Catie Disabato - The Ghost Network

Berliner and Kraus met in a coffee shop in Wicker Park shortly after he began walking. At the time, Kraus worked as the Chief Officer in Charge of Recruitment for the recently formed New Situationists. In contradiction to her intentionally ironic title, Kraus’s job was to dismiss or divert anyone who seemed captivated by the New Situationists, whether the interest was academic, political, or personal. Her job was difficult; she not only had to convince people to give up their curiosity, she had to convince them that there was nothing to be curious about. “The New Situationists can’t exist,” she often reminded Berliner. “That was how Debord would’ve wanted it.” §

Well-suited to her position with the New Situationists, Kraus gave a first impression of cold indifference; she rarely developed sentimental attachments. With David Wilson, she was the exception to the New Situationists’ program of extreme secrecy. While the two of them would have some level of visibility among the members and to the outside world, every other member remained hidden as much as possible. Later, after the New Situationists made themselves known through their act of domestic terrorism, the State Prosecutors and the public conflated the New Situationists’ historic secretiveness with long-term plans for the bombing. However, Kraus always insisted the Chicago Subway Bombings were a flight of fancy, planned in a few months, maximum; the secrecy grew out of an adherence to Situationist principles, plus a flair for theater.

“We were not above some Eyes Wide Shut— esque displays. Not the orgy part, but the masks, the passwords, the secrecy. We were feeling very dramatic at the time. We wore animal masks like in some movie,” Kraus told Anna Kirkpatrick during a 2009 exclusive video interview for Kirkpatrick’s political commentary show on MSNBC. During the same interview, Kirkpatrick asked, “Most of a decade has passed since the New Situationists disbanded. Can you tell us what they were exactly?” Kraus responded, “Anna, what makes you think the New Situationists have disbanded?” ǁ

At the coffee shop where Kraus and Berliner met, the first location of the high-end organic coffee retailer Intelligentsia, Berliner sometimes flirted with a young vegan barista named Anna. He often talked to Anna about his devotion and compulsion to walk. Anna also knew Kraus, a regular at the café, and had seen her reading a book about Debord and psychogeography. When Berliner and Kraus happened to stop in at the same time, Anna suggested Berliner ask Kraus for book recommendations. They spoke for a little while and left separately, but Berliner had already developed a bit of a teenage crush. Berliner walked to the coffee shop when he knew Kraus would be there, acting surprised to see her, and asking her if he could sit down at her table. After a few weeks of this, Berliner dropped the ruse and planned his run-ins with Kraus; they met several times a week to discuss urban planning philosophies and music.

Kraus didn’t like Berliner at first, but she never liked anybody at first. She slowly warmed to him, then surprised herself by thinking about the strange teenager when he wasn’t around. She broke up with her boyfriend of a year, a non — New Situationist, and a month later realized she’d broken up with him for Berliner. On a Saturday afternoon in August, she invited Berliner back to her mod apartment in the Ukrainian Village, and took his virginity on her maple platform bed.

Kraus was pleased that Berliner didn’t say anything too sentimental after their first time having sex; she was also pleased that he fell asleep with his head on her chest while she smoked a cigarette, drank wine, and thought about him. After a thirty minute post-coital nap, Kraus woke Berliner. She slowly and thoroughly explained that she had what previous lovers had called an “architectural fetish,” which she became aware of during a therapy session when she was sixteen. Under hypnosis, she had remembered her twelve-year-old self, masturbating against certain kinds of doorways because the molding was more beautiful. Kraus told Berliner that while she was pleased with devirginizing him, the two of them couldn’t continue a sexual relationship if he didn’t feel comfortable indulging in her preferred sexual practices. Kraus needn’t have worried. Kraus’s descriptions of her preferences were arousing to Berliner. He happily became her sexual protégé.

They began a secret affair. They talked extensively about their personal histories and the historical architecture of Chicago. Kraus introduced Berliner to Debord and the Situationists and he learned quickly. Even while avoiding Dana and Raulson, the lovers found a way to see each other every day. Sometimes, after Berliner’s mother and grandmother had gone to sleep, Kraus snuck into Berliner’s basement and spent the night in his bed. She attended most of his baseball games, pretending to be the cousin of one of Berliner’s teammates, an outfielder whose parents never came to games. She sat in the bleachers, wearing black high-waist jeans, a white button-down shirt, and one of many colored scarves, heckling like she was at Comiskey Park. She drank beer from the bottle or whiskey from a flask and smoked clove cigarettes until the mothers asked her to stop.

The New Situationists were mostly supportive of Kraus’s relationship. Some of them had known her for many years and were amused that she’d finally become enamored of someone. They weren’t happy, though, when Kraus asked to bring Berliner into the group. Up to this point, Kraus had done a thorough job squashing any scrutiny of the NS and its members. Because of Kraus’s efforts, the group was invisible to the outside world and their identities were secret from her and from each other. Asking to bring Berliner in, the antithesis of her job, surprised the other New Situationists despite the depth of her feelings. But because the New Situationist higher-ups respected Kraus, they agreed to see Berliner. They all met in an empty office in a building in the middle of the Loop. Each member of the New Situationists who interviewed Berliner wore a full-face animal mask and used voice-modulating devices when they spoke. They quizzed Berliner about his school and political beliefs, but the thing that really struck them was Berliner’s story about his grandmother’s attempted exorcism. It convinced a few reluctant members that he was interesting enough to join. At the same time, Kraus staged a test of romantic fidelity, hiring an actress she knew to try seduce Berliner. He didn’t stray.

In early November 1999, Berliner was accepted into the New Situationists as a “junior” member and Kraus’s assistant, specializing in Negative Recruitment. They threw a party for him at the group’s headquarters; all the members attended in masks. Some wore wigs, long gloves, or cowls to hide the color of their hair or skin. Kraus wore a purple mask in the shape of a unicorn head and an elaborate horned headdress. Berliner’s mask was red. The loud and lavish party lasted all night. Kraus pulled Berliner into her personal rooms for a quick tryst, then they rejoined the party to dance and drink champagne.

At the party, Kraus introduced Berliner to David Wilson. Unconcerned about protecting his identity, and lacking Kraus and Berliner’s flair for the theatrical, he didn’t wear a mask. Physically, Wilson was an unimpressive man: short, slightly hunched from years of sitting in front of a computer, and graying early. He was nearsighted but had a face-shape that rejected nearly every style of glasses. Round glasses were too small, rectangular glasses were too long, and the square-ish Wayfarers that had recently come back into style made him look like he was trying too hard. He wore a pair of tortoise-shell Wayfarers anyway. He took a picture with masked Kraus and Berliner. Although the picture from the party doesn’t show it, the three of them oddly look like they could be related: big eyes, dark hair, pale skin, and big smiles with large teeth. Lay pictures of Wilson, Kraus, and Berliner side to side and it will look like you’re assembling a family photo album.