Moving Kiez: An interview with Curious Fox

Marina Manoukian talks to Curious Fox owners Orla Baumgarten and David Gordon about their recent move to Kreuzberg…

Originally located on Neukölln’s Flughafenstrasse, the Curious Fox bookstore is an essential part of Berlin’s literary landscape. Known for their ever-changing collection of English-language books (second-hand and new) from local and international authors, as well as the variety of events held in the store—literary readings, quiz nights, poetry readings—it is beloved by writers and readers alike.

After eight years at Flughafenstrasse, owners Orla Baumgarten and David Gordon discovered in 2021—right in the middle of the pandemic—that their lease wasn’t going to be renewed. Suddenly faced with a frantic search for a new place, the increasingly exorbitant rental prices in the city, and the anxious wait for responses that can never come soon enough, they battled on for several months before finally finding a new place in Kreuzberg.

Set right on the northern edge of Lausitzer Platz, the constant sounds of cars along cobbled Flughafenstrasse has been replaced with the laughter of children in the adjacent playground. The new shop is located in a souterrain, and so has a different aesthetic as well as location. It’s even easier here to leave the outside world and lose your sense of time as you descend the steps and explore the intimate corridors lined with books and illuminate by sunlight that charms its way through the windows; only when you reach one of the rear rooms will you feel like you’re truly underground.

While the books are categorised by the same genres as before, their relocation allows for a new sense of discovery. The first room contains new books as well as second-hand fiction, while the long second room hosts second-hand non-fiction, poetry, sci-fi, and fantasy texts; with their three-for-one trade-in deal for used books, the second-hand book collection is constantly shifting.

A third and final room in the back, complete with armchairs, is the place to settle down with a book or just take a breather while your offspring leafs through the children’s books. It’s here that I sat with Orla and Dave to talk about their move…

What originally brought you both to Berlin from Ireland?

Dave: I came to Berlin first in 2007 for a weekend to see a concert with my friends and had the best weekend of my life. I had intended on going back to study for a Master’s in Dublin but decided to move to Berlin instead.

Orla: After I finished school, I wanted to travel around Europe for a few months, after arriving in Berlin I decided to stay for a bit longer—that was 22 years ago!

How did the two of you meet?

Dave: Orla and I met at the Another Country bookshop on Riemannstrasse. I had just arrived in Berlin and discovered that place on my first weekend and I slowly started to attend the various social gatherings there: the film night, the Friday night dinners, and though Orla had been living around the corner from it for years, she had only just discovered it too. I was chatting to Kim who used to work there and run the film nights and then Orla and I got to chatting. We quickly became friends and the rest is history. Our friend Sophie Raphaeline who founded Another Country passed away in May. This is a huge loss and we will always be grateful for her bookshop, the community that grew around it and everything Sophie did for us over the years.

And what made you decide to open up a bookstore?

Dave: It was something we both, separately, had always wanted to do. To me it had always seemed impossible but that’s one of the things about Berlin: things are possible here that in other places are not. I found out recently from friends of Orla’s family visiting from Dublin that as a child she ran a library for all the children on the street from her own book collection, so I really feel Orla was destined for this.

When did Curious Fox first open and what was the process of finding the first location like

Orla: We opened in 2013, and spent a good while thinking about it and then kinda very very quickly found a place after we started looking for a premises. It was a couple of weeks really, wasn’t it?

Dave: It was weird because I wasn’t quite ready for the shop. We’d just been planning it for so long, and then Orla said, “no it’s going to happen soon”. When we started looking at places, I just thought we were just getting a feel of what’s on the market. But was that the first place we looked at?

Orla: We looked at a bunch of places but I think that might have been the first one. It was just really well located between two very established shops, a Chinese shop called Yang Chinas Kultur that’d been there for 30 years and a second-hand antique place with a café. All the other places we looked at just were nothing in comparison really.

Dave: The footfall is also really good on Flughafenstrasse. Like, it’s not the most beautiful street in town to look at but it’s really well located between two U-Bahn stations.

How and when did you find out that you had to leave?

Orla: We always had quite short contracts for that place, three years, two years, one year. It seemed to depend on what mood they were in, and it always involved a proposed rental raise that we had to negotiate. We were in the process of negotiating when they told us they wanted us out ; we knew that our contract was up, but as usual five months before we’d get back to them that we wanted to stay, we’d negotiate, they’d say fine, and they’d send us the new rental prices.

Dave: We were kind of preparing ourselves but looking back there was just so much work involved in moving out that no matter how prepared we thought we were, we were not really prepared at all. There was just too much to do.

What was that process lik…

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