“Lilac Wine”

“Lilac Wine” is the Nina Simone recording that Silvija and the unnamed narrator share in Mauerpark, turning a song listened to through one earpiece each into the scene’s intimate counterpoint to a conversation about leaving Berlin.

The Song in Mauerpark

That summer, the narrator and Silvija travel through Wedding, where the fashion crowd has moved its serious photo shoots as gentrification spreads north from Prenzlauer Berg. After stopping at a corner shop for bottles of pils, they cross Bremenstrasse and rest on Mauerpark’s scraggy hilltop. The narrator carries the gear while Silvija strides ahead; there, inclined to arrive late, they lie together and listen to the Nina Simone version of “Lilac Wine.”

Shared Listening and a Changing City

The song is part of a small, specific ritual of closeness: each has an earpiece from the narrator’s headphones, and they listen religiously while looking out across Berlin. Around them, the city is being remade. The designers who had mostly lived and worked in Prenzlauer Berg are confronting the arrival of affluent newcomers drawn by cut-price lofts and childcare facilities, while the fashion crowd responds with dismay and heads into Wedding. Silvija’s dismissive reaction to those arrivals and her prediction that the situation will last only six months give the shared listening a backdrop of weary resistance to change.

The Song as a Threshold

The music accompanies a change in the conversation rather than resolving it. Silvija, who has spent ten years in Berlin, speaks seriously for the first time about leaving; the narrator, only a few months removed from Cork, feels a sudden spike of nausea. The scene places their quiet musical communion beside a possible separation: “Lilac Wine” briefly holds them together as Silvija voices the prospect of departure, making the song an intimate marker of a moment when their shared attachment to the city may no longer be shared.