The alarm clock didn't ring. That was the first thing Karin Neubauer noticed, even before she opened her eyes. No greenish glow from the digital display. No hum from the refrigerator in the kitchen. Just the silence that had settled over her apartment on Greifswalder Straße like a thin layer of ice over a lake.
She felt for her cell phone on the nightstand. 6:52 a.m. Friday, February 6th.
The display showed 41 percent battery remaining. She tapped the power grid app. Outage in Friedrichshain and Prenzlauer Berg. Estimated resolution: 8:30 a.m. Approximately 2,200 households affected.
Karin sat on the edge of the bed and breathed a sigh of relief. Just a power outage. Just a completely normal power outage. Faults on two cables, she would later be told. Nothing unusual.
But for Karin Neubauer, nothing had been normal since January 3rd.
She got up and went into the kitchen without turning on the light. It wouldn't have worked anyway, but she had trained herself to do this, to avoid reaching for the switch. Thirty-five days had passed since the attack on the cable bridge over the Teltow Canal, and since then she hadn't touched a wall without thinking first.
In January, she hadn't been affected. Her apartment was in the northeast, far from Lichterfelde and Zehlendorf, where forty-five thousand households had sat in the cold for four days. She had watched it on television. The cots in the district office. The lines in front of the emergency shelters. The Governing Mayor saying he had spent the entire day on the phone in his office.
Karin was an engineer. She had worked for Stromnetz Berlin for thirty-one years until she retired two years ago. She knew what a cable bridge was. She knew what N-1 redundancy meant and why it failed in the event of multiple simultaneous outages. She knew that connecting oil-filled and plastic cables required specialized teams, deep trenches, and dust-free environments.
What she hadn't known was how little it would actually take.
In January, she had started making lists. Not out of panic. Out of professional habit.
The first list contained the things that would fail immediately during a power outage: lights, heating, refrigerator, internet, elevators, traffic lights, and cell phone towers after four hours when their backup batteries were depleted.
The second list contained the things that would fail after twenty-four hours: gas stations, supermarket checkouts, water supply in high-rise buildings, and dialysis centers.
The third list contained the things that would fail after seventy-two hours, and she hadn't finished that one.
Instead, she had started buying supplies: two cases of water, canned bread, tuna, batteries, and a hand-crank radio. Candles that smelled of vanilla, because they were the only ones the drugstore on the corner still had after half of Berlin had the same idea.
Her son Thomas had asked her on the phone if everything was alright.
"Of course," she had said. "I'm an engineer. I'm preparing."
"Mom, you live in Prenzlauer Berg. That was in Steglitz."
"Electricity," she had replied, "knows no district boundaries."
Thomas had laughed. It hadn't been a convincing laugh.
Now she stood in the dark kitchen, thinking about the Federal Network Agency and its statistics. Eleven point seven minutes of average outage per consumer in 2024. One of the most reliable power grids in Europe. She had carried that number around like a badge of honor for thirty-one years.
The gas heater was still working. Gas didn't need electricity, at least not for the flame. But the circulation pump did, and so the radiators would slowly get cold if the outage lasted much longer. It was February, and the temperature outside was minus three degrees Celsius.
Karin sat down at the kitchen table. In the apartment below, she heard someone cursing. Next door, a dog barked. Normal sounds of an abnormal situation that was beginning to become normal.
She picked up her phone and opened the news website. The article was short. Outage at the substation. Friedrichshain and Prenzlauer Berg. Between Greifswalder Straße and Landsberger Allee. Technicians were on their way.
Below, in the comments section, someone had written: "Again? Is this happening every month now?"
Someone else: "It was just two faulty cables. Calm down."
And a third: "Exactly. Just like in January. It was only a few cables then, too."
Karin closed the app. The third person had been both wrong and right. In January, it hadn't been faulty cables, but ones that had been set on fire. But the result was the same. That was the point no one wanted to voice: The infrastructure didn't distinguish between sabotage and wear and tear. For the 45,000 households in Lichterfelde, it had been irrelevant whether their cables had been burned by extremists or corroded by time. The result was darkness.
At 7:20 a.m., there was a knock at the door. It was Mrs. Yilmaz from across the street, 80 years old, with a thermos in her hand.
"I still have some hot water," she said. "From last night. My husband always said you should leave the thermos full overnight." "Would you like some tea?"
They drank tea in Karin's kitchen, by candlelight. The vanilla candles. Mrs. Yilmaz said the scent reminded her of a bakery in Kreuzberg that had closed twenty years ago.
"Are you afraid?" Mrs. Yilmaz asked.
"No," Karin said. "I'm an engineer."
“My husband was a bricklayer,” said Mrs. Yilmaz. “And yet he was still afraid when the wall shook.”
Karin drank her tea. It tasted of nothing. The water was only lukewarm.
“In January,” said Mrs. Yilmaz, “my daughter called me and said I should come to her. To Spandau. But I said no. If everyone leaves, who will look after the house?”
“No one has to look after the house,” said Karin.
“Yes, someone does,” said Mrs. Yilmaz. “Someone has to look after everything. Even the cables under the street. Even the bridges over the canal. Even the things you can’t see.”
Karin put down her cup. She wanted to say something about maintenance cycles and backlogged investments, and about the fact that the Berlin power grid comprised over 20,000 kilometers of cable, a considerable portion of which dated back to the 1970s and 80s. She wanted to say that the average lifespan of a medium-voltage cable was forty years, and that one could do the math.
But Ms. Yilmaz didn't know any of that, and yet she did.
At 8:32, the light in the kitchen flickered. Once. Twice. Then it stayed on. The refrigerator began to hum. From the living room, the router chimed with a low beep.
Ms. Yilmaz smiled and stood up. "There it is again, the electricity. Like a guest who's late."
She picked up her empty thermos and went to the door. She stopped in the hallway.
"Ms. Neubauer?"
"Yes?"
"Fill up the thermos tonight. And leave the candles where they are."
Karin nodded. Ms. Yilmaz closed the door behind her.
The apartment hummed again. Everything worked. Everything was as it had been before. Ninety minutes of darkness, and the city carried on as if nothing had happened.
Karin sat down at her desk and opened her laptop. She typed "Berlin electricity grid investment backlog" into the search engine.
She read for an hour. Then she opened a new file and began to write. Not as an engineer this time. As a citizen.
The first sentence read: "There's a number that doesn't appear in any statistics, and this number is growing."
She called the text "Dark Figure."
Then the lights went out again.
S.
Author's Note
This story is fictional, but its basis is real. On January 3, 2026, a far-left extremist group carried out an arson attack on a cable bridge over the Teltow Canal in Berlin-Lichterfelde. 45,000 households were without power for up to four days—the longest power outage in Berlin since 1945. On February 6, 2026, another power outage occurred, this time in the northeast of the city: 2,200 households in Friedrichshain and Prenzlauer Berg were affected, caused by faults on two cables. The question that remains is the one Karin poses: Is there a hidden vulnerability that doesn't appear in any statistics?
Your support keeps ideas alive — and stories in motion. 👉 https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=5NGG6XB67BZ4N 🙏
🇩🇪 My lyrical thoughts between two book covers: blau pause zimmerlautstärke - lyrik über die zeit - zurzeit
BoD Bookshop: https://buchshop.bod.de/blau-pause-zimmerlautstaerke-stefan-noir-9783695118779
Amazon-Shop: https://amzn.eu/d/1TvOBUO
🇺🇸 / 🏴 / 🏴 My lyrical thoughts between two book covers: blue pause room volume: poetry about time – currently
Amazon (English edition): https://amzn.eu/d/3b3GUF4
Comments