There are no cars in the center of the city. The Reichstag, the prime minister’s residence, and the House of the World’s Cultures are all connected by a river called the Spree, with pleasure boats going back and forth. On deck, to the sound of clinking beer glasses, tourists chat with members of parliament. The boat makes a stop in front of an island with museums of art and history, looming like a row of castles. You open the front door of an art museum and enter a huge hall with a high ceiling where homeless people live in huts they have built themselves. From the darkness behind their shanties, Rembrandt peers out as if to say, “Can you see me from there?” Though Cézanne’s apples are laughing merrily, no one reaches out to take one and bite into it. In the historical museum next door, children are playing with primitive stone tools. There’s no need to worry that guards will come running and scream, “You mustn’t touch the artifacts on exhibit!” The thousands of excavated objects, so long sleeping in storage, have been set free and given to the children. On the walls of Catholic churches, photographs of Muslims at prayer are on display. At City Hall, visitors listen as a man with a beard, dressed as a woman, politely explains about certificates of residence. Lines of demonstrators march slowly from embassy to embassy. Uniformed policemen join them as they shout antinuclear-power slogans. Looking carefully at the clouds floating by, you see that they all have human faces. No one ever uses words like “imagination” or “creativity” anymore. People are now expected to use their brains in imaginative and creative ways as a matter of course, and these two forces have begun to move politics. Is this the sort of future Maya­kovsky had in mind? A city like a museum of modern art, where you can shake off the anxiety of living just by taking a walk?

But wandering aimlessly through the center of town would only make her feel more anxious. Every day, as if repeating a prayer, she says she wants to buy an old farmhouse in northern Brandenburg, on the border between the plains and forest. That’s why she works from morning until night, saving up her money little by little. She thinks people who stroll around town, spending money on coffee or cake or the movies, are wasting their lives.

When I’m looking out on fields from a farmhouse window or walking through the forest, I don’t really think of words. Though the word Baum comes to mind when I see a tree, I couldn’t tell you whether it was an oak or a beech. The chirping of birds tells me that Vögel are somewhere near, but whether they’re angry thrushes or robins making love is beyond me. I do know the words for various kinds of birds. Amsel, for instance, or Rotkehlchen. But because I only know them from poems, I don’t connect them to a bird with a red head, or to that black bird pecking at a worm by the side of the road. The words go fluttering through space, while the birds perched in the trees ignore them. That words really have no relation to the world gives me a strange, empty sort of feeling.