This all started because of a rumour I was sleeping around behind my girlfriend’s back. Spreading rumours about an affair was a classic tactic of the Stasi. Stories of this abound in Berlin, where this campaign began. I did not cheat on Kitty. We dated in Dundee for a few months while she was over on an Erasmus semester. A few days before she left, I decided that we would break off the affair. I needn’t have spared it much thought though, because she never asked about seeing me again. I stayed on at Dundee to finish my Masters, unsure what my next move was. She had gone back to Belgium to finish her Masters, though she was from Holland. Unbeknown to me, we would meet 6 months later in Berlin.
While in Dundee my flatmate and friend was cheated on by an American. I texted him to meet before the end of year exhibition party and have a word. He started to meander arrogantly through excuses. I cut him short. He did this knowing he would not have to deal with the consequences. In less than two weeks he would be flying back to the States. He got to enjoy the benefits of the close-knit postgrad group. A group that others had built before him with dinner parties, house parties, and group trips. He repaid us by humiliating two of the women in our group and leaving the rest of us to patch things up. This must have struck a chord with him because he became tearful, and I dropped the subject.
In the party, my pals claimed that it wasn’t my place to say anything. I wonder what they would say now, over a decade later, when many feminists consider all men guilty by association. Every misogynist is facilitated, the argument goes, by friends who apparently don’t object to their behaviour. I had acted ahead of my time. Only 6 months later I would be targeted by feminists for allegedly cheating on my girlfriend. Did any of my pals from Dundee see a problem with me being attacked? No, they would never hear me out, and knowingly assist in my systematic drugging, even if only by gaslighting me when I called for help.
Months after Kitty left Dundee, I was planning a cycle trip around the Outer Hebrides, a scattering of islands on the west coast of Scotland. I decided to invite Matheus who I had met three years earlier in Berlin. When he heard that I was finishing my thesis in Dundee, he told me that I could have Tom’s room. It would take some convincing though. By the time I left Berlin I was fed up with living off a shoelace. I had been in the typical spare room 1.5meters by 4meters with a window at the far end. It had wooden floorboards painted a deep red, a matrass on the floor, and a desk at the window constructed out of two painter’s trestles and sheet of chipboard from Baumarkt. Between the matrass on the left, and the desk in front of the window, was a standing clothes wrack. That was it. Every time I put my shirt and trousers on to teach English, at a factory on the outskirts, I felt I was putting on a disguise. I hadn’t planned on heading back, but Matheus told me that I wouldn’t need to pay the same as Tom. I would not need to pay rent at all until I found a job. Living in a nice flat, with a friend, was more than I had after my first year in Berlin.
Kitty had played me well. It put my nose out of joint that she did not ask to see me again. We casually said that we would keep in touch. Skype was the thing back then and, at some point, it was me who got back in touch. I thought she was seeing a guy in Belgium, and I was heading back to Berlin, but she said she had thought of doing the same. I told her she could crash at mine. A few weeks later, I asked if she was seeing this guy, because he was thinking about coming to Berlin as well- “No”. So we might pick up where we left off.
When I got to Berlin, Mathias said Kitty could crash in my room. It was only as we were making our way out the kitchen. after the conversation, that he quipped, “Oh, so you must really like this girl, huh?’” I thought I would do Kitty a favour and say ‘yes’, in case it takes her a while to find a place, and I would be thankful for the time with Kitty. This is all Matheus would ever know about our relationship from me.
Things were going well in the flat between the four of us after a few weeks. As Mathius’s girlfriend pointed out, Kitty was a bit flirty, but Kasia didn’t mind, that was just Kitty. Kitty was about 6ft 2inches tall, good looking with big blue eyes. She was smart and funny. Matheus liked Kitty himself, but I didn’t mind. Until he put me in the shit. While I was out of the flat, Mathias told her that she can move in with ‘us’ permanently. This was never my plan. He had only known Kitty for a few weeks. Mathias is a nice guy, and generous, but as a property developer, he is used to being in the dominant position.
