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"Slow Travel Berlin"
Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin: A Walking Tour
“For Christopher, Berlin meant boys,” goes a memorable line in Christopher Isherwood’s memoir. It is the starting point for Brendan Nash’s walking tour of the area around Nollendorfplatz in Schöneberg, one of Berlin’s oldest gay neighborhoods. Isherwood, whose portrayal of Berlin between the late 1920s and early 1930s gave us the images many of us still associate with this period, lived here during his third visit to the city. While still a student in Cambridge, Isherwood and [...]
Five Elephant
Natalie Holmes drops in to her neighbourhood cafe to find out what all the fuss is about... I walk through the door of Five Elephant exactly one year after it opened - but there appears to be no time for birthday celebrations. Out front, customers mill about or sit absorbed in laptop land. Just beyond them, a roasting machine is working its magic, surrounded by a crew of human assistants overseen by co-owner Kris. In the background, Kris' partner Sophie prepares a generous batch of [...]
CTM Festival 2012
Between 30th January and 5th February 2012, the thirteenth edition of Berlin's CTM (Club Transmediale) festival will be taking over a range of venues in the city. Paired with the Transmediale festival for media art, the two will run concurrently, with a number of crossover events as well as their own individual line-ups. Both already have significant reputations for fantastic, thought-provoking programmes that avoid treading along established genre lines in favour of a broader, more thematic [...]
Haus Schwarzenberg
Grashina Gabelmann explores the story behind Mitte's Haus Schwarzenberg... Most visitors to Berlin find themselves ambling along Mitte’s Rosenthaler Strasse at some point, often to browse well-known commercial landmarks like the Rosen and Hackeschen Höfe. While these places possess their own kind of charm, located between these highly buffed retail magnets, at No. 39, is a more subdued, scruffy building whose brown, pockmarked façade -- conspicuously un-refurbished – is decorated [...]
Waxing Poetic: Berlin’s Live Lit Scene
Looking for lit events in Berlin? Marian Ryan outlines the best of the city's regular shindigs, salons and slams... For literature geeks in Berlin looking to sample the local scene, there’s no shortage of salons, readings, talks and slams. In English or German, whether at big institutions like the embassies and the American Academy, the traditional, clubby Literaturhäuser or intimate Lesebühnen, options are ample. That’s not even counting the hordes of festivals with a literary [...]
Sing Blackbird
Tam Eastley profiles vegan-vintage concept store and cafe, Sing Blackbird... It's no secret that finding a job in Berlin isn't easy. With the highest unemployment rate in all Germany (12.7% compared to a 6.5% national average), Germans and ex-pats alike need to be increasingly creative when it comes to finding a job, or find themselves forced to leave and look elsewhere. While this can be a struggle and a stress, it also accounts for the abundance of small, creative businesses here in the [...]
Natur-Park Schöneberger Südgelände
The snappily-titled Natur-Park Schöneberger Südgelände is a not-so-well-known 18-hectare urban park at the southern end of Schöneberg. The park has blossomed from the ruins of an old railway hub that was built in the 1890s, and which for 70 years operated as one of the city's busiest (including during WWII). The area was closed and abandoned following the division of the city and nature slowly began to work its magic, reclaiming the old crumbling administrative buildings and rotting [...]
A guide to renting in Berlin
New Berlin resident Marcel Krueger on how his recent move to the city was not as cheap - nor as fun - as he'd imagined... In Ireland, where I've been living for the last five years, finding a new apartment and an agreement with a landlord was never hard. It mostly boiled down to viewing a place, shaking hands and paying a deposit in cash, up front. In Berlin, I've recently discovered, it's a different story. For example, prospective landlords and property agents require you to submit [...]
Bonanza Coffee Roasters
Vanessa Remoquillo chats to Yumi Choi of Bonanza Coffee Roasters... With her business partner Kiduk Reus, Yumi Choi started Bonanza Coffee Heroes in 2007. Hip yet serious, and competitively priced, the coffee outlet at the Mauerpark end of Prenzlauer Berg was quickly embraced by young, trendy, discriminating Berliners. "This is the new Berlin", a patron sweepingly remarks to friends sampling the coffee for the first time. Whatever that means, Bonanza is doing its bit representing this [...]
ZZB: Berlin’s Historical Eye Witnesses
Paul Scraton goes beyond the museums and the history books to look at the importance of eyewitness history and Berlin's ZeitZeugenBörse... http://youtu.be/v3x2EBKn4PM Eyewitness History: An Interview with Jutta Hertlein from the ZeitZeugenBörse Berlin (by Dougal Squires and Ruby Pester). A few years ago I visited the crowded offices of the Falls Road Community Council in Belfast, where they were busy collecting and documenting the testimonies of local people and their memories of [...]
