#my berlin years were easily the happiest of my life so eiorjgeoirjijg

[historia-vitae-magistras]

I don't know who else to ask about this, sorry, but I'd like to ask about Gilbert in Berlin, I know the history (ussr, west vs east), but personality-wise, does Gilbert "fit" in Berlin?

OH, don't apologize! I love this ask. Gilbert is my OG blorbaux lol. Anyone can ask me anything about him! My thought Is very much yes. It's not a natural inherent fit the way I write Matt in the woods, Arthur at sea, or Alfred in the sky or space, but he does fit.

Gilbert was born the Teutonic Knights, a military order with a very strong sense of what we might call unit-based identities in a modern military context. He exchanged that for the Duchy of Prussia, the Kingdom of Prussia, the German Empire, and maybe East Germany? The memory of a last generation of East Prussians who, until recently, would have remembered what his Königsberg looked like, who might remember that pre-war world he no longer recognizes when the Wall falls? The Teutonic Knights? Who is he supposed to be, still breathing in this world where everything he once was, is a relic of a bygone and disavowed age? Who makes us what we are as people? I think Gilbert did what he's always done. He looked at the world around him and found his place.

Gilbert has Ludwig, his life's work. The rest he can find in Berlin if he looks, if he wants to live. And in my version, he very much wants to live. He has been boxed up over a long post-war winter like the statues in the Volkspark Friedrichshain, but when spring comes and he’s in his city again, it's just another transition.

The Vietnamese restaurant in an odd little corner of a warehouse. The children laughing in the Mauerpark. The two young lovers fucking their brains out in the apartment next door, finding a new joy in each other's bodies. The annoying tourists. The dead places of Cold War voids bursting with greenery. The Brandenburg gate flooded with light. Marjellchen, after dark, three glasses of honey schnaps past drunk. The 24-hour clubs, bodies grinding on each other, lights flashing, sweat, and lousy house electro music. Orgies in glow paint, he's not quite sure he pulls off. Freedom past the point of reason. The visiting young historian was drinking coffee overlooking the cemetery on Greifswalder Strasse, trying to come to terms with what the place was supposed to mean. The idiot tourists at Checkpoint Charlie and the Fernseturm. Haggling with the Polish babcia at the markets over antiques. Art students smoking and bemoaning the state of the world. Stiff federal government workers. The whackos ball out at the train first thing in the morning. Every little facet reflects who he’s been and could be now. Berlin might not fit him like a glove, but he can be himself in its excess of freedom. Especially for him, being born in an actual religious institution so repressed even a thousand years of hetero pining for Erzsé was taboo, he finds some real peace in a post-war, post-war Berlin. If there was ever a city for a thousand-year-old military machine to remake itself into an actual person, it is Berlin.

He just has to convince NATO‌ to get the ankle monitor off him first lol.