‘Art & Culture’ Archives
Gartenstadt Falkenberg
Elizabeth Childers profiles Bruno Taut's Gartenstadt Falkenberg housing estate... Image by Ryan Hursh Take the S-Bahn twenty kilometers southeast from the Middle of Berlin to the Grünau stop and you will end up at a small and intriguing housing estate called Gartenstadt Falkenberg (“Falkenberg Garden City”). Clustered around three streets — Akazienhof, Am Falkenberg, and Gartenstadtweg — are 128 dwellings. These simple but colourful buildings sit in what looks like an almost [...]
Renaissance in the Gemäldegalerie
In celebration of Slow Art Day, Kirsten Hall visits the Gemäldegalerie and focuses on three of her favourite Renaissance paintings... Renaissance wing of the Gemäldegalerie with the painting of St. Sebastian Berlin’s oft-overlooked Gemäldegalerie -- one of the assembly of museums, galleries and libraries that comprise Potsdamer Platz’s Kulturforum -- dates back to 1830 and hosts one of the world’s largest collections of European paintings from the 13th to the 18th [...]
Anika: Q&A
Natalye Childress talks to Annika Henderson (Anika) about her new album and Berlin as creative muse... Photo by Jeff Meltz It's not entirely a stretch for artists to move around within the space of the creative realm, crossing over from one medium to another, but it is somewhat rare when someone with a stable profession suddenly makes a horizontal move into the art world. Yet that is exactly what political journalist Annika Henderson did some three or four years ago, and she hasn't [...]
Berlin At War
Brian Melican reviews Roger Moorhouse's excruciatingly detailed account of Berlin during World War 2... Berlin at war: the devastated city in 1945 For a comparatively young city, Berlin is by no means short on history. Paris and London may have been founded by the Romans, but the presence of the past in Berlin can be quite overwhelming – primarily, and quite paradoxically, due to the recent nature of this past. There must be nearly two million people in the city who remember the Wall [...]
Photographing Berlin’s Homeless
Jack Seemer chats to Paul-Hynes Allen about his portraits of the homeless... Photographer Paul-Hynes Allen’s work has often been rooted in the concept of the outsider – the individual apart, oftentimes “the stranger”. It’s a concept that has driven him in the pursuit of artistic progress, but helped himself also to overcome the impact and scars from a turbulent past. Hailing from Croydon, south London, he first came to Berlin in 2004 after finishing his BA at Brighton [...]
Easter in Berlin 2013
With icy winds still blowing through Berlin's snow-spattered streets, it seems hard to believe that the Easter holidays are almost here. While we patiently await the arrival of spring’s warmth and blooms, here's our round up of Easter-related festivals and events. Don't forget to wrap up warm! Medieval Festivals Between Saturday 30 March - Monday 1 April the lovely Kloster Chorin just north of Berlin will celebrate their annual medieval festival (€4 adults, €2.50 children). [...]
Jewish Museum Berlin
Paul Sullivan takes a trip through one of Berlin's darkest museums... Front Garden of the Jewish Museum by Matthias Heiderich Of all Berlin’s myriad museums and memorials, Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum is one of the most powerful and unique. Built in 1999 and opened in 2001, it’s a bold attempt to express not only the horrors of the Holocaust, but also to examine the broader history of Jewish life and culture in Germany. Located off a busy road in the city’s Kreuzberg [...]
Berlin’s GDR Museum
John Feffer explores the split personality of Berlin's GDR Museum... The GDR Museum in Berlin is actually two museums in one. And these two parts, both devoted to everyday life in the German Democratic Republic, subtly contradict one another. That might not have been the intention of the museum founders. But this tension actually captures the ambiguities of East Germany and the ambivalence that many Germans feel today about the erstwhile communist state. The experience inside the main [...]
Berlin’s Best Bookshops
Paul Sullivan rounds up some of the city's best English (and some German) language bookstores... Another Country Named as one of the top ten bookshops in the world by Lonely Planet, Kreuzberg’s Another Country is one of Berlin’s longest-running literary/intellectual salons for the English-speaking crowd. A good chunk of its 20,000-odd books are for loan, not sale (bring a book back and the purchase price is refunded, minus €1.50), while about ten percent of stock functions as a [...]
Farewell to C/O Berlin at Postfuhramt
Stuart Holt says a sad farewell to one of Berlin's most beautiful photography spaces.... Photo by Stuart Holt The first time I visited the C/O Gallery in Berlin it was deep winter. It was oppressively dark outside and the thick snow on the ground made a satisfying crunch as our collective boots marched towards the former post office on Oranienburgerstrasse. I was not yet very familiar with Berlin and somehow the city felt very Cold War to me - or at least cold; grainy and moody like [...]
