Homeless in Berlin at Christmas

Not me. Well, not in Berlin, anyway. I stay with a friend on a small street on the north side of Olivaerplatz, the most elegant enclave of Charlottenburg. Cartier, Chanel, Gucci, Hermès, Vuitton, and Zegna are all less than a five-minute walk. Exactly the neighborhood I’d choose to take refuge in were I without an abode. Or was a regular shopper. It’s a quiet, mainly residential, street with a few boutiques, restaurants, and art galleries. No doormen, of course, because it’s Europe. Entry to the building is with a conventional key; not even the more sophisticated sort with smooth edges and tiny indentations. It always takes me a minute to figure out which of the three rectangular keys will open the front door.

A tidy, well-mannered, and elderly homeless man has taken up nocturnal residence in the covered portico of my friend’s building. This is first time, apparently, an unhoused person has done this. The first night we arrived by taxi after an evening out, there he was, a Christmas tree festooned with red glass balls and garlands of tiny white lights looming in the background. He had carefully spread newspapers on the ground before the front door. For warmth? To keep his sleeping arrangement clean? Or perhaps to reassure the building’s inhabitants of his thoughtfulness and cleanliness? That he, too, is civilized and understands the comfort and safety such residential buildings promise.

He had turned in for the evening and lay stretched across the entrance in his sleeping bag with his head concealed, a single suitcase and a shopping bag wedged between his head and the limestone door jamb. If he hadn’t already known from camping or sleeping in chilly bedrooms that breathing into a sealed space creates heat, he (I assumed it was a ‘he’, since street-living men vastly outnumber women) would quickly have learned it by sleeping on the street.

Charlottenburg does attract some of Berlin’s unhoused population because it’s a safe, bourgeois neighborhood and because there are several convenient pedestrian underpasses that provide shelter from the elements and sufficient space to create a small community. Most, however gravitate to non-residential places or ones inhabited by a demographic more likely to join the unhoused than the privileged residents inhabiting the elegant Jugendstil buildings of Charlottenburg.

As we approached the gentleman (for that was the impression he conveyed) I announced (in German): “excuse me, sir, we must come inside.” Without poking his head out, he drew in his knees into the position of a Peruvian mummy and pulled up his sleeping bag to allow the door to open. It took longer than he probably anticipated for my mobility-impaired friend to get inside, and as I stepped in, I, at a loss for what the proper salutation should be under such circumstances, awkwardly uttered: “thank you, sir, sleep well.”

Once inside and headed toward the elevator, I asked my friend a few questions. She revealed that he’d been there intermittently throughout November, and no, she hadn’t given him money, although she didn’t object to his inconveniencing her on her evening returns home because he was so proper, polite, and tidy. She had spoken to him briefly, though, because she’d noticed that hers was the only building on the street with a nocturnal, unhoused guest. He told her that he liked waking up and seeing the beautiful Christmas tree through the glass-paned outside door. My eyes filled with tears at hearing about such a sad and undesirable—quite possibly, final—chapter in the life of a respectable German senior citizen.

The second time we arrived home after a pricey evening in Kreuzberg—a five-course duck dinner accompanied by piano jazz performed by a local conservatory professor—the experience repeated. I asked my friend how it could happen that a well-behaved old man who seemed neither mentally handicapped nor habitually indigent could find himself in such a situation. Might he be too embarrassed and proud to seek help? Surely, Berlin has accommodations for such citizens. Or maybe these locales are unpleasant or dangerous? Filled with the sort of people with whom he has nothing in common? I’ll never know.

The third time we returned, after an evening at the opera followed by an elegant holiday dinner for the opera’s board of trustees and sponsors, complete with a pre-dessert musical program, we arrived home a bit earlier. The gentleman had arranged himself for the evening but hadn’t yet retired. He sat, leaning against the entry reading a book by the meager light from inside. I jumped out of the taxi knowing it’d take a few minutes for my friend to debark and get to the front door. I apologized that we’d inconvenience him again, and I gave him twenty euros, which he gratefully accepted. I didn’t tell my hostess, worried that she wouldn’t approve. Once up in the apartment, as we enjoyed a glass of chianti from the Tuscan vineyard of her entrepreneurial daughter (she also owns a stud farm), I regretted not giving him enough money for a night in a hotel.

But I quickly realized that may not have been the thought that ran through the unfortunate gentleman’s mind. He undoubtedly appreciated the kindness and discretion of a stranger and may well have made similar gestures when he was younger and living under better circumstances, as he certainly must have. I hoped that building residents brought him warm things to eat and drink on cold and lonely evenings. When I departed Berlin in the morning, there were no traces, no signs, that he had ever been there. All that remained was the memory of a chance encounter.