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 railway tracks from the ground up. In 1995, the legal owners Deutsche Bahn AG donated 18 hectares of the area to the Berlin Senate as compensation for the “negative impact on nature of transportation facility expansion in the city center”. Thanks to the work of campaigning Berliners and ecological experts, the park was officially opened to the public in 2000 and declared a Global Project of EXPO 2000.

Today the park is a beguiling mix of industrial ruins (including a well-maintained old steam train), modern art (a series of modern sculptures and a spray park) and the fauna and flora – birch, lime, fruit and oak trees, 30 species of breeding birds, 350 plant species and lots of bees, crickets and grasshoppers – that now call the park home and keep the joggers and strollers company.

Natur-Park Schöneberger Südgelände
Priesterweg
10829 Berlin
T +49 (0)30 70 09 060

The main entrance to the park is via Priesterweg S-Bahn station (S2, S25). The park is open all year round from 09:00 until sunset. Admission: 1 euro.

About The Author

Paul Sullivan is a Berlin-based writer & travel photographer and the founder of Slow Travel Berlin. You can check out his personal website here and some of his photography galleries here.

Photo by Jack Orlik

The workshop stands in a triangle of land carved up by industrial bars of steel: frontiers formed by the S-Bahn and national railway tracks that bring trains thundering past every few minutes.

“It’s a shame you didn’t get to see it in the sun. It can be really quite beautiful”, says Dan Vogel-Essex, gesturing over the scrubland that was once a trainyard. The sky has clouded over, and the thick metallic smell of rain begins to permeate the air.

Dan tells me that the land and its buildings are rented as a community from the Deutsche Bahn, and run by a committee chosen from those working on the site. Despite the relics of defunct urban industry – the shallow impression of the old turntable, and the paved ground, forcing the plants through narrow cracks in the concrete – Dan is right. It does seem quite idyllic.

Dan takes me into a building, and down to the cellar. To the right, dozens of bicycles hang off racks attached to the wall. In the room to our left, there’s a man working on a beautiful blue racer from the Eighties. “This is Stefan”. Stefan says hello, but gestures with his oily fingers that shaking hands might be difficult.

“We started out thinking we could earn money by fixing up old bikes, but I soon realized that that was a whole lot of work for not much cash”. That’s when he decided to start building bicycles from bamboo. He gestures to a frame hanging on the wall – a Heath-Robinsonesque construction bound together with twine.

“That was the first one. It broke pretty quickly.”

“What was wrong with it?”

“Everything”.

Photo by Jack Orlik

I ask if there are any advantages to building bikes from bamboo. How does it bear up against metal and glass-fibre framed bikes? “Well, there are no disadvantages,” says Dan. Stefan sidles into view, absent-mindedly cleaning up with a greasy rag: “You have to look at it as a material in its own right.

Every material has its pros and cons. Aluminium is cheap to produce, but it’s hard and uncomfortable. Steel is nicer to ride, but it can bend. Bamboo is free growing, and easy to fix. And it’s comfortable to ride”.

Looking at the near-mint 30-year-old steel frame in the middle of the room, I express my doubts that a bamboo bicycle would last as long. Dan takes me to the racks next door and pulls out two bikes.

“I rode this all winter, and it’s fine”. I’m amazed – the freezing, wet and cold winter months of Berlin have done no damage at all. “Is it varnished?” “No. Stefan varnished one of his, but there’s no real difference”. I lift another bike; it’s as light as a feather. “That one, Light? That’s the heaviest one we’ve made. Try this.”

Dan hands me a bicycle that I could carry with my little finger. As a competitor to traditional metal-framed bikes, bamboo can could hold its own pretty well. But Dan’s not that interested in bamboo, or in bicycles themselves. “They’re not something I dream about at night”.

He likes the idea of offering bamboo bike construction as a high-end customer service, and hopes to be making them as a business within a year. Thinking about them as “a product”, though, Dan says that the bikes lose their fascination. What really excites him is the place they have in an ongoing trend of the 21st century. “The bamboo bicycle is a symbol for a change in our expectations of materials. There.”

What makes the bikes special is their use of composite materials; specifically, Dan’s home brew of resins and natural fibres – the stuff that holds the bamboo bars together. “Lots of people say that renewable energy won’t work, because electricity can never produce the heat needed to smelt metals like steel”. Composites are a solution to this problem, but using them to replace more traditional man-made materials would require enormous changes to the manufacturing processes that the industrial world has grown up with. And, as Dan says, “It takes a long-ass time to change anything”.

Photo by Jack Orlik

The technology is there, though: laser-measuring technology exists that can make minute adjustments to machinery operated on irregular materials; research into the epoxy resins that can be mixed with natural fibres has “skyrocketed” in recent years. Consumers now care about where things are made, how it’s done, and what they’re made of.

For Dan, the popularity of the bamboo bike is testament to this: “In the future, when they look back on history, and they look back at the change from non-reusable materials to natural composites, the bamboo bike will be there as a side note, saying that this was one of the first products accepted.”

Before I leave, Dan takes me upstairs to his office. “This is what I dream about,” he says, thrusting a bunch of papers into my hand. They’re covered in beautiful drawings – hundreds of sketches of one-person cars. Dan tells me that they would be electric, and made of natural composites.

“These are the future. I was so pissed off when the US government bailed out the auto industry. The government halted innovation! I’ve got friends who work for GM. Do you know what they call it within the company?” “No?” “The Titanic.” Walking once more though the post-industrial yard surrounding the workshop, Dan’s ideas seem to echo in the landscape: nature and artifice working together to create something strong, beautiful and slightly futuristic.

www.dvedesign.com

This article first appeared in Issue 5 of The Manzine, a venerable, non-aspirational magazine about the male phenomenon.

