World-wide media is agog with the news. Who is the ‘Forest Boy’? Why has he rejected help to find his identity? How come he speaks no German? Is he afflicted by ‘dissociative fugue’, a rare form of amnesia in which the sufferer forges a new identity through a sudden, unexpected and purposeful journey? Why can’t his father’s body be found? How can his clothes and hands be clean, and his fingernails clipped, if he lived so long in the woods? Is he a Czech hoaxer?
As these questions are being answered, an even more remarkable story of disappearance comes mind – in the very heart of trendy Berlin. According to unsubstantiated reports, last Monday morning at Berghain, the world capital of techno music, cleaners came upon a forgotten cupboard behind the Panoramabar. They pried open the door (which was bolted from the inside) and discovered a secret chamber in which a young clubber had been living since late 2004.
In that year the boy – who was then eleven years old -- seems to have stumbled into the former Friedrichshain power station in the belief that it was hosting a model railway exhibition. Once inside he found himself at the club’s opening night party. He liked the music, enjoyed the gifts of Bionade and Red Bull and, when he realised he had stayed up way past his bedtime, slunk away into a corner and the secret cupboard. The next day he awoke to find the building empty. He quickly discovered the club’s ice cream cooler, as well as its sweet snack storeroom, and this ready supply of food – combined with guilt for not having paid an entrance fee (which suggests he must be a German national) – convinced him to stay.
Over the years the boy fitted out his cubby-hole with cushions, cinema seats and lava lamps, decorated the ceiling with unusual balloons, and dressed himself in the many cast-off clothes (he is said to look particularly fetching in skin-tight lederhosen). On Club Nights at the hidden bars and along the disconnected balconies, he made many friends, some of whom were also toy train enthusiasts. There is no indication that Berghain’s owners knew of his existence although I understand from one particularly unreliable source that the club’s no camera policy may have its origin in the myth of the Berghain boy.
Police neither confirm nor deny that the boy speaks no known language (although I hear that his remarkable range of emotive grunts has sparked the curiosity of zoologists at the Berlin Zoo). As he has not seen the sun for almost a decade, his skin has lost almost all its pigment. In an effort to protect both his eyes and identity he has been issued with wrap-around dark glasses and so he looks – for all intents and purposes – much like all the other blinking, emaciated Berlin clubbers on a Sunday morning. Like them he also is totally deaf.
Apparently his busy parents – who I believe work for the World Bank – didn’t notice his absence until 2009 when they were transferred to Washington. When she was contacted his mother told the authorities, ‘I have an opening next Wednesday. Could you get him a room in the Adlon until then?’
Speculation is now rife that other ‘wild’ Berliners may emerge from their hiding places in other nightclubs, at tourist hotels, along labyrinthine civil service corridors and perhaps even in forgotten offices at the Bundestag. One thing is for certain; the appearance of both the Forest and Berghain boys proves once again that there are few places in the world better for reinvention – and even for make-believe – than Berlin.
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