Photo by Grashina Gabelmann

I love tea. In fact, I’m sipping on my third cup of Jasmine as I write this. Not only is tea a great excuse for procrastination (“I’ll get back to writing just as soon as I make another cuppa”) but the ritual of preparing and drinking it is relaxing and quite often I’ll even find an idea or inspiration after gazing wistfully into the bottom of my tea cup.

Kristine Mager, the owner of Mitte’s Tee Import, understands this. She knows tea is more than just a beverage to warm you up on a cold day. She’s fascinated by its history, its origin and the rituals and customs attached to it, which becomes immediately apparent upon experiencing her enthusiastic customer service and her shop’s unique atmosphere.

Though Tee Import is larger than any tea salon I’ve been to, any sense of sterility is banished by the wave of homely warmth that washes over you as you enter. Most likely you’ll find Kristine behind the shop’s small wooden counter, offering up a cheerful welcome in front of a display of huge, silver tins containing carefully selected teas.

On top of the counter stands a delightful old till, and on the floor beside it an equally antiquated set of scales. These perfectly match the aging flowery yellow-and-green tiles that cover some of wall’s lower half.

“The tiles are original,” remarks Kristine. “When the former owner of Tee Import renovated this place the walls were covered with layers of thick paint and as these were taken off these beautiful tiles re-surfaced.” Though many people believe the shop used to be an apothecary, probably due to the shelves that extend far into the ceiling, it was actually a “Holzhandel” (a wood selling shop) prior to being a coffee house.

The shop opened in 2001 and was taken over by Kristine in 2006. “I had a small tea shop in Wedding but I knew that I’d chosen the wrong location,” she says. “I thought this store was extremely beautiful and, having always had a healthy portion of self-confidence, believed that I could run it even better than the previous owner.”

One of Tee Salon’s many winning factors is that rather than simply offering hundreds of different types of tea, it specializes in certain types. The main focus is Far Eastern teas like fine smelling Oolongs and a variety of white, green and yellow teas. Kristine also sells Indian (Darjeeling and Assam) and varieties from Africa, Japan and Mauritius. “But the tea has to taste good,” she insists. “There’s no point in getting tea from an exotic country if it doesn’t taste right.”

In order for customers to authentically enjoy her products, Kristine also collects and sells a huge variety of exotic and oriental teapots – some shaped like mallards or pumpkins – as well as attractive, hand-made cups and other related paraphernalia.

Some of these products are made from fragile porcelain and covered in hand painted flowers; others are sturdy clay structures. Some are square, round or shaped like an U.F.O, but their abundance is not oppressive and there isn’t any underlying pressure of having to buy one like in other shops. They’re just there, part of the atmosphere and part of Kristine until someone else takes them home.

What also makes the store cosy is that you can sit down and enjoy a cup of tea while eating some cake (Kristine sometimes sells cake but she’s fine with people bringing in their own); and if she isn’t already busy with customers she’s more than happy to sit down with you and tell you a little something about what you are drinking.

Photo by Grashina Gabelmann

In fact on Saturday afternoons Kristine offers a tea-tasting session (or you can book your own session any time with a minimum of six participants). Ten to twelve teas are served with in-depth explanations of each.

“There are different thematic areas I delve into such as tea ceremonies. I start off explaining the European tradition. Why do we drink tea out of a handled cup? Because we drink black tea and it’s still hot. Why is the cup made of thin porcelain? So that when our lips touch it we can tell if it is still too hot to drink…

“Then I go into Gongfu Cha, the Chinese/Taiwanese art of drinking tea. I use the proper utensils and show how it is done, though of course I pour the tea in a much more European way then someone who grew up in Asia. The water won’t be as hot and the tea won’t be as strong as most Europeans don’t like the taste that way. Then I explain the Chanoyu, the disciplined and regimented Japanese ceremony as opposed to the Chinese ceremony where joking and chatting is allowed. Chanoyu doesn’t fit into the store very much but it’s interesting to talk about it anyway.”

Before I leave the store, I ask Kristine the burning question: “why tea?” Her answer is as unexpected as it is charming: “It’s simply a grateful product,” she smiles.

Tee Import
Invalidenstrasse 160
T: 030 28 04 06 60
Mon-Fri 10-19, Sat 10-16

Amit Elan (photo by Eli Saban)

Amit Elan is a 22 years old Berlin based Israeli artist. He studied at Hamidrasha Art Academy and has since developed mixed media installations. He exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in Europe, Asia and Israel.

He writes for the artists’ blog Art in Transit published by the international artists’ organization I.G.B.K. Spring 2011 he completed an artist residency in the Philippines with a solo exhibition.

In Berlin he has taken part in several exhibitions (co)organized by Kunstraum Richard Sorge, notably the “La Creche” project…

When and why did you move to Berlin and what attracted you to the city?

My first encounter with Berlin was rather random. It was about five years ago when I was hitchhiking across Europe, from Athens through the Balkans. I actually wasn’t on my way to Berlin; I was on my way to Amsterdam, but the Turkish truck driver I caught a ride with in Serbia was heading to Berlin so I decided to go with him and check it out.

I immediately fell in love with the city and ended up hanging here for three months that summer. A year later I moved into town to live. The city has all the things I love in one place: a booming art scene, alternative-everything, amazing party scene, huge queer scene. I saw no reason not to move here. Also Tel Aviv was getting very expensive and Berlin is so cheap to live in comparison. As an artist it’s much easier to survive here, I can afford an apartment and a studio for the same price I would be paying for just a flat in Israel…

You work in different mediums – painting, photography, installation. Why do you use these different mediums and how do you inter-relate them to each other?