Shiatsu Loft

It’s 5pm on Kottbusser Damm: the road is busy with cars returning home from work, the market traders are yelling as they try to get rid of the last of their produce, while, down by Hermannplatz, blue lights flash as the siren from another emergency vehicle approaches.

But, up on the fourth floor of a hinterhof behind the Banzai Sports school, peace reigns supreme. This is where Katrin Werner launched her Shiatsu Loft at the beginning of the year. A petite woman with silver blonde hair and an amiable smile, she welcomes me into the sanctuary of her studio and offers me a cup of herbal tea, gesturing to a white sofa with a view over nearby rooftops.

This will be my first experience of Shiatsu, which has its roots in centuries old traditional Chinese medicine. Though there are now several schools of treatment, the word means ‘finger pressure’ in Japanese, and this remains central to all its varieties. Werner specialises in Zen Shiatsu, popularised in the West by Shizuto Masunaga’s book of the same name, published in 1974. Where some forms of the practise sought to integrate Western understanding of physiology, Masunaga focussed more on the more traditional approach, emphasising the importance of deep relaxation: hence the Zen.

Werner, who studied Art History but then built her reputation in her former incarnation as a curator of media art, first experienced Shiatsu in the late 1990s when she took what she refers to as a “revelationary” massage course at university. Though she continued with her work for a number of years, the encounter remained with her, its lessons slowly filtering more and more into her daily life, and, in the mid 2000s, she signed up for proper training. She eventually took the difficult but ultimately inevitable decision to leave her art curation behind, and, having worked for a short while in Mitte, she set up the Shiatsu Loft in Kreuzberg.

Conversation reveals Werner to be a woman keen to combine her love of the technique with a genuine interest in people – she sees her work, she says, as “a dialogue” between herself and the patient – and she enquires politely as to whether I have any special issues that might be worth addressing. Her manner puts me at my ease, and it becomes clear that the traditional role of journalist and subject has been reversed: in answer to her gentle questioning, I’m soon candidly discussing my problems with pre-hypertensile blood pressure and confessing to an ongoing failure to deal with stress effectively, while my own enquiries into the methodology are temporarily put to one side.

Shiatsu Loft

This approach, she explains, allows her to determine more efficiently how best to treat each individual client, but, although she goes on to explain a little about how she’ll be working, I realise the moment we stand up that I remain fairly unenlightened about what is actually going to take place.

When Werner advises me to lie down on a futon at the furthest end of the room, asking whether I brought anything more comfortable than the jeans I’m wearing, I learn for the first time that Shiatsu is practised on fully clothed patients. I notice that my sock has a hole in it, and, oddly, feel briefly more exposed than if I were wrapped in nothing more than a towel.

With my head supported by a small cushion, I lie on my back while Werner begins her work in silence, a blessed if unforeseen relief given some of the music to which I have been previously exposed during massages. Though she later admits that she considers herself a deeply spiritual person, this isn’t something that she brings to patients unless they are specifically seeking it. Instead, she’s most concerned with ensuring that they enjoy an opportunity to relax while she addresses any specific problems that may have been raised.

Her manner is gentler than I had expected, soft like the hands with which she begins to seek out pressure points on my own. Attempting to find a balance between observing and enjoying the treatment, I periodically open my eyes to discover that her eyes too are firmly shut, and that she seems to be working by touch alone. Later, she bashfully concedes that this isn’t necessarily normal practise, but it allows her to be more intuitive. He grandmother was blind, and she previously worked in a care home for those afflicted, so she’s highly attuned to the way the loss of one sense can heighten others.

In all honesty, I’m initially disappointed that the massage isn’t firmer, but this nonetheless fails to bring out the cynic in me: there’s no gentle laying on of hands in the style of a spiritual healer, after all, and she’s definitely finding spots that appreciate her attention. Indeed, after a while, the subtlety of her procedure starts to pay dividends: without the distraction of especially physical exertion, I focus more on the response of my body, noticing how my shoulders are starting to loosen – helped, I’m sure, by the way she at one stage pushes them down into the mattress – and also recognising the manner in which my leg, for instance, resists the stretches she puts it through, even though, consciously, I feel entirely comfortable. I’m forced to address my own tension, in a sense, to enable her and myself to continue profitably, and, in a curious fashion, this enables me to play a greater part in the relaxing, meditative process.

Katrin Werner, Shiatsu Loft

I’ve always found it hard to switch off, and yet, when Werner finally rises from beside the futon and quietly tells me that I can rest, I’m more than content to lay there for a while longer before I feel that the time has come to get on with real life. She’s worked on my arms and legs, my back, my neck and even my stomach, and, though the process seems to have been considerably shorter, it’s in fact lasted an hour. When I finally sit up, I shake myself a little like a dog emerging from a lake and realise how loose I feel.

She offers me another tea and asks if I have any questions. I do, but perhaps not the ones she expects: I ask whether she feels she has learnt anything about me. On previous occasions, masseurs have insisted that I have ‘blockages’, and these are most likely affecting me in particular, and yet still vague, fashions. Werner, interestingly, refuses to diagnose anything explicit, and instead tells me that, rather than her consciously making judgements, a picture or a word will sometimes form in her head as she works on individual parts of the body. I ask her to elaborate, and, though what she reveals about the past hour could be associated with the conversation we had earlier, something she’s more than happy to concede, she highlights certain aspects of my own personality of which I am fuzzily aware. I, in turn, concede that there’s something about her work that seems to have addressed them.

