‘Old Berlin’ Archives
Onkel Toms Hütte
Natalie Holmes unearths the intriguing story behind Zehlendorf's most singular housing estate... Imagine this: in 1925, 70,000 Berliners lived in basements and about 600,000 people inhabited rooms shared with three others. Many apartments had little or no heating and the lack of running water made for appalling sanitary conditions. In winter the apartments were damp and icy. In summer they were unbearably hot. Times were tough, so in order to survive, women and children frequently [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
In Prenzlauer Berg
Philosopher Justin E. H. Smith takes a stroll around Prenzlauer Berg and ruminates on its (mostly hidden) past... Among the grimmer thoughts one has to contend with on any visit to Berlin is this: that one could very well be staying not only in the logistical nerve center of the Final Solution, but in the very building, and perhaps in the very same room, in which a Holocaust victim once lived. This possibility rose to 50%, in fact, when I was in Berlin a few days ago, and stayed in a [...]
Berlin’s Lesbische Frauen
Brendan Nash explores Berlin's Weimar-era lesbian scene... In 1928, Ruth Margarete Roellig wrote a guide book for visitors to Berlin. But this wasn't just any run-of-the-mill guidebook. This was "Berlin's Lesbische Frauen" a comprehensive guide to the hottest and most happening lesbian bars and clubs the city had to offer. With an estimated 85,000 living in the city, Berlin was the lesbian capital of the world, and visitors were flocking in to experience all the city had to offer, and [...]
GDR Museumswohnung
Grashina Gabelmann visits an East German home that's been preserved as a museum... Whether it’s through movies such as Goodbye Lenin, books like Anna Funder’s Stasiland, Berlin institutions like the Stasi Museum or Hohenschoenhausen, or one of the city’s many themed walking tours, you’ll probably know something about the GDR (German Democratic Republic). But unless you’re one of the rare people who actually lived in East Germany between 1949-1990, you probably won’t know [...]
A Tour of Neukölln’s Berliner Kindl brewery…
Natalie Holmes explores the grand tradition of German beer with a visit to one of Berlin's oldest breweries... The ‘invention of tradition’ is a common practice, one noted among anthropologists as a way for cultures, both dominant and marginal, to reassert their uniqueness in a globalised age of blurred borders. Relatively recent phenomena, such as tartan in Scotland, are discussed as if they are tied to the birth of the culture itself, and often make up an integral part of national [...]
Behind the Wall in ‘Stasiland’
Bookslut's Jessa Crispin talks to Australian author Anna Funder about her 2003 book Stasiland... Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall is a document of a city in flux. After the fall of the wall, the East and West found itself intermingling, sometimes unwillingly, in a city that had to transform itself structurally and demographically very quickly. Australian journalist Anna Funder found herself drawn to these places of tension. In Stasiland we meet a former propagandist for [...]
The GDR Murals Of Magdalenenstrasse U Bahn
The Berlin U-Bahn station Magdalenenstraße, on the city’s U5 line, does not have any advertising hoardings along its walls. Instead, it features a remarkable series of hand-painted murals depicting scenes from German labour history, created by the German painter Wolfgang Frankenstein. The murals were commissioned and installed by the East German government in 1986, as part of their official celebrations of the 750th anniversary of the founding of the city of Berlin in 1237. There were [...]
