Diary of a North European Heat Wave

Berlin’s record-breaking temperatures were brutal. I’m worried for the future.

June 2026 — Berlin reached a historic high of 105ºF / 41ºC (author selfie)

Berliners often quip that if you can’t endure the city’s winters — eight cold months of practically unrelenting gray — then you don’t deserve its summers. I moved here from the US in late 2016.

When I finally experienced my first Berlin summer, I was enchanted. Berlin is one of Europe’s greenest cities. Flowers blossom in wave after wave with each microseason all over town; friends pour into lakes and historic beer gardens to cool off and connect; parks and sidewalk cafés fill with life everywhere; and the sun barely sets, save for a few scant hours each night.

These past few summers, though, have been less magical: vicious heat is now part of the norm. And this latest heat wave, which broke records, terrified me.

How brutal can a heat wave in Northern Europe actually be? After all, some world regions routinely experience blazing temps. But buildings here are designed to hold onto any heat they get (thanks to those long winters), and only 6% of German households have a cooling system. If you live on an upper floor (like I do) or have gigantic, south-facing windows (like I do), you are especially screwed. Opening windows at night to cool down is a losing battle; summer nights have less than six hours of darkness.

Air-conditioned public spaces are, likewise, few and far between, often have limited hours and tend to be closed altogether on Sundays. Getting to one by public transit is like riding a veritable oven on rails, such that merely trying to cool off anyplace else forces a lengthy endurance test amidst the outside temps and hotter — followed by a searing-hot return back to a suffocatingly-hot home.

How do you stay cool, then?

You do not.

It feels like living in a fever, except that instead of your body being sick, it’s the Earth who is sick, and no matter how much you might want to escape, for hundreds of miles around, you’re trapped in the burning.

Here’s how that went for me.

Day 1 (Wednesday) — 91ºF

I go out for coffee and last-minute groceries early in the morning, before we reach 85º. Our heat wave is predicted to end next Monday, with five days above 90º or so. I’ve learned from previous Berlin summers that, somewhere in this range, I’m prone to get weak, dizzy, and disoriented, forgetting — mid-walk — where I was trying to go. Since we just had three days above 85º and 90º last weekend, I’ve used the two-day reprieve to stockpile electrolytes and foods that won’t require a stove.

This morning’s outing will be my last contact with civilization until next week.

In a heat wave, the people most likely to become ill or die are the very young, the very old, the physically unwell, the cognitively disabled, and the poor (for lack of resources to ameliorate the problem). At 41, I’m fairly young and mostly healthy, but a few issues that normally don’t endanger me — reactive hypoglycemia, hypotension, anemia, and the fact that I take a medicine every day that dehydrates me — suddenly pose frightening risks in extreme heat.

I get home before noon, close the enormous windows, and draw the curtains, depressed that I won’t be enjoying any sunshine again for nearly another week; when the windows are open, even early in the mornings before the outside air becomes extreme, the tiniest breeze that rustles the curtains lets enough sun in to heat the place substantially. Hence, I’ll only look out once or twice a day — for the next five days.

With today’s being the “lowest” of the daily highs to come, it’s a little uncomfortable indoors, but manageable. A century-old brick building takes a while to warm up.

I spend the rest of Day 1 reading. So far, so good.

But I already know that it will, very soon, be terrible.

Day 2 (Thursday) — 93ºF

Not even 24 hours in, I wake with a general malaise. The building has officially pre-heated. Even with the curtains drawn against the hell outside, I can’t work, can’t tackle my to-do list, can’t even concentrate on reading a book for more than 10 or 20 minutes at a time. I try voice-messaging some friends to occupy myself, but I feel like I’m rambling and losing my train of thought.

Because I am. Because my brain is cooking.

Throughout the day, I take the maximum dose of electrolytes and lose track of how much extra water I drink. I also start seeing blood whenever I blow my nose, but I don’t have energy to wonder why.

“Just three more days,” I tell myself.

Though that’s no genuine reassurance: I know full well that the coming days will be the hottest.

Fuck.

Day 3 (Friday) — 95ºF

I wake with a headache, not knowing whether that’s due to the heat itself, to a migraine, to my medicine, to the health issue for which I take this medicine, to the fact that I’ve been deprived of sunlight for days now, to the impossibility of getting more than a few hours of sleep each night while I roast, or all the above. Whatever the answer, I spend the whole day in pain.

My hazy cognition points out that I felt better yesterday after eating two whole BOWLS of chips — even if just for an hour — so I eat a couple more bowls again today as a chaser to breakfast, thus establishing an official ritual for the remainder of the mornings. (As a hypotensive, I need unholy amounts of salt.)

Until today, I’ve resisted turning my fan on, but now I must accept that it's not optional. The problem is, I’m afraid to tax the gadget’s tiny motor and have it die before the worst arrives in the next two days, because I can’t fathom how I’ll survive without a fan once Berlin climbs past 100º. I know I can’t endure a trip to the stores to hunt for a replacement.

