The heat relief service IB Berlin-Brandenburg provides a cold room with food and cold drinks to people experiencing homelessness during the heat wave in Berlin last week.Axel Schmidt/Reuters
Kelly Dignan is a Canadian writer living in Germany.
Despite this being my eighth summer in Berlin, I’d never needed to buy a fan until record-breaking temperatures broiled much of Europe last week.
I left buying one too late, though, and had to spend all of last Thursday morning biking from one sold-out store to the next until I finally found an enterprising man with a stack of fans in front of a shop that normally sells party supplies and fake flowers.
Now I had a fan, but as the temperature rose to 40, it only served to blow the hot air around my place.
“Don’t people there have AC?” a friend back in Toronto asked me, incredulous.
The answer is, not really: Only 6 per cent of households in Germany currently have air conditioning. A recent article in The Atlantic suggested that there is something to the European mentality that allows people to weather discomfort stoically, while looking upon North America as a land of excess and convenience at the expense of all else.
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I suspect, though, that it’s more likely that the lack of air conditioning, at least in Germany, is the result of an unwavering allegiance to efficiency and rules.
This January, Berlin had a cold snap that was the closest thing resembling a Canadian winter since I’ve been here, coating everything in ice, like an enormous skating rink. But the city doesn’t allow the use of salt, as it damages trees and groundwater, so everyone was slipping and sliding, filling up emergency rooms with fractures. The Berlin Senate decided to temporarily allow street salting, only to be challenged by environmental groups who argued this set a “dangerous precedent” and had the decision overturned days later.
Is the AC situation like the salt? Are Germans forgoing immediate relief for a long-term commitment to sustainability? Or is this just another example, so common here, of change being stalled in an endless knot of bureaucracy, rules cancelling out other rules?
Berlin, just like many cities across Europe, wasn’t built for extremes. The typical “Altbau” apartments – pre-Second World War buildings – don’t easily accommodate modern heating and cooling systems. They are already poorly insulated, with outdated wiring and plumbing. Lüften, which translates to “airing out,” is a national daily ritual (often even written into rental contracts), enforced to avoid the buildup of toxic mould.
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For homeowners, modifications are a difficult process, especially for historical buildings where work must be approved by preservation authorities or use specific materials.
Whether it’s these practical considerations, or wanting to not be as wasteful as North Americans, the hellishness of the past week is a reason to reconsider both.
On Saturday, I was woken up at 2 a.m. by a panting dog; I panicked, not knowing how I could possibly cool her down. I set my alarm for three hours later so I could walk her at 5 a.m. when it was “only” 28 degrees. I changed clothes every few hours and took multiple cold showers. Businesses were shut across the city, trains were cancelled, and people were drowning as they cooled down in rivers and lakes. Across Europe, 1,300 deaths were attributed to the heat wave. Surely, this was a case where we could do with a little North American coddling?
As a group of my friends sat in a shaded park, our conversation sounded like a meet-up of amateur meteorologists. Someone said Europe is heating up faster than anywhere else in the world. (It is, in fact, progressing at a rate twice the global average.) Another told us about the influence of El Niño, winds blowing up from northern Africa.
People seek shade under trees along the Spree river during the heat wave in Berlin on Sunday.Maryam Majd/Reuters
We also told stories about standing in snaking lines for ice cream, shared cooling tips we read online and laughed about our personal struggles to do lengths in overcrowded pools. Unspoken was a darker feeling that the world as we know it has changed, is changing – and the cities we live in are not built for the new reality we’re living in.
When the heat finally started to break on Sunday night, I was outside, watching Canada play in the World Cup on an oversized TV outside a convenience store. It was 9 p.m. and still 31 degrees. We saw the players run into the stadium in Los Angeles, a city where only recently we were checking on friends affected by wildfires, just like friends in Toronto had been checking on me.
“Look, it’s only 20 degrees in L.A.,” someone said, sighing.
And I thought about how that’s the same temperature my friends in Toronto were experiencing – chilling inside with their AC blasting.