Kitty naturally presumed that I had asked Matheus about us living together in his flat. We had both been lingering in bad faith, neither of us mentioning her flat search. Now I had to tell Kitty that she ought to be looking for her own place. She was crestfallen. I would feel the same. I knew we would be lucky to get past this. I told her that living together had been working well, and if Matheus hadn’t forced the issue, who knows what would have happened. Matheus then tried to make up for his mistake by kicking me out the flat, just for three months, while Tom was back in town. The plan did not work. I didn’t move in with Kitty.
I moved into a tiny room 4m x 1.5m with a window at the end, wooden floorboards painted white and turned cream, with a fold out couch on the left. There was a desk at the window made from a sheet of a thick glass laid over a flip-top Singer sewing machine. My clothes were in my suitcase. I was back to where I was when I decided to leave Berlin three years ago. My live-in landlord would open the door and walk when I was in my make-do-bed. He would remind me that the cheap rent was on the provision that I build him a mezzanine bunk. He would remark on our sex life, or rather, the declining audible testimony thereof. Meanwhile, my last job had not paid me, and I soon discovered that others had not been paid, and they were due thousands of Euro. So I and cut my losses. I knew I wouldn’t find another room that cheap, but now I needed a another room, and a new job. I was angry with Matheus for destroying my relationship with Kitty, and for kicking me out, but also for messing with Kitty’s head. I felt responsible for landing her in this mess.
For around 3 months I tried to convince Kitty that I really cared for her, but to no avail. Eventually I said we should finish, because she was badly hurt, but she was too proud to accept this. She simply said “No”. She might have said “No, fuck off!” actually. She told me that I was patronizing her. ‘I should just tell her if I did not want to be with her’. I refused to lie to her and betray the battle I had been fighting for months. I remember trying to read her face to find something I had missed. What was she thinking? How did she think this would play out from here? You might think I could have shouted at her to leave or thrown her out, but she was very stubborn and proud, that wouldn’t have worked. I had no options left. When I tried to explain my situation to Kitty, to each of my problems, she insisted, ‘Why do you not move in with me then?’. She would not continue the relationship as it was, nor would she accept it was over. Kitty’s personality had changed altogether. She became clingy, and she did not want to let me out her sight. I tried to get some time to myself. I organised this cycle trip without Kitty. I needed to decide if I would move in with Kitty, move back in with Matheus, or leave Berlin.
Then I got an email from a prestigious professor in Berlin agreeing to supervise my PhD. This would be the last moment that I could have prevented what would befall me in Berlin. I would have had the chance to speak to my friends again and explain what had happened. From this point on, my friends would only gaslight me, believing whatever they were told by a feminist network in Berlin. I was close to leaving Berlin. I was also close to moving in with Kitty. In the end I decided to stay and attempt the PhD, and let Kitty make her own beginnings.
I was trying to give myself space from Kitty. I had already told her that we need to end the relationship because she was not herself, since Matheus, since moving out. I did not know what my next move was. I told her to go to a party on her own. It was near her place in Gesundbrunnen. I might go to a party in my building, but not for long. Kitty decided to cycle down to Schöneberg. Her hope was that I would cycle to the other party after. A young woman was talking to me, about her plans to study in Britain and the likelihood of other weird accents like mine, when I noticed Kitty hovering alone watching us. I quizzed her about this. She didn’t like the way the woman was looking at me. I thought this might be the excuse Kitty needed to leave the relationship. Later on, I said quite loud to this young woman that my girlfriend would be going off to another party, and I lived downstairs. Kitty was nearby, but she did not hear. The young woman was puzzled, so I spelled out what I was suggesting, and I expected the gossip to go round. We hung about for a bit, but Kitty and I left together because no one told her.