I started out originally with photography a few years ago, and at some point began playing around with paints and colours. I was always painting things inspired by photography. I used my photos as a jump start for paintings, looking at different images and creating a mash-up from bits and pieces and interpreting it into a painted dimension. In my work I like to be naughty and mix contradicting materials like oil paint with aquarelle, crayons with markers, pen, pencil, fake tattoos, charcoal, spray, stencils, glue, fire, tapes, stickers and about any type of tool that leaves a mark. As I get bored quickly, the whole rectangular painting-on-canvas thing got a little bit old, so gradually my work moved more towards installations. I started thinking more in 3D and how I can work in space rather then on each piece individually in two dimensions.

Totem Painting by Amit Elan

Some of your paintings seem to absorb some of the darker or more “taboo” aspects of human nature…

I like the idea of creating a world where distorted creatures, characters and splashing body fluids are not taboo and are even gladly welcomed. Lots of sexuality, perfectionism, fetish and violence, combined with a colourful, childish and humorous contrast of dinosaurs, rainbows, intergalactic laser wars and sparkly road kill.

A painted/sculpted dimension where laws of physics and social prohibitions no longer prevent us from connecting with our real element. All is allowed in this utopian dimension; fluffy, talking marshmallows, upside-down grannies or supernatural porn stars are all welcome and respected. No one needs an excuse for doing what they are doing or permission to be who they are. No one needs to be interpreted, their existence itself is enough.

Faces stand out in your paintings – who do these faces belong to and what do they mean to you? 

The faces I paint vary from people I know and meet on my journeys to random faces I find on the internet and feel some kind of connection with. On my last “totem” project I was going in both directions with a different topic that I fancied at that moment, i.e. every time something else. So one totem pole was all inspired by the faces of transvestites, another was albino Africans. There was one with orgasm faces where I took the facial expressions from porn. Sometimes I’m more random and intuitive with my choices and sometimes more thought through and conceptual. In the end it’s not really about who I choose to portray – I’m much more interested in expressing the emotions in the faces, and being expressive with the paint and colours.

Your photos are somewhat different in aesthetic and execution…there’s more humour, less concern with straight portraits. Can you tell us more about your photographic approach?

I’m not interested in portraying reality in my photos. I like distorting and creating a new reality, re-inventing and staging a whole new scenario especially for the frame I’m trying to catch. I like to take what I see in front of me and try to compose it in a less usual way. The staging process is never in a studio or something of that sort, it happens in unplanned situations like in the streets or when I see someone that has something interesting about them; then I ask them to pose for me in certain poses or with different backgrounds. These are usually random strangers I meet. My photos usually contain people or abstract things like rotting body parts, or sick people. I like to combine dirty stuff and very trashy vibrant colorful things in one shot.

You took on a South China Sea residency a while ago: how did that come about and what were your experiences like?

Well as I love traveling, last Berlin winter I decided I must escape the cold to a tropical exotic climate for an unlimited time. After dreaming of it for a long time I finally made it to Tao Philippines, this breathtaking island where I was invited by Eddie Barrok and Jack Footit to stay and work in my own studio for as long as I want. Eddie and Jack are two amazing guys I originally met in Berlin and became very close friends with. This super remote island was the ultimate paradise.

I ended up staying for five months in the jungle with very few people, a monkey, dogs, pigs, monitor lizards, huge python snakes and many other bizarre creatures I don’t know by name – and hardly any communication with civilization. My studio was placed between the beach and the jungle, and I used sea water to paint and to wash my brushes and coconut shells to mix my paint. At the end I had a solo show called “Mosquitos, Monkey & Pigdogs”.

Painting by Amit Elan

Who (or what) would you say are your main inspirations as an artist?

I have to say that most inspiring for me are wild new experiences and fishing and exploring through the conscious realm. Music is also one of my biggest inspirations. I can’t work without music. I really love Sufjan Stevens, he’s amazing.

What can you tell us about your current new exhibition?

The exhibition I’m showing now is the beginning of a much bigger project I’m working on. It’s the first exhibition in a series of upcoming shows that will exhibit the same project as it will be growing in complexity with each show. I started doing these totem poles mainly to satisfy my obsession of painting faces. I wanted to find a way to make as many heads as possible without having to make banal single portraits. To collage as many faces as possible in one piece, to get this facial addiction out of my system (or not). I was also lead to the totem shape by my growing interest in shamanism and spiritual consciousness of self growth. The totem pole is often linked to the shamanic practice of the indigenous people of South America, which is definitely my next location to explore.

What are your future plans in the art world?

No one can tell the future, not even me. But I definitely know that before I leave Berlin – not that I’m planning to – I will Make a huge street painting on the whole of a big building like those massive paintings in Kreuzberg as a little remembrance of this era of my life.

Finally, where are your favorite places to hang out and take it easy in the city (parks, bars, cafes, museums etc.) and which local artists would you big up?

One of my favorite places, where I can hang out for hours in is Cafe Kotti, on the Kottbusser Tor. It’s an old, queer, friendly, Turkish left-wing coffee salon with lots of old cozy sofas, nice to hang out in the afternoon, good ethnic Turkish music and tea – and a very interesting mixture of people. Another great place is Agora in Neukoelln – a great art space with a beautiful coffee shop and lots of things going on, workshops, performances, exhibitions parties. I also enjoy clubs like Homopatik, Cocktail D’amore, Berghain. A local artist I lately discovered would be Aerea Negrot. I was at one of her performances last week and she completely blew my mind!

Amit Elan’s current works are now showing at Berlin’s AKA Gallery (Pflügerstr. 6, Neukölln) until Feb 9th. You can also check his personal website here.

Photo courtesy of Haus Schwarzenberg website

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 only by old blocky German lettering that suggests a bygone era.

This blast from the past, criminally bypassed by many, is Haus Schwarzenberg, owned and run by the Verein Schwarzenberg (Schwarzenberg Association), who are independent from government funding.