Three days in, I also realize I must dial back on my medicine. My sternum starts getting sore, and a tightness settles over my heart — potential signs of disrupted cardiac signaling. I’m familiar with these symptoms from previous bouts of dehydration. I can’t risk an ER trip; even if I could reach a sweltering hospital safely in this heat (a big “if”), I’ve already learned firsthand that a patient can go neglected for well over 12 hours in a Berlin ER. Hence, though I know I’ll pay later for skipping doses, I can’t justify risking my heart by taking as much medicine as I need.

I’m not confident that this (or any other) choice I make while overheated is a smart or logical one, mind you, but I guess this dilemma is a preview of humanity’s future: heat so extreme that we’ll be making hazy, dangerous gambles on our welfare all the time.

Praise be to our climate-destroying overlords!

By now, having already lost two days to “resting” (translation: suffering), my mental health takes a hit today too. I become frustrated and self-critical, as if my inactivity amidst this nightmare is a character flaw. I want to get stuff done, or make some money… but my brain just can’t. I phone family to pass the time. Conversation is an effort. “Just say what you mean!” my mother urges when I forget a word.

… but I can only reply, “I don’t know what I mean.”

The word comes half a minute later.

I forget the whole topic soon after we hang up.

I also start eating out of boredom now — very unlike me, but I’m at a loss for how else to mark the hours, being so restless, listless, bereft of all other entertainment, and losing touch with the signals of my heat-stressed body. If I am weak and dizzy — which I have been, for days — yet I haven’t even perspired since this began… do I need more electrolytes, more water, or more food? I start defaulting to all three every time something feels wrong.

Something constantly feels wrong.

I go to bed. I hardly sleep.

Day 4 (Saturday) — 105ºF

My roommate decides this morning to seek shelter in a weakly-air-conditioned IKEA two districts away, valiantly braving a 20-minute train ride (plus God-knows-how-long on a bus) just to reach it. Today will shatter records.

Desperate to break the monotony of being imprisoned in my apartment since Wednesday, I decide to capitalize on the alone time by enlisting my vibrator. The heat is already fucking me; I might as well fuck myself. I know this will raise my core temperature (terrible idea), but I’m too desperate for life-affirming stimulation to care. People seek sex under all sorts of stupid circumstances — because sex is older than brains.

Alas, reaching climax is a test of will, almost of defiance, and I’m annoyed to find the finish line vaguely unsatisfying. Some miseries, even an orgasm or six, can’t fix.

After these ill-advised festivities, I accept that my fan must be on today at nearly all times and — just as I demanded of my vibrator — at its most ambitious speed!

Day 4 passes much like the others — just hotter and more alarmingly uncomfortable, in a boring blur of headaches, lethargy, and self-criticism over all this time I’m “wasting.” Except, now, more than self-critical… I feel resentful. I realize this time has been stolen from me; I am trapped in a crisis I didn’t create, forced to devote my vital energies just to monitoring my body’s needs from moment to moment so I can survive.

In what may be a half-delirium, I begin to escape inside my mind now, daydreaming of other blazing-hot once-upon-a-times: the steamy streets of Shanghai during the season of Plum Rains; the late-spring simmer of Seoul; the anytime-in-Bangkok; or the memories I made with friends, eating tánghúlu strawberries at a night market in a Taiwanese June or boardwalk tacos for dinner in a New Jersey July, when we all remarked at how refreshingly cool those evenings felt after a sizzling-hot day… only to realize that the “cool” that made us rejoice was 100ºF.

Yet I am lucid enough to recognize what differentiates “This heat is bearable” from “I’m genuinely worried I might die”: the simple fact that governments in those other regions have cared enough to implement policies to protect people from high temperatures. Hence, elsewhere, a person can venture out of their home on a furnace-like day (or night) to work, socialize, buy food or drinks and go about as needed (no widespread Sunday closures) and generally move about without risking heat injury. To continue engaging with life.

By contrast, because I am not in a boiling-hot Asian metropolis, nor on a burning-hot American beach, I am cloistered in a dark apartment, high up in an old brick building in northern Germany, with 18 hours of daily sun beating mercilessly against the walls for more than half a week now… and so I must shrink all of my vital energies down to a single-pointed focus on staying put and staying still. Just to stay safe.

The only productive task I manage today — really, through this whole period — is cleaning my laptop screen and replacing the keyboard cover: brainless, menial work. The only kind possible when it’s too hot to think, and the only kind for which humans will be required in a climate-collapse world, where AI does everything else. How wonderful to know I’m qualified!

Around dinnertime, Berlin reaches a historic high of 105ºF. Scrolling social media, I see someone in Belgium (or the Netherlands, or the UK, or here, or France) describe our collective experience as an inescapable miasma of dread: that you know there’s an imminent threat to your life — literally, it’s all around you — that you absolutely can’t get away from.

