Berliner brief

It was a Sunday night. The streets were deadly quiet as I turned onto Gniesenaustrasse. I was riding home from hip Kreutzberg back to my down-at heel neighbourhood in old west Berlin.
Berlin's bicycle paths are a systematic wonder, a testament to the belief in a perfectible society. They snake along every major thoroughfare in the city, sometimes on sidewalks, sometimes between parked cars and the kerb.
I am a New York cyclist, which means I look both ways at a red light before speeding through it. As I whizzed past Mehringdamm onto Yorckstrasse, I heard a shout behind me. It was not the first time I'd been railed at by Berliners, who take a grim pleasure in imparting the rules for living. I have been shouted at for pulling my dog behind me, in a little wheeled trailer, and for passing another cyclist without ringing my bell. What Prussians have excelled at is battle. Gniesenau was a general who fought at Waterloo, Yorck a field marshal. Here, strangers tell you when you have a stain on your blouse.
My assailant, who waited for the light to turn, caught up with me in the middle of the next block. A thick-thighed, clean-cut type in matching shorts and sneakers, he rode up beside me, as per regulation, on the right.
"You went through a red light!" he barked at me.
"The street was deserted!" I replied.
Berlin's sidewalk bike paths only have room to ride single file, and he, the more brawny, took the lead. But as he slowed for the red light, I cruised by on his right and heard him gasp in horror.
Halfway down the next block he caught up.
"It's the law," he said. "There's a fine."
"Who'll catch me at this hour?"
"Ich," he said. "Ich bin Polizei."
We were approaching Grossbeerenstrasse. He was again slowing for the light, but I shot past.
"Twenty-four hours a day?" I yelled.
My anarchic cycling triggered his adrenaline, and he came up beside me on the sidewalk, pumping furiously. It was Americans, he said, with their chaos and self-absorption and their Ich-philosophies, who were ruining everything about Germany. I observed that riding outside the lines of the bike lanes, other than to pass, was verboten.
He turned off. As I pedalled home, I thought of a piece of graffiti in the ladies' bathroom at the Free University. "Crazy is: seeing the world as it is, and not as it should be." The idealism, that quixotic, urgent belief that society is perfectible, seems a profoundly German trait. After the second world war, a tax was imposed on property owners whose houses were not bombed to finance the rebuilding of homes that were. No one seemed to find it odd that a law was instituted to redistribute luck.
In many ways, Berlin functions better than New York, especially for those with less money. Paying for your packet of ketchup, explains the Turkish proprietor of my local snack bar, spares the person who doesn't want it the unfair added expense of paying for yours.
But which is crazier: seeing only reality, or only what reality could be? In 1995, a well-meaning law decreed that bike lanes must be a metre and a half wide. Narrower paths were deemed dangerous to pedestrians. Official signs would be placed only on paths that were 1.5 metres wide, and only those between the street and the kerb.
Now a recent court decision has declared that the law must be enforced. Bike lanes must be built at the kerb, not on the sidewalk, and they must either be widened or closed. But Berlin, long propped up by western subsidies, is broke. So the paths will simply be closed, throwing the cyclists in with the street traffic that the entire system was designed to avoid.
Days later, babysitting a friend's six-year-old in the Volkspark, I began to ponder. We were escaping the noise on her tiny street, Prinz-Eugen-Strasse, where mourners and hecklers had gathered at the birthplace of Leni Riefenstahl to rumble. Was the obsession with perfection a symptom of the endless moral catch-up required of people who live in the Holocaust's gargantuan shadow? Was it a leftover of the failed socialist state in East Germany? Or was it what blinded Riefenstahl to the ultimate purpose of her brilliant cinematography? Was fascism simply the byproduct of the sempiternal belief in a more perfect path?
Just then, another smaller girl rode up on her tiny bike.
"Where are your parents?" I asked.
"I came alone," the girl said.
"You live along the square?"
"No, down the road," she replied. "I ride my bike here."
I shudder, imagining the fate of a five year old who decided to ride her bike down Broadway. I think of the times I have nearly been hit, or actually hit, riding there. Are this girl's parents crazy to believe in their perfect system?
All at once, my judgements disintegrate, and I feel a deep desire to be this girl, to live within the entire elaborate system of obeyed and enforced rules that protect her and enable her to roam with astonishing independence. I want to go back and grow up as her.