It shares exactly the same format as the surrounding buildings, i.e. a rear courtyard full of apartments, shops and storage areas, but with the crucial difference that the entire space has retained, as much as possible, its original post-war condition. Also, the utilisation of the spaces within – an independent cinema, cafe/bar (with live music/art performances), an art/book shop, various artist studios and a trio of small but interesting museums – contrast distinctively with its luxe neighbours.

The property has a long history. Its various units have been used as a factory, a shared living commune, a GDR movie and television office and a brush-making factory that employed and hid Jews during the Second World War (the associated “Museum Blindenwerkstatt Otto Weidt“ tells this story).

Artwork by Nil Reb

After the wall fell, the building remained empty until 1995 when an artistic group called the Dead Chickens moved in, finding it a cheap and inspiring place to work.

It was Jutta Weitz, an energetic, affable and now 62-year-old lady who made this possible. Jutta works for Wohnungsbau Gesellschaft (a housing development company) and instead of offering this massive building to some sort of business corporation she figured it would be perfect for this group of artists.

“I showed them this place and at first they weren’t interested – it was too big. But then they turned it into a collaboration with other artists and started to fix the place up,” she says, adding “The house is like a small universe…after the war, neither the Americans nor the Russians took over the space and to this day it’s a free structure.”

This freedom is expressed through Verein Schwarzenberg’s mission to support artistic activities of all sorts while providing a place for international artists to work together. The Neurotitan gallery and shop has pretty much perfected this job by hosting up to 12 major international exhibitions yearly. An underground space called the Monster Kabinett also hosts rotating exhibitions of the the last 20 years of work by the Dead Chickens.

Of particular interest for history and wartime buffs are the museums located within, which explore Jewish life in the area during WWII. The Gedenkstatte Stille Helden honours and commemorates local Jewish inhabitants who risked their lives to rescue persecuted Jews, documenting both heroic successes and tragic failures via written reports, photographs, documents and oral testimonies.

Among the heroes is Otto Weidt, a German entrepreneur who helped save a number of his employees – all of whom were blind – from his workshop next door. Now called the Museum Blindenwerkstatt Otto Weidt, it has been kept in its original post-war state and features photographs and personal mementos of Weidt’s life, stories and documents of his workers. The original hidden room, where Weidt hid Jewish families when the Gestapo came knocking, has also been retained located. Hidden behind a backless wardrobe, it’s a hauntingly claustrophobic reminder of the horrors of the era.

Photo courtesy of Haus Schwarzenberg website

Finally, the Anne-Frank-Zentrum (www.annefrank.de) is a modern, surprisingly engaging exhibition that expands on the life and themes of the well-known Jewish girl who hid in a house in Amsterdam.

In contrast to the surrounding gentrified melee, Verein Schwarzenberg is committed to values of tolerance, intercultural creativity, freedom and diversity.

“I think the mixture and diversity is what makes it exciting,” remarks Weitz. “People of different national and professional backgrounds get the chance to collaborate and help each other out. If you start talking to the people that work here, you can peel back layers and layers which reveal stories of people and places you wouldn’t have expected.”

Haus Schwarzenberg
Rosenthaler Straße 39
10178 Berlin
T 030 30 87 25 73

Photo by Tobias C. Meier

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 corner of Berlin, and is doing it very well indeed.

Bonanza Coffee Roasters (formerly Bonanza Coffee Heroes, as it still states on the sign outside) specialises in roasting but has a small, unpretentious café outlet on the side. Unlike many such hangouts in the city, it’s doubtful its adherents come here for the ambiance, since it has the appearance of an afterthought.

But its habitués genuinely don’t seem to mind the constant din of the two antique and sturdy Probat roasters, one from 1918 and another from 1950, both hard at work throughout the day; nor the sacks, crates, and plastic tubs of beans that are piled high and take up most of the floor space.

Because here it’s not the clientele or the small selection of cake and cookies from Barcomi’s that’s the draw, but the coffee. Whether in a bag or in a cup, one does not need to be a connoisseur to recognise that it’s a cut above the competition in a city literally teeming with coffee purveyors.

While Berlin has always had a coffee culture, the quality has often left much to be desired. Native Berlinerin Yumi muses: “Before, we drank garbage. Berlin was enclosed. Germans did not have a culture of indulgence. The city was not known for gourmet things. It changed through the people who moved to Berlin, as the city became more international.”

She credits a visit to London for her coffee epiphany, specifically a sample from Monmouth, known for sourcing directly from farms and cooperatives. “After that experience I couldn’t drink just any coffee,” she recalls. “It was as if I was blind and now could see. I could not go back. It was a journey of awareness of the different aspects of this everyday product.”

Photo by Tobias C. Meier

The result has been nothing short of a shaking-up of Berlin’s coffee scene. Bonanza roasts for, and supplies to Mitte’s Oliv Café, Prenzlauer Berg’s No Fire No Glory, and Katie’s Blue Cat down in Kreuzberg, to name a few.

“Bonanza is really small in the quantity of coffee that we move. But in terms of inspiration, we started this way of making coffee in Berlin,” asserts Yumi. “We have inspired others and also inspired innovation in the coffee business in the city.”

Interestingly, and perhaps not surprisingly, the people behind Bonanza come from creative backgrounds. Yumi studied art, while Kiduk is a designer and a filmmaker. Outside of Bonanza, the baristas tend to be musicians, dancers, and artists.

Who walks through Bonanza’s doors? A typical customer, reckons Yumi, is “a professional, a creative, a world citizen…cosmopolitan, often multilingual, aware of food, music, and fashion; friendly and open.”

The attraction, always, remains the beans, the smell of which lures customers in from the other side of the street. Bonanza’s progressive, gentle roasting methods, lasting about five times longer than the usual, delve into the intricacies of the coffee’s flavor and draws them out. It uses boutique coffee beans that account for less than 1% of the world’s produce, for which, Yumi maintains, they pay a significantly higher premium than fair trade prices.

