‘Old Berlin’ Archives
Nabokov in Berlin
Lesley Chamberlain takes a closer look at Vladimir Nabokov's relationship with Berlin... Vladimir Nabokov was starting his career as a writer when he found himself in Berlin. "It is clear, for one thing, that while a man is writing, he is situated in some definite place; he is not simply a kind of spirit, hovering over the page...Something or other is going on around him." The short 1934 novel Despair from which this quote comes is already heavily self-ironising compared with [...]
Christiane F. & The Gropiusstadt
Sanna Akehurst visits Gropiusstadt to pay tribute to Christiane F’s Wir Kinder von Bahnhof Zoo... There's a German author and cabaret artist by the name of Horst Evers who once suggested that if any of your acquaintances outside Berlin has the audacity to take your invitation to the city seriously and then insists you show them the sights, you should show them the view out of your flat window and ask them to kindly keep quiet so you can sleep off the rest of your hangover. I wouldn't [...]
Book Review: Young Hitler by Claus Hant
Paul Scraton reviews a new "non fiction novel" that looks at Hitler as a young man... Using real, historical figures as characters in a novel is not completely unusual; nor is the concept of the “non-fiction novel”, that by most accounts began with Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. So the premise of Claus Hant’s Young Hitler should not necessarily be a problematic one. Over three hundred pages Hant tells the story of Adolf Hitler from the age of 16 in 1905 up to his thirty-first year [...]
39 things you might learn if you visit the Stasi Museum with a 10½ week old baby…
Adam Butler pays a visit to the Stasi Museum with his new baby, and learns a few things along the way... 1. That the word barrierefrei when used in reference to e.g. U-Bahn stations, rather than meaning that there are no barriers and you therefore don’t have to buy a ticket, actually means that this is theoretically a place that you can traverse with a pram, wheelchair, broken-hipped aunt, etc. without having to worry about stairs; and that although the nearest station to the Stasi Museum [...]
Night Of The Pawn
Joseph Pearson of Berlin Memory Blog explores Berlin's underground chess scene... It's an abandoned brewery. You enter a gate, a waif-like woman lit by candlelight admits you, but gives no directions. You find yourself in a yard with a hundred parked bikes but no people. Lamps do little to up-light the darkened buildings. There's hesitation, you try a few doors, they're all locked. But you hear music, perhaps the static of conversation, and you divine the right stairwell. It's broken [...]
Mauerpark Flea Market
One of Berlin’s best-loved fleamarkets offers plenty of browsing, decent eats and a fantastic atmosphere... If there’s a flea market most beloved by Berliners and tourists alike, it has to be the one that takes place every Sunday next to the Mauerpark. You'll find it on Bernauer Strasse - just follow the trails of people walking in either direction, past the rows of bikes, ethnic eateries (Tandoori, Jammi Jammi) and mobile sausage vendors to the large set of gates that lead into a [...]
Kino Babylon
William Thirteen pays tribute to one of Berlin's oldest and best-loved cinemas... When the Kino Babylon opened its doors in Spring of 1929 Berliners couldn't complain of a shortage of cinemas. If anything, there was a surplus. The Reichs-Kino-Addressbuch of that year gave the official count as 378, and there were already film palaces at Alexanderplatz and Rosenthaler Tor, as well as innumerable "flea cinemas" in nearby Münzstrasse. But by a fortuitous coincidence of urban planning and [...]
Book Review: Berlin by David Clay Large
Paul Scraton takes a closer look at David Clay Large's fantastic history of the city... “What Potsdamer Platz resembles is an edge city; one of those private, development-driven urbanoid clusters that have sprouted up across the American landscape in recent years. It is reassuring that the new Potsdamer Platz is notably without nationalist expressions. The downside of this is that the place could be anywhere. Like other edge cities, it occupies a kind of nebulous international airport [...]
City Lit: Ten Berlin Books
Berlin has been the inspiration and provided the setting for many novels. Berlin based writer Madhvi Ramani rounds up ten of her favourites... 10. Book of Clouds by Chloe Aridjis “Ever since arriving in Berlin I’d become a professional in lost time. It was impossible to account for all the hours. The hands on clocks and watches jumped ahead or lagged behind indiscriminately. The city ran its own chronometric scale.” Tatiana is a Mexican in Berlin who flits from one job to [...]
Notes From The Underground
Paul Sullivan heads underground to explore an immaculately preserved WWII bunker... Most passengers passing through Gesundbrunnen S Bahn station don’t think twice about the door at the bottom of the stairs. Why should they? It's a plain old door, indistinguishable from a normal private entrance or storage area. But if you opened the door you'd be face-to-face with bonafide Nazi history, in the shape of one of Berlin’s best-preserved war bunkers. The door is locked of course, but not [...]