Back on Kottubusser Damm, rush hour is over, but it’s still a shock to emerge from the refuge of the Shiatsu Loft into the hurly-burly of day-to-day life. Though this hasn’t offered me quite the epiphany that Werner herself experienced back at university, somehow it lingers, and I’m grateful for a quiet evening ahead that will allow me to maintain my sense of calm for a few more hours. I remember how she told me that Shiatsu is like drinking green tea in comparison to the strong mug of coffee that a more vigorous massage might represent: it’s subtler, but its effects are longer lasting.

A few days later, after a weekend of typical Berlin debauchery, I realise I’m craving the peace of the Shiatsu Loft once again, its memory imprinted still in my mind. It might be time to consider exchanging work and peer pressure for finger pressure on a more regular basis…

A regular 40 min Shiatsu treatment costs 35€. 60 mins is 50€. A first, non-committal treatment 30 mins costs 25€ and the Blue Monday Special (60 mins) costs 40€.

Shiatsu Loft Berlin
Kottbusser Damm 25
10967 Berlin
T: 0163 854 17 60
Open: Wed, Thur, Fri, Sat, Sun 12-21, Mon 11-19

About The Author

Wyndham Wallace has been travelling for fifteen years as part of his work with musicians, first as a publicist for City Slang Records, then as a manager for Lee Hazlewood and Cortney Tidwell. His work as a music and travel journalist and photographer has appeared in The Guardian, Uncut, BBC Music, Electronic Beats, The Quietus and More Intelligent Life, amongst others. He now lives in Berlin, Germany. Check out his blog here.

Image by Jonathan Thompson

When I’m in a city, I am drawn to the places in-between. Spaces, I mean, that somehow avoided being paved over, or built upon, or that once held buildings that have now collapsed, the rubble mostly hauled away, leaving only the structure’s ghost all filled up with spindly weeds.

Sometimes these spaces are just surprising: When vacant lots are selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars just a short walk away, how has this space remained empty and undesired? Sometimes these spaces are surprisingly wild. When I visit Los Angeles, my wife always drives (thanks to urban-automobile-neurosis on my part), leaving me to wonder at the remarkably green strip of land that separates many lanes of interstate asphalt.

The vegetation is so dense here, I think, these slivers of wildness so unnoticed by the harried passersby, that I can’t help but wonder why the homeless don’t carve out little abodes here, rather than in concrete doorways. Perhaps they do.

My proclivity for seeking out the spaces-in-between did not perish when I came to Berlin. I automatically started noticing them on our first S-Bahn trip through the city (the S-Bahn mostly rides above-ground, and affords a view of the backside of Berlin, while the U-Bahn is the underground train).

These forgotten spaces are plentiful here: vine-infested hillsides; buildings that look to have been bombed out in the war and never resuscitated; random grafitti-covered walls sticking out of the dirt here and there; and an enigmatic, hulking metal skeleton called a gasometer, whose purpose I still cannot divine. They are distinctly urban spaces that have surrendered to the forces of the wild.

After I had been in Berlin for about a year, I had become enamoured with a few of these spaces in particular. In one of them, no more than a weed- and tree-infested offshoot of a LIDL parking lot in Wedding, I once came face to face with a fox. On those initial Bahn trips through the city, however, I also started noticing something else: little in-between-in-between spaces, with what looked like tiny houses and gardens.

The first one I saw reminded me of those L.A. freeway strips. It was on a narrow strip nestled between the S-Bahn tracks and and some freight train tracks, right on the edge of the Westhafen industrial complex. A low fence surrounded it, and it was divided into several different plots. Each plot had a small structure, along with a lush garden. The gardens were immaculately groomed, yet densely populated with vegetables, flowers and often a fruit tree or two. It made me wonder if Berlin’s multicultural quilt included elves and gnomes.

I began noticing these complexes all over the city; some were tiny, some were as big as city blocks, with dozens of plots and the tiny little houses.  Finally, I saw a sign on the entrance to one of these spaces. It read, Kleingartenkolonie, or little garden colony. No elves included.

Image by Jonathan Thompson

These are Germany’s allotment gardens, which are something like U.S. community gardens, super-sized. Though we like to think of urban agriculture and local foods as some sort of newfangled revolutionary things, Kleingartenkolonies have been around for a long time. The concept originated in the 19th Century, when the German government, instead of handing out welfare, granted land to poor folks to garden so that they could provide for themselves. The gardens were also intended to reconnect kids with nature, which was certainly an idea before its time.

Over the decades, the number of allotment gardens grew; when the city ran out of empty land, it bought more, with help from the federal government. After World War II, people actually lived on their plots, which may explain why so many of the current structures look more like little houses than potting sheds.

Today, there are more than 800 Gartenkolonies in Berlin, alone. Within those colonies are a total of more than 75,000 garden plots, each measuring about 250 square meters. Apartment-dwelling Berliners pay between 300 and 400 Euros per year to tend to and enjoy the plots. They must follow strict rules; at least 30 percent of the plot must be devoted to food production. Hedges can be only so big; owners are supposedly not allowed to live on the plot, but some of the so-called garden cottages appear to be big enough, and adequately equipped, for full-on habitation.

Traditionally, the allottees have been older folks, but in recent years the back-to-the-land movement has brought younger people, along with a new wave of immigrants, to the gardens. Thousands of people are on the waiting list for the gardens.In addition to getting people out of the concrete landscape so they can get their hands in the dirt and produce fresh fruit and vegetables, Berlin’s allotment gardens also add to the city’s already abundant green spaces (Berlin, with an abundance of parks and even a local forest, is considered one of the greenest cities in the world).

The Gartenkolonies appear in even the most downtrodden neighborhoods, providing oases of tidy vegetation amidst the grafitti-stained concrete and dog poop-piled pavement. They appear to go mostly unmolested by the graffiti artists, who have covered nearly every other surface in this city with their work.