While the search for coffee that fits the desired flavor profile brings samples from all over the world, the mainstays are from Brazil, Ethiopia, El Salvador, and Indonesia. As of December 2011, customers can now also find single-origin filter coffees on the menu, featuring a whole range of flavors and served in special tasting cups.

While Yumi hints at expansion, she adds that the Bonanza team tends to do things in an unhurried, deliberate way. “We grow slow, but that is due to authentic self-expression. We learn a lot in the process. I would be happy if, as a company, Bonanza stays innovative and remains avant-garde, but also serves more people.”

Bonanza Coffee Roasters
Oderberger Strasse 35
10435 Berlin
Mon – Fri 8.30 – 19.00
Sat – Sun 10.00 – 19.00

About The Author

Vanessa Remoquillo is a writer and editor in Berlin.

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 their lives in Belfast before, during and after the conflict. It was fascinating to talk to the people involved, especially to see their passion and their persuasiveness when it came to the importance of a project that provided people with the platform to tell their story. Increasingly, as with truth commissions and oral history projects around the world, it is clear that these are important ways in which a society can come to terms with and understand its past.

These everyday experiences of everyday people are important because they not only illuminate history and make it real in the sense that they are being told by individuals who witnessed history first hand, but also because it is often the history of the normal man and woman on the street that is lost as time moves forward. Kings, politicians, generals and even artists and musicians have their biographers, but who is telling the story of the teacher, the greengrocer, the doctor or the office worker?

The men and women who make up the eyewitnesses of Berlin’s ZeitZeugenBörse (ZZB – Centre for Witness to Contemporary History) come from a variety of different backgrounds and have performed a variety of different roles in society, but they all share one thing in common: through their willingness to make their testimony and tell their story, they bring history alive for all of us who have the privilege to hear them speak.

In cities such as Berlin this is doubly important because of the nature of the history through which these eyewitnesses lived. This is a fascinating city with an often dark and troubled past, and the famous reminder to “never forget” needs the power of the eyewitness to help it remain central to our society and relevant to contemporary visitors or residents. There are over 400 eyewitnesses involved in the ZZB, some of whom speak regularly, others who do so once or twice a year. Many are old, and as the generation gets older, the work the ZZB does in documenting the eyewitness testimony – through the monthly newsletter, short books and DVDs – becomes ever more important.

Most of the time the ZZB eyewitnesses are talking to schools and university groups, for which the organisation receives support from the Berlin Senate. Often journalists get in touch, looking for someone with a particular story. The ZZB has had a busy few years providing witnesses for journalists from around the world during the anniversaries of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 2009, re-unification in 2010, and the building of the Berlin Wall in 2011. In the next few years it will be the anniversary of the Nazi’s rise to power and then the end of the Second World War… in a city like Berlin there is always some reason to remember and reflect, and the eyewitnesses of the ZZB play an extremely important role as part of public education and civil society.

In early 2011 the ZZB began to work with the Circus Hostel and Hotel to provide witness talks in English for tourists and the English-speaking community in Berlin. It was a challenge for the ZZB, not only because this was a completely new cooperation, but also to find witnesses who were comfortable hosting such an evening in a foreign language. The various speakers that have told their stories to date offer an example of the range of subjects that ZZB members speak about.

ZZB Witness Talk at The Circus Hotel

Herr Schweitzer talked of digging a tunnel under the Berlin Wall; Herr Baerwald reflected on his time in a British prisoner of war camp; Herr Rottschy talked about his childhood during the rise of National Socialism.

Walter Sytlen told of his Pastor father and his work against the Nazis, eventually to be killed in Dachau. Frau Hertlein (see video above) grew up in East Berlin and then moved to the West before the Wall was built, crossing that dividing line many times in the years to come in order to visit friends and family on the other side.

Their stories are important not just because they are interesting, but because they are reminders delivered in the most persuasive way possible, through the mouths of real, living individuals. The work of the ZZB is important not only for Berlin and Germany but for the wider understanding of what life was like at certain moments in history, and what it meant to live through those times.

“Put yourself in another’s shoes,” the saying goes. Listening to the eyewitnesses of Berlin talk will go some way to allowing you to do just that.

The next edition of the Circus Talks in association with the ZZB will take place at the Fabisch Restaurant of the Circus Hotel at 6.45pm on the 10th January 2012. The speaker is Marie Louise Gericke, who was born in Potsdam in 1925 and grew up through the end of the Weimar period and the Nazi’s rise to power. In 1945 her family’s home was confiscated to be used as Winston Churchill’s residence, only to be returned to the family after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1990.

About The Author

Paul Scraton works for the Circus and has been involved in organising the eyewitness talks with the ZZB. He also runs the website Under A Grey Sky.

About the Filmmakers

Dougal Squires has worked with Insight Radio in Glasgow and BBC Switch in London. He now lives in Berlin and has contributed to Artconnect Berlin and Slow Travel Berlin. Ruby Pester is a Scottish  artist living and working in Berlin. She creates collaborative and interactive performance projects and has recently worked with the Agora Collective  and BBC Scotland and currently works with Artconnect Berlin.

Sophia Raphaeline (photo by Ana Dinescu)

In November 2010, one of the world’s best-known travel-guide brands, Lonely Planet, named Berlin’s Another Country among the top ten bookshops in the world. The quirky, thirteen-year-old Kreuzberg institution took its place at number six, alongside legends like Paris’s adored Shakespeare & Company and San Francisco’s iconic City Lights.

Not a few jaws dropped among the Berlin literati. “None of the other bookshops can quite believe it,” says its British owner, Sophia Raphaeline.