It sobers me to realize they’re right; this threat is so big that it swallows whole countries around me. Even the staunchest of science-denying Trumpsters in my family now has woken up to the fact that Europe is indeed baking alive and that I’m in genuine danger, as news of people and animals dying across this continent reaches the other side of the Atlantic; I know this when a Republican Boomer finally stops trying to counter my feeble, frightened complaints with retorts that Pennsylvania is unseasonably cool, or that one summer 40 years ago had a heat wave too.

Tonight, I place my fan right on the bed (imbecilic move from a fire safety standpoint, I confess) and hold ice to my pressure points… only to put the ice back in the freezer after 15 minutes because it’s melting fast and I can’t risk adding an electrical fire to this rodeo.

A thunderstorm raging outside inspires a new dread: what if a power outage kills my fan?

But the power survives. I sleep fitfully until morning.

Day 5 (Sunday) — 103ºF

The worst of the headaches yet. Something is amiss this morning. My calves are cramped despite all my utter inactivity since Wednesday. I can’t tell anymore whether I feel hot (sometimes I feel something almost like chills?), and I seem mildly confused, restlessly shuffling items back and forth from room to room because I keep forgetting where I want them. As I talk to myself, I suddenly feel like an outside observer who’s dropped in on a monologue that verges on derailing.

This is when I pause, get very serious, and hear myself say out loud, “Something’s… very wrong.”

I check the thermometers: 87º indoors (although I’ve lost track by now of how hot any room has been, or for how long). I know this is bad. It’s just that nothing I’ve tried these past few days has helped much.

This time, I douse a dish towel in water, grab an ice block, roll out my yoga mat, and lie down — placing the towel and ice directly on my torso — and just exist now in front of the fan. For a long, long time. My skin feels burning-hot to the touch.

Day 5 passes in a maddening rotation of, “I’m lying in front of a fan with ice, but I’m uncomfortable on the hardwood floor” vs. “I’m resting somewhere comfortably upholstered, but the upholstery holds days’ worth of heat, and my headache is back.”

While I lie on my floor for hours today, there’s plenty of time to be angry at the fact of having been forced to pour all of myself, for nearly a week now, into base orders like, “Prepare food.” “Take electrolytes.” “Curl around fan.” I contemplate Earth’s future, crestfallen; I realize that no one’s proficiencies, predilections, preferences, or potentials matter at all in a burning world. I’m a smart person, I’m a loving person, I’m a creative person, I have ideas, I want to contribute to other human beings, I want to see other human beings, I want to look out the damn window!… but I can’t think, can’t focus, can’t leave, certainly can’t work, and can’t even open the drapes.

Basically, I can’t do any of the things that make me feel like a person.

…but I do eat a full-sized chocolate bar today, just for a little bit of joy, because fuck it.

Counting down until the last extreme temp breaks and it’s “cool” enough at a reasonable hour (83º outside vs. 86º in here), I go outside to take a walk.

Finally. At 10 pm.

It’s post-apocalyptically quiet on the streets of Berlin, where life pulses weakly in the wake of the sweeping, continent-wide crisis — which still broils to the east. In the dark-blue dusk, parks and sidewalks start repopulating loosely with tentative, spent Berliners and their dogs, apparently all just as desperate to re-establish contact with the world, yet still too shell-shocked to engage beyond themselves. Though spring ended less than two weeks ago, piles of leaves have already fallen to the ground. Autumn-yellow and brittle, they make an eerie, paper-rustling sound when I bump them with my toe.

In fact, the next morning, I’ll see that the grasses yellowed too — some downright browned — and a friend one district over will send me a photo of her window boxes: all the flowers desiccated and collapsed.

I remember this same haunting stillness from last summer’s worst heat. When it’s too hot to do anything but nothing, there is no birdsong, no barking of happy dogs, no giddy shriek of children’s laughter in the courtyards. Life withdraws when Earth burns.

This is the heat of death, I think.

In the days that follow, my thoughts will be laced with the foreboding awareness that if the next heat wave goes on any longer, or gets any hotter, or even happens later this same year after Berlin’s buildings collect more summer heat, I might not survive.

Is it a form of self-harm to stay in a region so ill-equipped for climate change? I don’t want to have to spend my future on a vigilant rotation of desperate strategies to cool my brain and blood for days or weeks on end. Don’t want to have to skip doses of medicine, or be afraid to go out into the world of the living (much less for necessities like food or an ER visit), or despair over whether I can afford an air-conditioned hotel or a ticket out of town, just to find safety.

Which begs troubling questions regarding the rest of my life:

Has this been some kind of trauma? Years from now, will I have unsettled flashbacks to this unnatural disaster? To the five days I spent on a shuffled repertoire of survival attempts that felt only half-effective — weak, foggy-headed, in constant physiological distress, as a shut-in in a brick-oven of an apartment?

Or will I be wistful for this memory, in some climate-collapsed future that brings even worse?

Laura Rosell writes about society, spirituality, and human connection. You can support her writing through a tip at Ko-fi.