Special Assignment:
MARKETPLACE asked award-winning broadcast journalist and author Jeff Kamen to spend three very intense days in Berlin to bring out a 7-minute sound portrait of the city.
Here's Jeff's report about his experience getting the story.
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Berlin Cacophony
by Jeff Kamen
Berlin.
The very word whispers, growls and thunders magic. Marlene Dietrich in Blue Angel. Hitler in black leather and buckets of red. Bach in soaring ecstasy. I had been to the city only once before. As the Wall was coming down. One of those surreal, "parachute journalism" deals in which I was literally on the ground for less than 3 hours--just enough time to look deep into the TV camera to do a "standup" that lent credibility and authenticity to a story about the impact on American servicemen of the fall of Communism. The MARKETPLACE assignment would be 24 times more intense. I decide to avoid sleep as much as possible. There is so much city to hear and I do not want to miss anything.
On the eastbound flight over the Atlantic I have this strange realization: the gift of normal, healthy sight can, at times, be a hinderance to a radio journalist. If I ever get to hire reporters, I will make sure that at least one is blind. That one will be able to hear the story in ways the rest of us will surely miss. I swear to myself that I will listen harder than ever. The assignment takes on aspects of a lusted after lover. Even before the KLM flight lands at Tegel airport, I become voracious, interviewing Germans sitting next to me about their sense of the city, its place in history, their hopes for its economic future.
Since this job is for MARKETPLACE, I have arranged to visit some venues of commerce but the rest of my mornings, afternoons and late nights are spent prowling little streets and broad boulevards that look like Paris but resonate with a blaring mix of sounds that are all about Berlin, riding in smooth running taxis and throbbing subways, scarlet lit bars enraptured by American rock and coffee houses that are home to fine jazz, halls of great classical music and plazas punctuated by the wailings of street musicians. I insinuate myself into houses of worship and private homes, shamelessly eavesdrop on English-speakers on public streets and briefly invade their journeys with my tape recorder and microphone.
In one moment of dramatic serendipity, I come face to face with a beautiful friend with whom I had lost touch 6 months
before and she leads me to a delicious part of what will become my audio portrait of Berlin. 
As exhaustion seeks me out, I listen to the sounds of the city where Einstein and Marx studied, where Kennedy and Reagan cried for liberty and where women today pursue the ideals of the hard body as enunciated by Hollywood and Seventh Avenue--not the fullback look of Wagner's
Valkyries. Emboldened by more than 20 years of getting strangers to talk to me, I meet hookers and business executives, drug dealers and elegant retailers of erotic materials, scholars and writers and a pioneer in the mind-bending universe of virtual reality cafes. And if you want to know what this world's biggest construction project sounds like, or what the song is of a modern newspaper press as it reaches top speed, all you've got to do is what I did: Open your ears, to Berlin.
I gobbled up almost 10 hours of sounds and then came the agony of choosing the 7 minutes. I hated how much sweet, ugly, rich sound I had to leave out but I loved what we kept. Tune in and let me know how you hear the finished mix.