Naysayers fret that Another Country’s selection of literary fiction can be spotty, that the shop carries no new books, that the place is just strange. It’s true that Another Country is messy and unpredictable. The shop is appealing—with its black-and-white-tiled façade, dazzling red door, brightly painted plasterwork, colorful shelves, and comfy armchairs—but it does tend toward the slovenly with its full ashtrays and used wineglasses, mud tracked across the floor tiles.

And on Friday nights, when a crowd of regulars holds court in the back room, arguments break out and get passionate. It’s hardly a tidy, curated experience. Like other shops on the Lonely Planet list, though, Another Country is much more than a place to buy books.

Sophia is duly proud of the citation. You won’t see any promotional sign in the window, though, no mention in advertisements or marketing paraphernalia. You won’t find the news on the shop’s website either. Sophia demurs at the idea of truly publicizing the news; that would be, she says, “selling out.” Even so, she’ll tell just about everyone who comes in the door and is not above a good boast.

“Once or twice a day,” she says, “we get people saying, ‘What a great shop!’ We get a lot of Americans doing the Grand Tour, who come here after Paris and say, ‘Oh! This is what we wished Shakespeare and Company was like.’ The shop seems to fit into some archetypal image they have.”

Yet Sophia is something of an accidental bookseller. When the shop began, it was largely to find a use and a home for a personal collection of about 13,000 books. Wary of running a business unsupported, she approached an established secondhand shop specialising in English books about going into partnership. She told the bookseller that about a third of what she had consisted of science fiction and fantasy titles. “And I had wait about thirty seconds for the laughter to fully go away,” she says, “before the answer came: ‘Oh, we only do culture here.’”

She rankles at the memory. As you’d expect of a bookseller, she’s vastly well read, but Sophia abhors any sniff of cultural or literary snobbery. The principle behind her shop is very much one of inclusion rather than exclusion.

So much about the shop defies convention. For one thing, 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 reference library, available only to read in-shop. And unlike most bookshops in Berlin, Another Country is permitted to open Sundays, due to its designation under Reisebedarf, or traveller’s aid. Add to all that its considerable other life as a social club, and its curious owner herself.

Photo by Ana Dinescu

The shop’s tall, dark-haired transgender owner, Sophia, dresses mainly in long, dark skirts and cardigan sweaters and describes herself as having the hormonal and emotional tenor of a fourteen-year-old girl – as a person in the throes of a second puberty.

Her story, unlike the more familiar trans narratives, of early-post-adolescent transition or sustained efforts to pass in one’s natal gender followed by transition in middle age, is uncommon. Free of gender-role struggles, Alan Raphaeline lived contentedly as a heterosexual male well into his sixth decade.

But one morning in 2008, at fifty-five years old, Alan woke to find he was no longer a man. Later, that is what he would conclude had happened. I sit on a wooden cube in front of the shop desk while Sophia tells me her story.

“Imagine you’ve done a tab of mescaline,” she says, “and the feeling never goes away.”

Around the middle of 2008, having experienced a serious health scare and come out the other side, Alan went through a sudden, wrenching shift. “I woke up one morning with the strong sense that something was missing,” Sophia says now. “When I hit the streets, everything changed in the way I seemed to see and feel people around me.”

Then-Alan found he was overwhelmed by incoming sense information. He forced his mind back to the night, the days before. Had he taken something? No, he had to admit he hadn’t used a hallucinogenic substance in fifteen years. So what was happening? He began a journey to find out. First the tumble awake to strangeness, followed by consultations with neurologists and endocrinologists, psychological exploration (he was in fact a certified psychotherapist himself).

Neurologists could find no pathology or evidence of stroke; endocrinologists found elevated estrogen levels and lowered testosterone. Sophia cites the hormone upset as likely tied to a long-term medication regimen. She also considers the possibility of disturbed hormone cascade in utero brought on by DES, which her mother took when she was pregnant with Alan.

Late in 2008, after a few months of struggle and investigation, came the realization of the thing that had been missing since the morning when Alan woke up disoriented. It was gender. Alan’s ways of seeing shapes and colors were utterly altered, his ways of knowing things, the character of his anger. He began to conclude that his cognition had been completely reshaped, with “female” neural structures activated and male patterns switched off. He began to find himself thinking thoughts that began, “When I was a guy . . .”

The decision came quickly. Sophia says she could not go back, likening the shift to being freed from a cramped, dark space. Alan became Sophia; she grew out her hair and began electrolysis, undertook hormone therapy, began wearing skirts and brassieres. After a trip to London for the granting of revised identity documents, gender female, Sophia Raphaeline returned to her Kreuzberg shop and held an intimate funeral ceremony for Alan, burning the old documents and putting him to rest.

Photo by Ana Dinescu

Visitors to the shop often assume that its name comes from the James Baldwin novel of Bohemian decadence in 1960s Greenwich Village. It’s a not a bad guess; Sophia (as Alan) came of age during the high tide of the counterculture, and bears its imprint still. But she says the name properly comes from the original source, Act IV of Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta: “Thou hast committed— / Fornication: But that was in another country. / And besides, the wench is dead.”

The layers of subtext are delicious, but on the surface it’s just a good name for an ex-pat-owned bookshop visited by Anglophones who may pine now and then for the territory they’ve left behind; who’d like to use the simple currency of their native speech in a land run on seven-syllable-long, tongue-boggling compounds.

The main impetus in founding the shop, besides creating a purpose for then-Alan’s collection, was to make a place “where people could have the relief of speaking English. The books,” Sophia adds, “were almost beside the point.” Thirteen years on, she is proud of Another Country’s role as community hub, and enjoys helping newcomers to Berlin find their bearings, dispensing tips and advice.