There are those who feel that the Kleingartenkolonies, with each plot divided from the others by little fences as if in a mini-suburbia, are a bit too individualistic. And so, more communal urban gardens are popping up in Berlin as an alternative. Still, the slightly more private garden colonies, where the community can meet in community centers, seems to fit the particular German Zeitgeist a bit better. And for that matter, I think it would do quite well in the U.S, given the chance.

Up until recently the American dream of a big house with a big yard surrounded by a big fence to keep out the neighbors would never have accommodated Kleingartenkolonies or anything like them. That may be changing. With the collapse of the housing boom, credit drying up and people experiencing foreclosure left and right, former big-homeowners are developing a taste for smaller rentals and apartments. They no longer have giant yards of their own in which to do their own gardening.

Image by Jonathan Thompson

Meanwhile, the cost of once premium land has taken a nosedive, and big parcels that used to be farms, then were slated for development, are now sitting vacant, turning into spaces in-between. Phoenix, Arizona, where the housing boom boomed the hardest and crashed just as hard, now has many such a vacant lot, just waiting for a great community project.

Perhaps the banks, who I assume now own a lot of that land, would even consider donating it to the cause (not out of any sort of charitable urge, of course, but to get a tax deduction so that they can siphon more profits to CEO compensation, and also to unload some worthless assets). And for those of you who worry about polluting America’s Jell-O-fed purity with some commie Euro idea, check out the great essay by Grist’s Tom Philpott on the history of urban ag in the U.S. Turns out Berlin’s allotment gardens look a bit like American urban gardening efforts of old (the German gardens merely persevered, rather than getting paved over by strip malls, although that could change).

With bio-intensive gardening, these plots could feed a family for a summer, or offer an ambitious farmer enough produce to make some cash at the neighborhood farmers’ market. They’d add diversity to the concrete landscape, turn a few of those spaces-in-between into places of horticultural creativity (not to mention creepy lawn ornaments) and keep the Starbucks and strip malls and maybe even gentrification at bay, especially if the little elf houses were equipped for full-time habitation.

You can get an overview of Berlin’s allotment gardens via this map.

About The Author

Jonathan Thompson is a freelance journalist, writer and editor based in Berlin and in Boulder, Colorado, where he is a Ted Scripps Fellow in Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado. More of his work can be found at his gin + gelato blog.

Lilienthal Memorial (photo by Hidden Europe)

Prosaic places are so often the most interesting spots. And the Berlin suburb of Lichterfelde ranks as decidedly prosaic. None of the main English-language guidebooks to Berlin so much as mentions the suburb where we live and work.

Tourists do not flock to Lichterfelde to see the great sights of a community that, fifty years ago this summer, awoke on a Sunday morning to find that their local train service had been disrupted by the closing of the border between East Germany and West Berlin. No longer did the trains run south from Lichterfelde Ost across the nearby border.

Yet, like so many unsung suburbs around Berlin, leafy Lichterfelde does have a few minor claims to fame. By the railway station is an old tram stop. No trams have paused there for many a year, but the tram stop still displays details of a route that once linked Lichterfelde Ost station with the Prussian Cadet Academy three kilometres away. Most residents of Lichterfelde never notice the tram stop and many surely have no idea that this was the world’s very first electric tramway.

Aviation history

Lichterfelde cuts a dash in the history of aviation too. Otto Lilienthal conducted some of his early experiments in manned flight here. Lichterfelde was perhaps an odd choice, for our local landscape is pretty two dimensional and Lilienthal’s efforts really needed a steep hill from where he might launch himself into the air.

So Lilienthal compensated for this local deficiency in topography by creating in 1894 an artificial hill that is still a landmark in our local park. Kids now paddle in the pond below the steep slope where Lilienthal tried to prove that men might fly. Lilienthal’s experiments came to an unhappy end in 1896 when the aviator crashed to the ground and was fatally injured. But Lilienthal’s pioneering efforts paved the way for later successes by the Wright brothers.

Lichterfelde is not a conspicuously religious place, but the ethno-confessional landscape has been enhanced recently by the opening of a new church. It is no more than a chapel really, built on a fragment of wasteland between the railway line and the rambling prefab that houses an Asian takeaway. Yet the evident love with which the local Macedonian Orthodox community care for this little patch of land and their new church is deeply impressive. It is a little touch of sanctity in an otherwise rather secular suburb.

Market in Lichterfelde (photo by Hidden Europe)

The Silver Screen

Just a five-minute walk from our office is an old Coca-Cola bottling plant. It was built in 1957 to assuage the thirst of US soldiers – one of the four foreign armies that then occupied Berlin.

And the Coca-Cola plant and offices played a lead role, just a few months prior to the building of the Berlin Wall, in Billy Wilder’s classic portrayal of Cold War Berlin in his film One, Two, Three. James Cagney played a Coca-Cola executive who would far rather be in a glamorous west European city than having to cope with life in beleaguered Berlin.

A great part of the film was shot at that local Coca-Cola plant. Perhaps James Cagney was a regular at the Asian takeaway as the film crew and actors took a break for lunch. Coca-Cola long ago abandoned the buildings. Yet the former bottling plant enjoyed a second outing on celluloid in the 2003 film Goodbye Lenin, which, in a nice homage to Billy Wilder, included a single scene shot at the old Coca-Cola building.

Throw in a decent twice-weekly fresh food market, a sizeable Italian population, a couple of good bookshops and a clutch of friendly cafés, and you’ll see that Lichterfelde is a very likeable spot. A mere fleck on the map of Berlin, a place that makes no great claims for itself. Unfamous, unsung. And all the better for the excellent cycle path and hiking trail that now marks the former line of the Berlin Wall. What was once a formidable barrier is now one of our suburb’s principal assets.