I told her to spend time with a friend of hers who was visiting. After a week or so there was a big illegal party in the basement of a hotel that everyone was going to. Kitty was already there with Matheus and all my friends when I arrived. I hadn’t spoken to Matheus in the interim and I kept myself separate. I asked if her friend would want a threesome. Kitty did not react angrily as I expected. She just said that her friend had a boyfriend. So, I went and asked her friend. I went straight to Kitty and told her. She just looked confused. Still, she was not angry. Perhaps she knew I was up to something. I told Matheus what I had done. I wanted a fresh start for her, and for me. She recently started her internship and found a flat share. This was always the plan. Except now I did not want to see her again.
My unconventional approach should not have surprised Matheus. I had often stepped up and done the right thing, not caring what people looking on might think. This now belongs to a bygone era when friendships and relationships were defined differently. You would do the right thing, and people would recognise who their real friends were in the end. This was not at the cost of solidarity; this is where it began. It would radiate outwards, and your friend would see how you respected and supported others. You would show courage defending others, and the people you loved would recognise your efforts. It did not matter what strangers thought of you. Now it seems that virtue signalling permeates all forms of relations. Increasingly, all the morality there is, is mediagenic. People want to look as if they are outraged, so they attack strangers with vitriol online, or they abuse strangers in meat space and post their video of it on a group chat. This way they signal to a world of strangers which side they are on. They might well throw their friend under the bus to improve their social media profile.
Matheus and I confronted a test case of my old view during my first year in Berlin. There is a large stone amphitheatre cut into the hillside in Mauerpark, Prenzlauerberg. It is constructed of roughly hewn stones, each stone about three feet by four feet. In the summer, on Sunday, the round orchestra was held by a loquacious Irishman with a microphone and a diesel generator to run his portable Karaoke. The theatre would be packed with people drinking a bottle of beer in the sun before one of their friends belted out a number for the crowd. During the week, if you are easily persuaded, you might go there for a drink after work. At this point, most parks in Berlin were not lit by lamps. One night, as Matheus and I ascended the amphitheatre in the dark with a couple of beers, we discovered a women slumped over one of the stone tiers quite high in the amphitheatre. Her face was planted among the glass and bottle tops that were strewn over the stone. There was something left in the bottle of spirits lying beside her. We couldn’t leave lying there in the dark park.
Matheus managed to get out from her where she lived. It was just off the street parallel to the park. We were not ones to call the police, but Matheus pointed out how dodgy it would look if we carried this woman out the park. The only other people there were two young women sitting a couple of tiers down. “She’s not our problem, it’s her choice to get drunk”. As we helped her out that park, taking and arm each and most of her wait, a parade of people came from the Eberswalde U-Bahn station came to cut through the park. “I wonder what you are going to do with her when you get her home”, one woman shouted back at us, once she had sauntered passed us with a bottle of beer in hand.
Matheus quickly explained that we had just asked those two women to help us. Almost cutting him off, I asked, “Why don’t you come with us then, she lives just round the corner”. Answering in English, we appeared like stupid naive tourists. She decided that it was more important to get her beer while it was cold than help a woman who she thought was about to be gang raped. After this, most of the others that passed also passed their judgement upon us. I challenged them, ‘Why don’t you help us then, it’ll take 5 minutes?”. Matheus left contact details with the women and he went straight home really upset. I told him that the most important thing is that we know she is safe. Who cared what a group of selfish cowards shouted. Matheus only felt better when he met the woman a few weeks later. She admitted that this had happened before, and that she had a problem with drink, and she was thankful for what he had done.
This night strikes me as a precursor to the culture of virtue signalling now. Hurling abuse at strangers for being potential rapists while a large group cheers on, but unwilling to do the right thing by people when given the chance. In my experience, women are the worst for abandoning other women to whatever predicament that they got themselves into, while men naively play the knight in shining armour. This naivety of men is now being used by the worst of people. Everyone religiously believes what women say. People are willing to attack strangers to receive applause from the group chat, even delivering their friends over to serious abuses. This is what friendship means in the age of social media, morals must be mediagenic and signalled across an anonymous network that could attack you if you abstain. Back in the day, abstaining from group violence, respecting human dignity, and protecting the vulnerable, was the very least you would expect of your friends.