The flagship community event is the weekly dinner and salon. On Friday nights around nine, a buffet-style meal is served among the sci-fi cellar stacks (at 5 euros each, exclusive of drinks). Sophia cooks most of the meal herself in her adjacent flat, catering for meat eaters and vegetarians alike, with dishes like marinated chicken, baked fish, Tex-Mex frittata, sautéed potatoes, and stuffed tomatoes. Twenty or so hungry book lovers tuck in downstairs while on the main floor a corps of regulars shoot the breeze over beer and wine. People linger for hours, the somewhat younger, fresher downstairs crowd playing Scrabble and sharing their stories, talking about books, and the ground-floor regulars settling in the orange glow of the back room among the crime and history titles like it’s their local boîte till the small hours of the morning.

Regular quiz nights and occasional film screenings are also on offer, and Another Country has at times hosted musical events and has had its own writer-in-residence, American Darius James, who took up office in the front window with his typewriter and tapped out stories. A contest is currently on for the best short stories featuring the shop in some way; winning stories will appear in an anthology. In-shop book groups have flourished, as have writing groups, with a new one expected to take shape after the holidays. The activities are organized largely by regular volunteers who help out around the shop or by community members, bringing things full circle.

Sophia’s post as bookseller brings many people to her desk, where she enjoys talking about books and life. She’s grateful for the support and friendship she’s received from the shop community as she makes her way through transition, though she admits, “A few people look at me and they don’t think I’m trans at all. They just see a guy in a dress.”

But she says she’s happy to be in trans-friendly Kreuzberg, in a city as receptive to difference as Berlin, with its vibrant queer, bi, and trans scenes, a place where eccentricities are, if not everywhere accepted and cherished, certainly tolerated. After keeping to her nest in the shop for a few years surveying the internal landscape, Sophia says she’s ready to go out more, explore the scene.

“Yeah,” she says, a laugh humming in her throat, “I want to get out there and be tolerated!”

Another Country
Riemannstr. 7
10961 Berlin
T: 030 69401160
www.anothercountry.de
Open: Tue–Fri 11 am–8 pm, Sat–Sun 12–4 pm

About The Author

Marian Ryan has worked as a book editor and is former fiction editor of At Length Mag. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Columbia, The Writer’s Chronicle, Quick Fiction and elsewhere. She lives in Prenzlauer Berg.

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.

Stadt, Land, Fluss

Martin Görlitz doesn’t like the word ‘bio’. True, it has a certain appeal in some ways, but even dedicated bio-product buyers have to admit the original idea has been somewhat obscured in a tsunami of over-priced products, frenzied officialdom and related terminologies like ‘organic’, ‘Demeter’ and others in the last few years.

“Bio is a word that the government stamps on products,” Mr. Görlitz explains, “and if your farm doesn’t have the right certification, you’re simply not bio, period.”

When planning his new restaurant, Mr. Görlitz specifically chose to work with some of his buddies in the food industry whom he knew would also refuse to bow to the bio apparatchiks and their ilk.

He envisioned a restaurant that paid tribute to the land: where every piece of meat, fish, or cheese that passed through its doors could be traced back to the source — and where, optimally, that source had been paid a visit by the chef mere days before its product ended up on your plate.

If you’ve seen the goat that has produced the milk to make your cheese, the reasoning goes, it won’t matter whether the farm that raised her has the word “bio” slapped on all its products.

The name for this kind of conscientious sourcing, as Mr. Görlitz pronounces proudly at the table of his new restaurant “Stadt, Land, Fluss,” (City, Country, River) is not ‘bio’, but ‘local’. It is, in a way, the next step in the organic food craze that has captivated well-to-do and well-intentioned Westerners everywhere, from health-conscious parents with young children to hipsters in Brooklyn, London, and California.

Movements like this have been criticized for their lack of empathy: how, for example, can a family living under the poverty line in America, or on Harz IV in Germany, expect to pay attention to where their food comes from when they barely have enough money to pay for it? Well, “Stadt, Land, Fluss,” which opened right smack in the middle of bio-haven Prenzlauer Berg two months ago, certainly isn’t as cheap as a Döner stand. But its costs are surprisingly reasonable in light of the work that goes into every dish, which is something to consider when making daily food choices in Germany.

“We’re only open Wednesday to Sunday,” Mr. Görlitz explains, “so Monday and Tuesday can be our sourcing days. I’m from Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, and our chef Andy is from Pfalz: most of our food and our inspiration come from our home regions.”

Gesturing to the small plates adorned with sliced meats (called “Imis,” or basically the South-German version of Tapas) he begins to wax poetic on Saumagen, a delectable form of cured pig stomach from his home region.

Stadt, Land, Fluss

Next to that are slivers of aromatic, slightly-vinegary Wildschwein (wild boar) sausage from Mecklenburg, and roasted Blutwurst (blood sausage) from Pfalz. Bio it isn’t, but it doesn’t need to be, as it all comes straight from the (carefully-vetted) farm, or in the case of the Saumagen, from the same butcher Görlitz’s family went to in his childhood.

The restaurant itself is a pleasant space – smart without being pretentious, featuring subtly rustic touches like candles and flowers on the tables and wooden kitchen cupboards on the walls (rather than stuffed reindeer heads, for example). As well as a spacious, informal main room there are also some private dining booths out back.

The menu is split into three sections for the three distinct ‘sections’ of the restaurant’s name, once again hinting at the importance of place in the restaurant’s concept. On the menu’s “Land” section, for instance, is a succulent side of braised beef so soft it merely requires a fork and an appetite, or a pairing of both goat’s and cow’s milk cheeses from the Karolinenhof farm just 60 km from Berlin. In a blogpost on their cheese search, the restaurant drew inspiration from Canadian food-writing couple James Mackinnon and Alisa Smith, who pledged to spend a year eating only what came from within a 100 mile radius of their Vancouver home.