About The Authors

Susanne Kries and Nicky Gardner, authors of the 2009 Manifesto for Slow Travel (www.slowtraveleurope.eu), run the hidden europe editorial bureau in Berlin-Lichterfelde. The two woman are full-time writers and editors. They specialise in slow travel, write about cultures and communities across Europe and together edit hidden europe magazine (details on www.hiddeneurope.co.uk). Their book Europe by Rail: The Definitive Guide for Independent Travellers was published by Thomas Cook Publishing in March. Find out more at www.europebyrail.eu. A book on favourite bus journeys in Britain is published next month by Bradt Travel Guides. You’ll run across words and images by Nicky and / or Susanne in media across Europe: from the Kyiv Post to New Statesman, from the Barents Observer to Russian Life. Their writing on offbeat communities across Europe has been translated into Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Italian, German, Spanish and Basque. (This text is a slightly amended version of an article first published as a hidden europe e-brief on 13 August 2011).

Weinstein's interior

Upon entering Weinschenke Weinstein, you immediately sense that this is not your average German bistro or chi chi Prenzlauer Berg dive.

It exudes the air of a restaurant that is fine and feathered with wine barrels and old vintages bottles lining the wall paired with simple wooden tables and furnishings.

There is nothing fancy or intimidating about this establishment – in fact, it remains somewhat incognito with its ivy clad facade smack in the hubbub of this relatively bustling Prenzlauer Berg neighborhood.

Founded originally as a wine bar in 1993, Weinstein, much like its hometown of Berlin, continues “to become.” It has evolved from a simple enoteca to a restaurant now known for its fierce dedication to quality food and wine.

Dining here is more than just something to notch up on your belt of nights out on the town. Rather, it is a lesson in taste education. The menu advises you to drink – but to do it with food and thus gain a better understanding of how the two relate, and more significantly, how they reinforce one another. This sets Weinstein apart from your typical fine and dines.

Speaking with owner, Roy Metzdort, on a quiet Tuesday evening over glasses of German Riesling by winemaker Martin Tesche, I quickly learned about the restaurant’s history and current philosophy. Originally from Southern Germany and an electronic engineer by trade, Roy began to experience health problems in the early 1990s. This directed his attention to food, and upon moving to Berlin, he opened the restaurant. “I wanted a place where people could come and taste good but interesting wines. We were just a wine bar for 18 years. The food aspect developed later.”

Weinstein's Interior (photo by Sylee Gore)

The turning point was after the 2006 German World Cup under the direction of then head chef, Uwe Groß. Following the Cup, there was suddenly a renewed interest in German cuisine and a desire to reconnect to the land. Groß took this as an opportunity to seek out the best ingredients and to develop a new menu founded on quality products.

“Now, we get our fish from producers in Brandenburg and go to to wine fairs in order to see what other producers are doing. We are constantly seeking out the best and cultivating new relationships. It’s fun how things have changed, and I believe we do the best we can, but we don’t go overboard. We are not beholden to German cuisine nor do we have a desire to reinvent it. It is fine how it is. The most important thing are the products and their quality. We want to support producers who are committed to such a standard – wine producers included.”

The menu features staples like spätzle, goulash, sauerkraut stew and fried vendace (a fish), caught in Brandenburg and served on potato and mustard-gherkin salad. Slow Food aficionados will appreciate the Brandenburg Plate (€11), which features a selection of salami, ham, sausage and goat’s cheese from some of the best regional producers.

For more exotic taste buds there’s spiced bacon made from Mangalitza pig (Speck Plate Lardo, €6), selections of French cheeses made from unpasteurized milk (from acclaimed Berlin importer Maitre Philippe in Berlin, €11), and even a divine 50g Joselito-Pata Negra, Jamon Iberico Bellota Gran Reserva, pricey at €22 but commonly reckoned to be the world’s best ham — the Iberico pigs are fed on acorns for 24 months, their legs packed in sea salt for 15 months and then air-cured for several months at an altitude of 1.000 metres. They then mature for a further 36 months in the bodega.

Weinstein also has a pairing menu that is as much for their own benefit as their customers’ as it forces them to think carefully about their ingredients and the wines they select. “The menu’s pairing suggestions are a chance for us to know our products better. We mix and match and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. Either way, we learn from it and are thus able to better serve our customers, as well as teach them what wine and food really have to offer,” Metzdort says.

The wine list is diverse and long with plenty available by the glass too. And from Monday to Wednesday you will also find the option of a special 8 (small) course delight for €38, compiled by the chef. In the end, it’s all about taste education at Weinstein, whose piece de resistance is allowing patrons and intrepid explorers to indulge, imbibe, as well as learn what German food and viticulture really have to offer.

Weinstein
Lychener Str 33
10437 Berlin (Prenzlauer Berg)
T: 030 44 11 842
Mn-Sat 19:00-02:00, Sun 18:00-02:00

About The Author

Molly Hannon is a U.S.-born freelance writer based in Berlin. She holds a Master’s in gastronomy and communications from the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Italy, where this fall she will lead a master’s-level seminar about 20th-century food literature and its relationship to contemporary food writing. A contributor at NPR.org and the Dailybeast/Newsweek and an editor at the Berlin city guide Unlike, Hannon writes about food’s cultural influences, narratives, and literary legacies—how they shape civilization and bring us together. She maintains a blog, LesGensFaims, which translates as “Hungry People.”

Nomadisch Grün (Nomadic Green) launched Prinzessinnengärten (Princess gardens) as a pilot project in the summer of 2009 at Moritzplatz in Berlin Kreuzberg, a site which had been a wasteland for over half a century.

