgotten to do this a few times already and have twice missed my stop. Though I have no use for warm marble floors, I’ll leave them on for the length of my stay, because they’re there, I’m paying for them, and they’re controlled by the one button in Berlin I seem to understand.

Some hotels overlook mountains or the sea. My hotel sits at the end of a tramline, tucked away on a side street, hidden from the bustle of Mitte. My room has its own peculiar view: one window faces the street, its slim glass doors opening to a balcony just big enough to step outside for a cigarette, if I still smoked. A cluster of yellow trams sleep below and a maze of wire dangles a few yards from my window, feeding power to the machines. Across the street, an apartment building is covered entirely in graffiti, and in big red letters: FUCK BUSH. And in the distance stands the Fernsehturm, the TV Tower that hovers over Alexanderplatz like a giant steel dandelion.

The other side of my room overlooks a courtyard. Strands of flowering vines crawl up walls, defying the October chill. A small koi pond is lit from below. A few tables and chairs are scattered in the yard, but it’s hard to imagine they’ve gotten much use. It’s been cold and rainy since I arrived in Berlin rather suddenly, less than two days ago.

I go down to the breakfast room. A wall of windows faces the courtyard. German tourists and businessmen sit at square tables eating cake, salami, and muesli. Outside it’s gray and drizzly and the wind is gusty, but they all seem used to it. Most of them, like me, have blue eyes.

The hotel is staffed almost entirely by young women dressed in black. They are all very beautiful. “Guten Morgen,” one says as she leads me to a table. Her name tag reads Astrid. “Kaffee?” she asks, tilting her head to the side. I nod. As Astrid pours the coffee, her blond hair drifts down her shoulder and she sighs, “Soooo . . .” Everyone says this to me. I eventually discover that it means here you go, but not quite. Nothing is what it seems here. Nothing translates. The word bitte means please and you’re welcome and may I help you? When I walk around the city, streets don’t have names like 14th Street or Avenue A. My hotel is between Grosse Präsidentenstrasse and Oranienburger Strasse. That’s two streets and sixteen syllables.

I’ve come to Berlin to see an exhibit at Klaus Beckmann’s Zukunftsgalerie, curated by the owner himself. The latest show at the “gallery of the future” is all about the past. Its theme is Ostalgie, the nostalgia for the products, objects, and way of life that disappeared from the East almost overnight, after the Wall fell, less than fifteen years ago.

I’m an art advisor in New York. I specialize in contemporary art and tell people what to buy. Sometimes I consult for corporations, but mostly I deal with private collectors, which means that these days, I spend a lot of time with the newly wealthy— hedgefunders, trophy wives, Europeans, that sort of thing. I often find myself trapped in their cavernous apartments or strolling arm in arm with them through galleries in Chelsea, dining out with their families, making small talk, just hoping to close a sale.

Walking around Mitte, the neighborhood that bridges east and west, I see graffiti everywhere. But it’s not fuck-you graffiti. It’s beautiful, the wild bursts of color and ridiculous taglines. Art is everywhere—painted on buildings, stenciled on doorways, plastered on pipes. It is raw and, like much of Berlin, reminds me of New York in the seventies and early eighties, the city of my youth.

I picture Times Square: the crowds, the lights, television screens and scrolling headlines, the stock quotes, kidnappings, and natural disasters. Endless information pouring across pixilated walls. It’s the core of my city now, an advertisement for everything and nothing, the void filled with a million things.

There’s nothing about Berlin that’s on similar display. It’s a cagey peacock with its dazzling tail spread, walking away from you while looking backward. It seems an insular and introspective culture, happy to be on its own, connected by the dark threads of its knotty history. Daniel would say that I’ve got it all wrong. A city unfolds, takes its time. “Sleep,” he’d tell me. Because first impressions are never right.

German is a language of scissors and knives. Z’s, p’s, k’s, s’s, and w’s are chopped into an orgy of consonants: Platz, Strasse, Kuchen, Wasser, and Schnitzel. I’d been told that everyone would speak English. But now it seems that many Berliners don’t speak English, or if they do, they try hard not to use it. When I ask the front desk for directions, I am repeatedly handed a map.

I walk down an endless number of streets in East Berlin. The entire city is under construction. New office buildings are being erected, town houses restored, austere Soviet-era structures torn down. Much of the city is draped in tarp and plastic, which hangs from it like peeling skin.

And then there is the Wall. A few slabs are on display, scribbles of love and desperation, pleas for help, a reminder of a once divided city. Though the Wall is almost entirely gone, its scar remains. A brick line snakes through the pavement, showing where the city was separated. With no wall, Berlin is now a city with two hearts and no center. You feel like you’re in the middle of everything and totally lost no matter where you are. Or maybe that’s just how I feel after thirty-six hours of jet lag, overcome with the sort of traveler’s depression that makes you feel like your brain has fallen into your throat.

Everything would be easier if Daniel were here. Someone to speak the language, just a little bit. Someone to tell me where to eat. Someone to know what to do.

Everyone smokes. The clouds rise lazily above me in restaurants and cafés, instead of being sucked down in greedy gasps of nicotine outside office buildings. My clothes absorb the stench and carry it with me. Pretzels, beer gardens, blue-eyed pretty boys walking dachshunds down the street—they are all here. Young women huddle in the Bäckerei scarfing down pastries and espresso, yet they are thin and porcelain skinned. I don’t see a gym or a pink packet of Sweet’N Low. No one seems to drink water. I don’t ask for decaf. I don’t eat dinner before 9:00 p.m. It is not allowed.