This might not be such a new idea for a certain generation of Berliners, who might get their produce delivered weekly from a country farm close by, or might shop for veggies exclusively at one of the city’s many open-air markets. It is new and different, however, for a restaurant to take this concept and make it their focal point.

We’ve seen it with Little Otik, the Kreuzberg restaurant born out of an expat supper club, whose menu pages proudly proclaim its loyalty to local farmers, and now with the recently opened “Der Hahn ist Töt,” which advertises itself as classic French offering ländliche (country) menus. The difference with Stadt, Land, Fluss, however, is in the restaurant’s promotion of their concept as purely and proudly German.

Rather than simply consuming the food they have been presented with, diners really get the sense that they are being invited on a journey through the best of what Germany has to offer. There are, after all, thousands of acres of farmland just surrounding the German capital: it’s high time more Berlin restaurants took notice.

Stadt, Land, Fluss
Pappelallee 65
10437 Berlin
T: 030 40 57 47 36
Open: Wed- Fri from 6pm. Sat-Sun from 10am.

About The Author

Giulia Pines is a freelance writer and editor. She first moved from New York to Berlin in 2008, planning to stay for only a few months. Two and a half years later, it isn’t too difficult to guess what happened. When she isn’t writing, editing, and struggling with the Teutonic tongue, she accumulates new friends, stories, and recipes, all to be mixed into a heady brew packaged, labeled, and savored as “the life of an expat.” She hopes everyone will taste it at least once.

Amanda DeMarco of Readux

For English-speaking literary fiends in Berlin, there’s no denying the growing number of English-language outlets, events, and emerging writers to satisfy even the most particular of tastes.

It’s comforting and insular, but precludes full integration into the local German culture, for whom literature has always played such a vibrant and integral role. A wealth of fantastic German and international literature goes sorely undiscovered by the growing number of English speakers in Berlin, and it’s a dire situation that Readux founder Amanda DeMarco is hoping to rectify.

Readux, in its own words, aims to “give books or events a second life in English,” providing a rich forum of English language information on local book culture and literary issues you likely won’t find anywhere else.

With its unique mix of reviews of German (and international titles in German and French translation) literature, travelogues, literary criticisms and events to keep an eye out for, Readux is providing a a unique niche service all its own and one that’s been a long time coming. We spoke to all-around literary connoisseur extraordinaire Amanda DeMarco in the hopes of learning bit more about this amazing initiative and perhaps discovering a hitherto unknown gem for ourselves.

What factors inspired you to create the site? How did its unique niche mandate come to be?

I had been living in Berlin for about a year and a half, working as a writer, editor, and translator. I write for a number of venues about English books and German book business, but really had no opportunity to write about German books as such. Which was really sad because they’re the most interesting part of my life! Readux was formed to give me (and others) a place to talk about the literature we were engaging most actively with.

What factors do you think contribute to Germany (and Berlin in particular) being such a vibrant literary and reading culture, particularly in a flagging economy? What keeps the culture so rich and a part of the overall consciousness?

The German government does a great job supporting its literature, but German literature also does a great job supporting itself! German publishers’, writers’, and translators’ organizations are wonderfully proactive and professional. Most importantly, Germans read a lot; it’s just a part of their culture. Look around on the subway. Ever been in a German family’s house? There’s probably a shelf in the living room full of hardcover books. Reading is massively important to cultural identity here. As for Berlin, say what you will about gentrification but the rents are still pretty damn low, and that continues to attract writers — and publishers too. The history, of course, has some romance to it — not just because of the wall, Berlin’s grittiness predates all that. It’s long been a place writers come to. Finally, it’s sooo international.

Can you tell us a bit about the fixed-price system of books?

When a German publisher publishes a book, they are allowed to determine the price at which it will be sold. That means a supermarket or Amazon can’t sell a new book any cheaper than a small independent bookstore. This is why Germany has such an incredible bookstore culture, and also why the service is so good; if you can’t compete on price, you have to distinguish yourself by how well you treat your customers.

When a German publisher publishes a book, they are allowed to determine the price at which it will be sold. That means a supermarket or Amazon can’t sell a new book any cheaper than a small independent bookstore. This is why Germany has such an incredible bookstore culture, and also why the service is so good…

The motivation behind fixed pricing is that books are different from other products; their accessibility and diversity is important to the culture, so certain protections are given to the book industry that are not given to, say, the fashion industry. Here’s a quote from an article I wrote that explains Preisbindung’s machinations as well as I can: “To have a variety of books, a variety of publishers is necessary; a large number of independent bookstores willing to stock titles from small and large presses alike is necessary for such a variety of publishers to thrive; and a fixed price system is needed to protect those bookstores, publishers, and ultimately authors.” (“Swiss to Reinstated Fixed Book Prices,” Publishing Perspectives, 31.3.11).

The US never had such a system. The UK abolished it in 1997, and you can see the advances chain stores have made there. I don’t doubt that the system will run into troubles in Germany sooner or later, since flexible pricing has become an important tool for selling e-books, and since it has been contested to varying degrees in other EU countries.

Similarly, can you offer any insight as to why there’s such a rich international presence in titles translated into German compared to the relative bottleneck of great new international translations into English?

This is a very troubling question, and one that is often oversimplified. A few factors: In America, publishers think that people don’t want to read translations, which is sadly true to a degree. Germany is relatively free of this silly superstition, possibly because they’re used to interacting with other languages.

English already contains a far greater diversity of writers than German, and there’s a sense, right or wrong, that translation isn’t as ‘needed’ in it. If a German-speaker wants to read a novel from another continent, it’s got to be translated. Editors at German publishing houses also speak more languages than their American counterparts, which increases German translation since American editors are understandably reluctant to publish a book they can’t read.

