I left Berlin on Saturday last week after a very productive and enjoyable month there. My daily routine did not vary much. I wrote and read all day; then, went for walks and bicycle rides through the city’s neighborhoods.

On one of my last days, I bicycled through the forest of Grunewald. Vladimir Nabokov set an attempted murder from his novel The Gift in its dappled shade; the scene has haunted me for years. And the forest, seemingly unchanged from the time Nabokov lived in Berlin and startlingly empty, still allowed one to imagine the dramatic scene. Cycling deeper into the dense grove, I came upon a pond in a clearing. There were a couple of swimmers there, languidly floating on the leaf-strewn water. The sun was going down in a near-tropical blaze; creatures of the undergrowth were clearing their throats; all around us the trees stood mutely, and the moment seemed eternal. So much unassuming beauty, and so widely available: that’s what I have been thinking about Berlin, this truly post-imperial, maybe even post-historical, city, and I felt unaccountably assailed by melancholy on my last day.

Certainly, it was my now deeper, more enduring affection for the city that made me silently root for Germany in their World Cup match with England on Sunday. Well, England didn’t deserve to win; the Germans were a far superior side. But I was thinking, too, of the crowds in the Tiergarten: how much a German victory would mean to them, what fresh paroxysms of delight it would plunge them into.

Ich bin ein Berliner: I have always recoiled a bit from this cold-war declaration from an overrated president, who, together with his Soviet counterpart, almost unleashed a nuclear holocaust. But this is how you say it in German, and that’s what I would like to claim for myself.

My mind has been somewhere else, in Asia, and the early twentieth century. But Berlin keeps drawing me back to it.

I go walking everyday through its streets, my imagination trying to people familiar street names with famous figures from the past. I realize, too, that Berlin, this city of very young people, belongs as much to its present as to its past; it’s a place still open to self-invention; its ways are far from being set in a pattern. Industry deserted Berlin during the cold war when it was, ironically, the ‘window on the West’; there has been little business investment here since the fall of the Wall; the ambitious post-1989 plans to make Berlin the ‘center of Europe’ look like fantasy. The city presently faces a severe financial crisis. But life goes on, it still holds ample promise and excitement—at least for the young among the 3.4 million people who live here, the most cosmopolitan population on the Continent.

Last night, the sedately bourgeois Ku’Damm hosted an impromptu carnival after German’s emphatic victory over Australia. The young men and women blaring their car horns, hanging out of windows and waving the German flag made me think that perhaps Berlin, after bearing too many ideological burdens in the previous hundred years, was now taking a break from history. And who can say it is not well-deserved?

I always work well in hotels. The lack of superfluous possessions, the sparse furniture, the do-not-disturb sign on the door and swift, uncomplicated access to food and drink makes for gratifyingly sustained periods of writing, reading and daydreaming.

I have settled well into my room at the Bleibtreu, and hope to get a lot of writing done in the few weeks I have here, and the biggest question now for me is: how much time do I spend outside, absorbing the sights of this great city? For a city so young—in comparison to Rome or Delhi—Berlin’s buildings and streets carry such a weight of history.
I have been here before a few times and already seen the major tourist sights, but the urge to explore the renovated Neues Museum, or—if it is a sunny day—to return to the lake at Wannsee overtakes me in the middle of the working day.

For the moment I have settled for a compromise: rereading Hans Fallada’s extraordinary novel Alone in Berlin and, simultaneously, dipping into Fritz Stern’s Five Germanys I Have Known while allowing myself no more than a few small excursions to the magnificent—and conveniently nearby—Tiergarten. I hope I will be braver in the next few days.