Last week in Berlin at SAPPHIRE, I enjoyed the conversations I had with slightly unorthodox SAP customers like Ecotricity, an alternative energy company started by an ex-hippie who once powered all the mobile phones for the stage crew at the Glastonbury festival with wind energy. Ecotricity was a finalist in the SAP Quality Awards, an event at which I also had the good fortune to speak to the folks from the Spanish arm of Médecins Sans Frontières. The three Spanish members of their project team were the only presenters that day not wearing suits and ties. In fact, the black t-shirt that Ricardo wore sported such a brutally honest slogan that I had to ask him about it. “I am HIV positive,” it read. He explained that he worked on an awareness campaign in the border area between Uganda and Kenya, where there is a huge migrant population and where entire villages are wiped out by AIDS. “There are only children and grandparents,” he said. The interesting thing about both of these customers is that while they remain true to their values, of providing clean energy (Ecotricity) and saving lives (MSF), they want to improve and scale their business with SAP software. Hats off to them.
But then there was Berlin. Coming as I do from the provincial nest of Heidelberg, where the students are clean and shaven and study law or economics, and where my neighbors pluck the errant grass growing between the bricks in their driveways and terraces, I could finally visualize what the Germans mean by one of their most spot-on words – “spießig” – or white-bread and middle-class.
So I took advantage of being in a city where I have friends and stayed out late. Instead of going to the evening event on the program (the Zucchero concert on the last night of SAPPHIRE, explained to a visiting colleague as “light Italo-pop” by our PR guy), I went to Acud, a divey joint in Berlin-Mitte where my dear friend and fellow Canadian expatriate Robin Draganic plays a regular gig as bassist in a saxaphone trio. I was impressed at how well he and the drummer – whose bread and butter job is at the Friedrichspalast (a music hall and Berlin institution) – communicated with their instruments. Instead of playing standards, they play their own compositions. Robin also introduced me to the Bebop Bar in Kreuzberg where he hosts a session every Sunday night. There is an astonishing amount of talent in Berlin and a lot of it shows up to play at the Bebop – twenty-year-old sax players, keyboard artists, singers, and drummers.
There is nothing spießig about Berlin. Quite the opposite. 20% unemployment. Before the wall came down it was always a safe haven for draft dodgers. This is the Germany I imagined before I came here – the one populated by Fassbinder characters in leather, artists all.
