Image courtesy of the Bundesarchiv

When the Kino Babylon opened its doors in Spring of 1929 Berliners couldn’t complain of a shortage of cinemas. If anything, there was a surplus.

The Reichs-Kino-Addressbuch of that year gave the official count as 378, and there were already film palaces at Alexanderplatz and Rosenthaler Tor, as well as innumerable “flea cinemas” in nearby Münzstrasse. But by a fortuitous coincidence of urban planning and cultural transformation the Babylon was completed just before the curtain fell on the Berlin’s cinema construction bubble.

The Scheunenviertel, as the area was originally known, was established in 1672 for the storage of dry goods in wooden barns (Scheune) outside the city walls, thereby reducing the danger of fire in the old city. In following decades it became home to Jewish immigrants and other newcomers seeking their fortunes in Prussia’s capital, and by the end of the 19th century the area had grown into an overcrowded and unhealthy slum.

Initial renewal efforts culminated in the clearance of “Babelsberger Platz” in 1908 and the construction of the Volksbühne in 1914, but the First World War put a halt to further development. By 1920 the area’s tenements housed a dangerous mix of poverty and political radicalism and, confronted with a restive population in what was now essentially Berlin’s own ghetto, city planners drafted an ambitious proposal: a library, school and modern housing development along with a mix of commercial and entertainment establishments, among which would be a state of the art cinema on the now renamed “Bülowplatz”.

Image courtesy of Wikicommons

In keeping with the project’s high profile the developers turned to one of Berlin’s most renowned architects, Hans Poelzig.  A Berliner by birth, Poelzig taught at the city’s Technical University and was head of the Architecture Department at the Prussian Academy of Art.  He was also deeply involved with the cinema.

Not only did he build both the city’s Kino Capitol and its famously expressionistic Grosses Schauspielhaus, but along with his wife he designed sets for stage and film, including the medieval ghetto of Paul Wegener’s legendary “The Golem: How He Came Into the World.”

While his grand plans for Bülowplatz were only partially completed, Poelzig is responsible for the Babylon’s strong lines and smooth facades, which even after eighty years feel restrained and modern.

But it wasn’t only the architecture of “Babylon-Kino-Variete” which was cutting-edge. In addition to enjoying the fine dining of its modern Automatenrestaurant, filmgoers were entertained by Germany’s largest Kinoorchesterorgel. The Philips-Kino-Orgel accompanied the cinema’s still silent films with musical compositions as well as produced sound effects such as hoofbeats, sirens, car horns and telephone bells.  In addition, it backed up with Berlin’s Weimar-era jazz bands & orchestras with its simulated trumpets, clarinets and saxophones.

The glittering evenings came to an end, however, and darkness descended over the Babylon as the Nazis took over. Bülowplatz was now Horst-Wessel-Platz, Poelzig was driven out of his academic positions due to his Jewish background, and Reichspropaganda Minister Goebbels declared the saxophone to be a “symbol of Negroid lewdness”.

Image courtesy of Kino Babylon

Adding injury to insult, in November of ’43 Allied bombs burned out the Volksbühne, the fires spreading to the Babylon and surrounding apartment houses. Miraculously, however, the Philips-Kino-Orgel survived the war and in May of 1945, a scant two weeks after the Nazi’s capitulation, the Babylon threw open its doors once more, screening a Russian adaptation of Jules Verne’s “The Children of Captain Grant” to a grateful, if exhausted, public.

During the decades of division the Babylon served as one of East Berlin’s leading cinemas, initially hosting monthly premieres of DEFA’s productions until it was finally overtaken by newer and larger venues such as the Kino International and the Colosseum.

The early years of reunification presented their own hazards when, in 1990, a carbon monoxide leak caused by a faulty heating unit forced the cinemas closure, and, in 1993, a war damaged support beam in the ceiling of the main hall threatened to collapse. It was feared that the Babylon might have reached its final reel.

Thankfully, due to the efforts of fans and its place in Berlin’s history, funds were made available for the necessary renovations and in 2001 the Babylon reopened. In the main hall the number of seats had been reduced, from the original 1299 only 447 remained, but the screen had been enlarged and, in May of that year, the newly restored Philips-Kino-Orgel once again thrilled audiences, accompanying the screening of Wegener’s “Golem” as it had seventy years earlier.

Hans Poelzig (image courtesy of Wikipedia)

The Kino Babylon has since reclaimed its leading position among Berlin’s independent cinemas, taking part in dozens of film festivals, screening domestic and international films and and hosting special events throughout the year. In 1929 the Reichsfilmblatt was dazzled by what it called a “cinematic jewel box”.

While today waiters in red and gold jackets and ushers in powder blue uniforms no longer bustle between rows of emerald green seats, the Babylon still retains something of that former glamor and the flickering dreams of a long lost Berlin still play across its silver screen.

Kino Babylon
Rosa-Luxemburg-Straße 30
10178 Berlin, Germany
Tel: 030 2425969
Map

10. Book of Clouds by Chloe Aridjis

“Ever since arriving in Berlin I’d become a professional in lost time. It was impossible to account for all the hours. The hands on clocks and watches jumped ahead or lagged behind indiscriminately. The city ran its own chronometric scale.”