Along with friends, fans, activists and neighbours, the group cleared away rubbish, built transportable organic vegetable plots and reaped the first fruits of their labour.

For half a century Moritzplatz hid in the shadows of the Berlin Wall. This almost forgotten corner, once zoned as a motorway junction, is now experiencing a new lease of life as a thriving urban community garden…

Who are you and what do you do here?
My name is Marco Clausen and I’m part of the Prinzessinnengarten. I’m one of the founders. In 2009 we [Marco Clausen and Robert Shaw] started to transform a piece of wasteland in Kreuzberg, close to Moritzplatz, into an urban farm. In the meantime, we’ve established this new form of urban green together with a lot of voluntary helpers. We now have 400 different plants that we grow here; we have a restaurant and a café. I think we have 7 or 8 beehives. The garden is growing every year, and new people are coming into it.

What is Nomadisch Grün?
First we decided to have a garden in the center of the city and then we had to create some kind of form in which we could work. We’re working like a company. Robert and I are the CEOs in a way, but every profit that we make – and we can make a profit – goes back into the project. The project has specific aims, which are mainly education and working with the neighborhood: transferring knowledge about ecological farming, conservation of food, biodiversity and so on. This company is called Nomadisch Grün.

What’s the history of this plot of land?
It was a wasteland for almost 65 years. There was a big department store here until the Second World War, when it was bombed. From then on it was not really used for several reasons. One reason is that Kreuzberg was and is a very poor borough here in Berlin. Another reason is the Berlin Wall was 200 meters from here. Now this piece of land belongs to the city, and the city wants to sell it. In the meantime, we can use it. We have to pay rent for it. Because we don’t know how long we can stay here, we created this mobile garden.

What happens here in the wintertime?
Like all the farms in this region, there’s no gardening going on in the winter, because it’s really harsh. We can have -20 degrees. We go on working of course but because most of the work we do is not just gardening itself, but organizing things, looking for money, doing networking, making concepts for the kind of informal education that we do here. We support gardens in different German cities, for example, and we’re starting a garden together with people from Hamburg. We do consulting, so now municipalities come to us asking what they can do with their unused plots. They come to us asking how to activate this kind of space. It’s many different things that are not really gardening. There’s a lot of things to do in the winter.

What other projects have come up? What have your suggestions been?
It always depends on who you’re working with, the surroundings, the neighborhood, and so on. You really have to go there and try to figure out what kind of potential is already there to use in this kind of project, as we do here. We see there are neighbors with competences in the field of gardening, especially when they’ve migrated from rural areas. And also about preparing food, conservation of food, and so on. There’s a lot of institutions working here with teenagers for example, and you have to find a way to cooperate with them. So you have to see the local conditions, and also the gardening conditions – light, soil, water – and legal and economic questions. It’s complex but we’ve had specific experiences here that we can pass on to people who want to start something similar.

What about the community that’s involved here? About how many people are regular gardeners?
We have a group of around 20 people who are really here on a regular basis. They have fields of responsibility, so one takes care of the tomatoes, another the potatoes and so on. On top of that we have open gardening days twice a week where people can just come by, every Thursday starting at 3 and Saturdays at 11, and then it’s hundreds of people that just come by and garden with us and learn things. Apart from that we also do workshops. Our beekeeper, for example, does workshops about beekeeping in the city.

Photo: Peggy Schatz

Do you have any stories about people that you might not have expected to be involved?
There’s a lot of people who come from all over the world, who are here for just a few weeks or a few months, and help us. But there’s also people who’ve lived here for 40 years who help us. The group that is more stable is also very mixed. We were so surprised from the beginning that there were so many people helping us. When we started in the summer of 2009, what we found here was a place completely full of trash. We had a newspaper ad saying these two guys want to start an urban farm and they need help. And the first day we opened the gate there were 150 people  doing nothing but collecting the trash. From then on we knew that there are so many people who want to make this happen.

Do you find that people who come to the open gardening hours keep coming back?
That’s different. And that’s a part of the concept. Normally if you have a garden you have to take care of it for a whole season. A little bit like a baby. A lot of people don’t want to have that responsibility. And they like the idea that they can have this experience once in a while, maybe just once a year. Other people come really often, some come once a day. We take care of the basic needs of the garden and other people can just come in and contribute or learn.

As people new to urban gardening, we were hoping you could give us some useful tips on how to get started in this scene…?
Really? I don’t know…I have no clue about gardening myself! I think there’s so many different motivations to start with things. The important thing is that you start. You don’t have to be a professional: you can learn a lot on the way. You can learn a lot from the people next to you. I think cooperation is very important. And for gardening, you have to deal with time in a different way, so patience is also a very important thing. It takes time for the plant to grow. And you have to be open to mistakes. You don’t have to avoid them all the time, but you have to really look at the thing and see what goes wrong and what you can change. This is what we do all the time. We make a lot of mistakes and try to learn from them. And this is not just important for gardening.

What would you consider to be your area of expertise?
We call ourselves amateurs. If you’re an amateur, a non-professional, what kind of strength and creativity lies in this? Maybe this is an expertise in itself, that you know you can do things on your own without being a professional and knowing everything about this field. We learned that organizing voluntary help is tricky – we had to learn a lot about this. We have a balance between working as a business company and doing things that you never get money for. And this kind of balance is also something that we can share with people. That it’s possible to make money but also do things that have a different value.

What’s your favorite thing that has come out of this garden? 
The food. That’s something we learned. Food is something that brings everyone together; everyone is interested in food. It’s also connected to pleasure. We talk a lot about global problems that you learn a lot about when you start gardening, like biodiversity, climate change, food supply and so on. But on the other hand you have an alternative that’s fun and a very intense and good experience. When you grow your own vegetables, you harvest them yourself, and you work with them directly in the kitchen, then you have amazing results.

