‘Off The Beaten Track’ Archives
Majakowskiring
Richard Carter takes a trip to Pankow to explore the former houses of the SED politicians... "Entschuldigen Sie, ist das der Sonderzug nach Pankow?" (excuse me, is that the special train to Pankow) sang West German rocker Udo Lindenberg in his 1983 hit Sonderzug nach Pankow. In it, he suggested he'd sit down with East German leader Erich Honecker to ask, over a bottle of Cognac, to be allowed to perform in East Germany. He suggested that Honecker was really a closet rocker who'd don a [...]
Exploring Berlin’s Rubbish
Jack Orlik makes some interesting discoveries amidst Berlin's flotsam and jetsam... Walk down any street and you’ll see plastic bags strewn from from the linden trees; a pair of grease-caked trainers smeared behind a discarded sofa; a doner kebab splayed gorily across the tram tracks like a scene from a (very) low budget 3am horror. On my third day here I saw a mother in a nice part of town goading her 8 year old son to piss in the street. Against a parking car. Over the last month, [...]
Berlin’s Three Peaks Challenge
Kevin Braddock and Paul Sullivan take on the Berlin equivalent of the Three Peaks challenge... Successive waves of trauma, division and reconstruction have given Berlin’s outward character a dimension of the arbitrary that’s absent in cities with seemingly “finished” centers like Paris, London and New York. Such was the thrust of a topic embarked upon during a "Slow" walk with the artist Stephen Walter not so long ago to the Borsigwerke above Tegel Airport. Walter, who is in [...]
Christiane F. & The Gropiusstadt
Sanna Akehurst visits Gropiusstadt to pay tribute to Christiane F’s Wir Kinder von Bahnhof Zoo... There's a German author and cabaret artist by the name of Horst Evers who once suggested that if any of your acquaintances outside Berlin has the audacity to take your invitation to the city seriously and then insists you show them the sights, you should show them the view out of your flat window and ask them to kindly keep quiet so you can sleep off the rest of your hangover. I wouldn't [...]
Night Of The Pawn
Joseph Pearson of Berlin Memory Blog explores Berlin's underground chess scene... It's an abandoned brewery. You enter a gate, a waif-like woman lit by candlelight admits you, but gives no directions. You find yourself in a yard with a hundred parked bikes but no people. Lamps do little to up-light the darkened buildings. There's hesitation, you try a few doors, they're all locked. But you hear music, perhaps the static of conversation, and you divine the right stairwell. It's broken [...]
Notes From The Underground
Paul Sullivan heads underground to explore an immaculately preserved WWII bunker... Most passengers passing through Gesundbrunnen S Bahn station don’t think twice about the door at the bottom of the stairs. Why should they? It's a plain old door, indistinguishable from a normal private entrance or storage area. But if you opened the door you'd be face-to-face with bonafide Nazi history, in the shape of one of Berlin’s best-preserved war bunkers. The door is locked of course, but not [...]
Canoeing in Gosen
William Thirteen paddles in the watery footsteps of Frederick the Great... In 1752 Prussian ruler Frederick the Great took time out between war with Silesia and witty banter with his friend Voltaire to found the small village of Gosen. Gosen and neighboring village Neu Zittau were intended to be home to the workers of the new weaving and spinning mills being established in the area as part of Frederick's efforts to develop the local Brandenburg economy. In the intervening two and a half [...]
Teufelsberg: Berlin’s North Face
A personal walking excursion to one of Berlin's most mysterious landmarks... Considering it’s a city with lots of neighbourhoods named after hills (Prenzlauer Berg, Kreuzberg, Schöneberg and so on), Berlin is a challengingly flat place. You can walk for miles and miles without rising so much as an inch above the median above-sea-level altitude. Nor would the more notable inclines in the city’s topography – the gradual north-easterly rise along Prenzlauer Allee, for instance - trouble an [...]
The Pfaueninsel
William Thirteen explores art and artifice in "Prussia's Arcadia"... "On Rabbit Island neither the merest tree nor bush may ever be felled again!" With this bold edict in 1793 Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm II took possession of a small island in the Havel river, erected a fairy tale castle for his favorite mistress and rechristened it Pfaueninsel. While he disported himself here among the peacocks for only two short summers before dying in 1797, Friedrich's royal proclamation [...]
The Art Of Urban Sketching
Berlin Illustrator Rolf Schroeter talks about his passion for Urban Sketching and the relationship between art and place... I was born in a small town near Cologne in West Germany. After an apprenticeship as a stonemason I travelled to Italy, then took a degree in architecture from RWTH Aachen. During all that time, and especially during my architectural studies, I used sketchbooks. I worked as a tutor alongside Professor Heiner Hoffmann, who put a strong emphasis on filling sketchbooks with [...]