German publishers can afford translations, which are slightly more expensive to produce and pose difficulties in promoting (because the author presumably is in another country). US publishers, through a mixture of irresponsibility and awful luck, are not in a position to take many risks. Germans are better equipped.

More than half of all German translations come from English. This tells us more about Germans’ notion of English media supremacy than anything about their ‘openness’ to translation. Finally, there are many great publishers of translations in English: Seagull Books, Dalkey Archive Press, Archipelago Books, Open Letter Books, And Other Stories, Peirene Press, Europa Editions, New Directions, Amazon Crossings…

Where do you source your new finds and intimate insider information? Are there any general criteria that determine what you’re reading or following at any given point?

To be honest, a lot of it is boring legwork that anyone could do if they had the time and patience. I scour publishers’ catalogs and press releases. I read a variety of industry publications. I check out literature programs and events whenever I can. But, of course, I have developed contacts that are very helpful. Plus, sometimes I’m researching an article for another venue and I stumble across something for Readux, or someone emails me out of the blue with an idea. I always have 10,000 more ideas than time to implement them.

General criteria? Well other than my own taste, I pay special attention to independent publishers and magazines, which are under-reported on but often publish interesting, risky writing. I provide suggestions to Readux contributors, but they tend to do whatever interests them, which results in better pieces anyway.

Can you tell us a bit about your background and what led you to Berlin in the first place? How did you initially get involved in the local book culture?

I was working for a US publisher when I got a Fulbright Grant. I had a business contact at Aufbau Verlag in Berlin, which allowed me to help out in their foreign rights office for the duration of my grant. That was a hugely eye-opening experience, and one I’m very grateful for. I basically spent a year silently observing and internalizing as much of their business culture as I could. Since then I’ve been writing, translating, and editing. I’ve also taught and continue to volunteer in a wealthy Grundschule and a majority-immigrant Gymnasium, which has been indispensable for my understanding of how a very broad swath of Germans approach reading, language, etc.

Did you experience any difficulties ingratiating yourself and gaining a foothold in said publishing culture?

Yes, I find German publishing culture much more closed and professionalized than many other countries’, which makes it much harder for an outsider to gain access. But that’s also what makes it so strong, and I’ve come to appreciate its, um, colder side.

But language barriers in and of themselves should not serve as a barrier to accessing this wealth of undiscovered literature you bring to light…

Just because many English-speakers here don’t read German well doesn’t mean that we should treat German literature like it doesn’t exist. That’s a lowest-common-denominator approach that I don’t like. Not reading German books doesn’t make you lazy or immoral or culturally incompetent, but you should know that you’re missing a rather large slice of German culture.

I noticed that the site also occasionally offers up nuggets from faraway and exotic locales like Rabat. Is there a strict mandate for your travelogue content as well?

I travel a lot, and if I see something great, I’ll write about it. Readux’s ethos is all about specialized knowledge and personal engagement, so I often don’t feel I have the right connection to cover non-German things. (e.g. I recently spent some time in Copenhagen but didn’t write about it.) But in other cases, it just clicks. Either I read the literature in its native language (French in Rabat), or in translation (German in Reykjavik). In the case of Rabat, I traveled through several touristy cities in Morocco, then left the beaten path and suddenly found myself in an incredible cultural ferment in Rabat — bookstores, theaters, cinemas…and citizens eager to talk to me about them! I would have been crazy not to write about it!

Berlin, sowjetische Buchhandlung

What are some of your most recent recommendations? Authors that we should absolutely get to know?

As you might guess from Germans’ enthusiasm for translation, some of the best new books in German aren’t German books at all. Because of its status as Guest of Honor at the 2011 Frankfurt Book Fair, in the past year Germany has published 177 (!) Icelandic books. Try Nordic-Prize-Winner Gyrðir Elíasson, the richly noirish Indriði G. Thorsteinsson, or the down-to-earth yet heartrending sensitivity of banking-crisis whiz-kid Guðmundur Óskarsson. Icelandic literature has made such a splash here, you’ll actually be learning something about current German literary culture by reading it!

For those who can’t read German, Max Frisch is a widely-translated Swiss author to try. 2011 was Frisch’s 100th birthday, and Germans go crazy for literary anniversaries, so it’ll give you a glimpse into a current literary discussion, even if Frisch himself is a classic. Check out novels like Montauk or Homo Faber, which are short, readable explorations of western manhood in the 20th century.

Having navigated the maze yourself, what would be your advice on how readers/English speakers/expats might themselves more deeply engage in the local book culture?

Spend half an hour in a bookstore every now and then. I recommend Hundt Hammer Stein or ebertundweber, but there are countless little gems. Look at all of the books on the front table. Notice how cover design is different here? Talk to the person working there. Your German isn’t great? Tell them that and they’ll help you find something. Or just ask how business is going.

Even a small German bookstore will have an English-language section, and you might be surprised at what Germans are attuned to. For instance, Brett Easton Ellis (Less than Zero, American Psycho) was never exactly a literary idol in the American circles I ran in, but he’s a darling of German readers — go figure! Berlin also has great English bookshops. You can read more about them here

What are some of the most exciting things on your radar in the coming months?

I recently braved the mania of the Frankfurt Book Fair, the world’s largest book industry event that took place from October 12—17. A very important event for foreign rights or any kind of international collaboration. I think the coming months will be a really exciting time for digitalization in Germany, which up to now has been a bit slow moving. I believe that readers are just as important as writers in any literary culture, and I’m positively giddy about observing (and writing about) how e-reading effects the book world here.

Readux is always looking for new contributors, especially those passionate and confident about a certain area or preferred subject matter (Swiss or Austrian literature, fantasy/sci-fi, Arabic-German translation, whatever). Although content scope and format is negotiable, Amanda adds that being “quick-witted and well-read” are, quite fittingly, not. Have a long peruse for yourself at www.readux.net.

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.