This article has been reprinted courtesy of Gidsy. You can view the original here. You might also enjoy our previous article on the Prinzessinnengarten here, or Sanna Akehurst’s guide to Gardening In Berlin here.

About The Author

Madeline Maher is the community manager of Gidsy, a young startup based in Berlin, Kreuzberg. Gidsy lets anyone offer and book activities organized by real people. At the moment, Gidsy is looking for the best listings they can feature when they launch in Berlin and NYC very soon. For more information about Gidsy, please get in contact here.

The Vegan’s View by Ruth

Photo: Ruth Michaelson

Before you even get to the food, Lucky Leek presents itself as a vastly different vegan eating experience – just by virtue of the light, airy interior and general lack of wind-chimes, woven hemp furniture or thrashing punk music. The interior blends right in to the other upscale, minimalist establishments on Kollwitzstrasse without seeming pretentious or intimidating.

This seems pleasantly predictable when you consider that the team who started Lucky Leek just over a month ago were previously trained at Berlin’s premier vegan haute cuisine establishment, La Mano Verde, and are now trying to bring some of that high-scale vegan dining to people at a slightly lower price.

It’s worth taking a moment here to discuss the service, which is engaged and, well, kind without being too…Moby. The staff are attentive and enthusiastic, always happy to discuss the food and engage with the clientele without being overbearing. On my last visit, the owner brought me a custom-made latte (half rice milk, half soy) that he had just prepared for himself when I ordered one: now that’s service.

We visited Lucky Leek for the weekly Sunday brunch, which is a great way to sample a taste of what they have to offer via the eternal favourite medium of the glutton: the buffet.

Being something of a pig myself, a brunch buffet normally offers me the chance to eat all of my meals for the day (or sometimes when I really put the effort in, the following two days), and with everything on offer being vegan, I was in danger of taking my hamster attitude to food a little too far. Lucky Leek also manage to up the ante here, as the brunch each week is themed, meaning that omnivores and vegans alike will never be bored by the selection.

On my first visit I sampled a fabulous, if almost impressively heavy, Bavarian-themed brunch, but on the Sunday that we visited the theme was Italian. This normally presents a challenge in terms of textures rather than the flavours themselves, but Lucky Leek rose to the challenge on both counts. The selection is small but beautifully formed, with a good mix of hot dishes of intense tomato-based dishes and cold dishes, such as an olive tart with pleasingly flaky pastry.

Achieving a convincing creaminess is always the biggest challenge of vegan cooking, and a creamy herb sauce made a perfect accompaniment to dishes such as a seitan frittata. As one of the greatest pleasures of brunch is to be able to mix sweet and savoury on the same plate, a miniature chocolate pudding with a salt crust top provided the perfect balance. Each dish was carefully prepared with a depth of flavour that was impressive – this makes it an eating experience and a pleasure, not just an excuse to provide nourishment to people who like eating without worrying about stray meat and dairy content.

My criticisms are minimal. The first thing would be the size of the selection, although supplies seemed never ending of the selection of good-quality fare that was on offer, so this is really a minimal complaint. The second is the price: I know that the location probably allows restaurants to charge a little more but €9.50 given the size of the selection seems a bit much, especially as I suspect the price has been upped a couple of euros since my first visit.

Photo: Ruth Michaelson

Nonetheless, although it’s only been running just over a month, Lucky Leek seems set to become a Prenzlauer Berg – if not Berlin – vegan institution. It is the model that other vegan restaurants should look to emulate – simple decor, mostly light and healthy-feeling dishes that still allow you to feel full.

The Omnivore’s View by Itay

Sunday brunch buffet seems to be German for stuff-your-face-and-don’t-be-ashamed-of-it. An endearing ritual, in which etiquette forces you to act like a pig and repeatedly pile heaps of food on the same dirty plate (or use different plates and feel the stinging guilt for not being environmentally friendly. You choose). Needless to say, I approve.

If you think that alone is inherently pleasing, think of yet another improvement: stuffing your face without feeling guilty for it because it’s healthy food you’ll be having. Welcome to the world of the vegan brunch.

I do not want to start analysing the dangers of a brunch buffet that serves neither eggs nor cheese (nor egg or milk based products), because we all know that. However, my biggest fear when I hear the words “vegan buffet” is the evident lack of choice and the ensuing blandness.

Lucky Leek’s idea to tackle that problem by serving an entirely different menu to an entirely different theme every Sunday sounded therefore ambitious, intriguing and too good to be true. I cycled up to Prenzlauer Berg for their Italian Sunday. The selection of dishes was indeed fairly limited, which I strangely did not mind. It was quite nice not to be baffled with too much to choose from, especially as there was something endearing about how much effort had been put into presentation and detail.

Photo: Ruth Michaelson

On the food level, the antipasti was probably the weakest link in that buffet, which was a pity. Eating the dark bread felt like biting into a piece of stale rubber and the soy-mozzarella served next to the tomatoes was absolutely devoid of any hint of taste.

The other antipasti-elements (pastas, fried vegetables) were far better, but in a standard way. It only improved with the three warm pasta dishes. They were pleasing without triggering any useless thoughts about the menacing vegan label. The desserts (fruit salad, cake, chocolate pudding) were high quality little things for a buffet, which was a fine way to end a Sunday’s feast.

Last and least, two slight “carnivore” regrets. The first would have to be the price. I know that the stuff-your-face-for-€6.00-days have been long lost to the annals of Berlin’s history but still, €9.50 is on the higher scale of brunch pricing even today.

It requires a clear sense of added value, which in this case would have to be the vegan element. That is all understandable, but at the same time, I am not certain normal “carnivores” care that much about the vegan label to pay more when they can get the same quality and more choice somewhere else for two Euros less.

My second remark concerns the B in brunch. Even though the amount of food at a usual Sunday brunch anywhere in Berlin is enough to induce temporary amnesia, let us not forget that brunch stands for a crossbreed between breakfast and lunch. The buffet at Lucky Leek was indeed very good quality, but it did not offer any breakfast choices whatsoever. It was – all factors included – a good lunch buffet on a Sunday.

And yet, these are mere details, as Lucky Leek seems to have found the magic formula for a meal that remains enjoyable without any sense of culinary deprivation that is the price that often goes along with eating vegan. A combination of good food, pleasant atmosphere and friendly service.

Lucky Leek
Kollwitzstraße 46
10405 Berlin – Prenzlauer Berg
T 030 6640 8710
Open: Tue-Sun 17-23. Closed Mon.

Display on nudism in the former East Germany. DDR Museum Berlin, by Karl Gunnarsson

It’s ladies day at the sauna in my local gym in East Berlin and I’m almost mesmerized by the amount of flesh on show. I’ve found myself sharing the small wooden enclosure with three elderly East German ladies all of whom are blessed with ham-like thighs and the most impressively enormous pendulous breasts.

The women are nattering away as I slink in and soon draw me into their conversation. They tell me about growing up in the area and how much it has changed. They all worked as nurses and in their day they had no time for hanging out in cafes with their strollers like all the current trendy mums in the hood. I nod and smile and sweat, all the time slightly mortified because I am Irish and NAKED IN FRONT OF STRANGERS.

It’s something I’ve had get used to in a city where people whip off their clothes willy-nilly. In saunas, at the gym, badminton courts, the parks, a friend even reported seeing someone wearing just a purse and flip-flops in a shop, the Germans are happy to let it all hang out, no matter what the size or shape. In the summer you can barely go a week without encountering a bronzed-to- within-an inch-of-leather figure coming at you.

Coming from a nation that should get a prize for the ability to put on swimsuits with one hand while clinging for dear life to the corners of a towel with the other, this can be a traumatic encounter. And eventually there is little choice but to join in. Never mind the bratwurst and the biergartens, the sign of true integration is being able to get naked with the Germans.

And far from being some kind of army of extras in a Leni Riefenstahl film, they are not really that dissimilar from us. A bit taller, a bit less pear-shaped, not quite so pasty, but they have scar tissue, purple veins and knobbly knees too and the weight of gravity works as much on their breasts and buttocks as on the rest of us.

It’s just something they have no absolutely no self-consciousness about. Nudism has been something of a cause in Germany since the 19th century and in the 20s became associated with all kinds of utopian ideals. FKK, Freiekörperkulutur (free body culture) is as ingrained as having mayonnaise with your chips or a strange obsession with white asparagus. In the former East it was particularly popular, a sort of escape from the preponderance of uniforms, pins and badges that declared one’s loyalty to the communist regime. In nudity everyone truly was equal.

Public disrobing has become easier over time. It is simply quicker and easier to perform a clean strip at the swimming pool or sauna than all that rigmarole of hiding the bits that everyone else is displaying so nonchalantly. And the city is also full of great Turkish baths where you hang about semi naked for hours, popping in and out of the saunas and steam rooms and sipping mint tea. No one is batting an eyelid so in the end you don’t too much yourself, at least not too much. Somewhere the Catholic schoolgirl within is still uncomfortable with so much brazenness.

My first real plunge was back in the mid 90s. I shared a ramshackle flat with two other Irish lasses in the former East. The toilet was out on the landing and there was no bathroom but for a few blessed months the contraption of a shower that had been erected in our kitchen worked fine. It took half an hour to heat up the water in the tank per shower, and we often had another 3 or 4 people sleeping on our floor, but that was what mornings were for, to sit around drinking tea and coffee and talking about maybe looking for a job as a cleaner that afternoon… or tomorrow… or next week.

FKK image by Andreas Kluth

Then the shower broke and our neighbour downstairs came to the rescue. Martin, an East Berliner, had the luxury of a bachelor pad all to himself, though this consisted of one room, with open plan kitchen and shower. I didn’t know Martin that well, I had arrived to the city later than the other two and had managed to avoid this exhibitionist cleansing ritual by having a boyfriend not too far away with a tremendously fabulous bathroom. Then me and the fella sort of split up and it was perhaps the white tiles, the gleaming taps and the shower nozzle that I missed the most.

So off I trudged to Martin’s with my towel and shampoo and not a little trepidation. He flung back the door, wearing his tie-dyed t-shirt and a bleary-eyed look from too much of something, and pottered back to his armchair to listen to dub music; Martin only ever listened to dub music. Here goes, I thought. I quickly shed my clothes on the floor, hopped into the shower unit and had the fastest soap and scrub known to womanhood, before shoving on my clothes again, grunting Danke and running back upstairs.

A few hours later my flatmate came back from her own shower hooting with laughter. “You stripped in front of bloody Martin!” “Er, yes isn’t that what you guys have been doing?” She snorted in disbelief. Oh no, like the demure well-brought up ladies they were, they always brought an extra towel to hang over the side of the shower, shielding them from their host’s gaze

From then on Martin was a lot friendlier to me, not in a creepy way, just in a way that implied acceptance and respect. That said: Hey, Mädel, you are one of us now.

About The Author

Siobhán Dowling is a freelance Berlin-based journalist originally from Dublin. She has worked as an editor and journalist at Spiegel International and has written for several other publications, including The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Times, The Sunday Business Post and the Irish Times website. This article was reprinted with kind permission from Siobhan and excellent website The Antiroom, where it first appeared.