Tatiana is a Mexican in Berlin who flits from one job to another. One of her jobs is typing for a reclusive old historian. The subject? The history of Berlin. This book is very much about the city, where the past seeps into the present and the story unfolds in a dream-like sequence.

9. The Innocent by Ian McEwan

“On weekday evenings they walked to the Olympic Stadium and swam in the pool, or, in Kreuzberg, walked along the canal, or sat outside a bar near Mariannenplatz, drinking beer. Maria borrowed bicycles from a cycling club friend. On weekends they rode out to the villages of Frohnau and Heiligensee in the north, or west to Gatow to explore the city boundaries along paths through empty meadows.”

Set between 1955-56, the novel centres around English spy Leonard Marnham and his love affair with German woman Maria Eckdorf. The novel brings together the story Marnham’s mission, which is to help build a tunnel from the American sector to the Russian sector to tap important phone lines, with his love affair, making it a thrilling tale about lost innocence and loyalties that plays out in pre-wall Berlin.

8. Berlin Alexanderplatz by Döblin

“There is a lot of wind on the Alex, at the Tietz corner there is a lousy draft. A wind that blows between the houses and through the building excavations. It makes you feel you would like to hide in the saloons, but who can do that, it blows through your trousers pockets…Early in the morning the workers come tramping along from Reinickendorf, Neukoelln, Weissensee. Cold or no cold, wind or no wind, we’ve gotta get the coffee pot, pack up the sandwiches, we’ve gotta work and slave, the drones sit on top, they sleep in their feather-beds and exploit us.”

I have to admit, I put this novel in here because I had to; it is considered to be a literary masterpiece, influenced strongly by Joyce’s Ulysses. It has a cinematic, shifting, collagic style, and captures the speed, anonymity and chaos of modern city life. Set in 1920s Berlin, it is about small-time criminal Franz Biberkopf. The fragments describing life around Alexanderplatz are beautiful, but it is a hard read.

7. Pleasured by Philip Hensher

“The car drew to a standstill. The moment of fear and memory and excitement was gone. He was stuck in the middle of a vast and terrifyingly foreign country, on an East German transit road between the borders of West Germany and West Berlin, with two strangers, on New Year’s Eve. The worst place, the worst time, the worst people.”

It is New Year’s Eve 1988 and three people find themselves stranded in a car in East Berlin; Englishman Herr Picker, who has a plan to flood East Berlin with ecstasy tablets in an effort to liberate its occupants, half-hearted terrorist Daphne, and Kreuzberger Friedrich. The novel follows the lives of these three characters over the course of the following year.

6. Alone in Berlin by Hans Fallada

“The Rosenthals used to have a little haberdashery shop on Prenzlauer Allee that was Aryanized, and now the man has disappeared, and he can’t be far short of seventy. […] And now the old woman is sitting in her flat all alone and doesn’t dare go outside. It’s only after dark that she goes and does her shopping, wearing her yellow star; probably she’s hungry.”

Primo Levi called this “the greatest book ever written about German resistance to the Nazis”. It centres around an apartment block where a couple who lose their son in the war start resisting the regime in their own way. A sad but moving picture of Berlin during the third Reich.

5. The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell

“In front of me was the entrance to the U-Bahn station, Stadmitte on the C line. I ran down the steps, went through the gates, and kept going down into the darkness, guiding myself with one hand on the wall. The tiles were wet, water was welling out of the ceiling and streaming down the vault. Sounds of muffled voices rose from the platform. It was littered with bodies, I couldn’t see if they were dead, sleeping or just lying there, I stumbled over them, people were shouting, children crying or moaning. A train with broken windows, lit by wavering candles, was standing at the platform: inside, some Waffen SS with French insignia were standing to attention, and a tall Brigadefuhrer in a black leather coat, with his back to me, was solemnly handing out decorations to them.”

Okay, so this isn’t entirely a Berlin novel, but a lot of it is set in Berlin – and what a gripping, vivid Berlin it is. The novel is about an SS Officer who encounters people such as Himmler, Speer and Eichmann and is present during significant events such as the Babi Yar massacre in Ukraine, the Battle of Stalingrad and the Battle of Berlin. Historians have praised the novel for its historical accuracy so if you would like a meticulous portrait of Berlin as the centre of the Nazi regime, look no further.

4. Berlin Blues by Sven Regener

Instead of a quote from this novel, I’m going to give you a clip from the film, which was made in 2003, because it is the most hilarious depiction of the fall of the Berlin Wall I have ever seen. Like the clip, the novel by Sven Regener, who is also the lead singer and songwriter of band Elements of Crime, is immensely funny. It centres around Herr Lehmann, who is about to turn 30, and his life as a barman in Kreuzberg just before the fall of the wall.

3. Berlin Noir Series by Phillip Kerr

“Berlin. I used to love this old city. But that was before it had caught sight of its own reflection and taken to wearing corsets laced so tight that it could hardly breathe. I loved the easy, carefree philosophies, the cheap jazz, the vulgar cabarets and all of the other cultural excesses that characterized the Weimar years and made Berlin seem like one of the most exciting cities in the world.”

Three books; ‘March Violets’, ‘The Pale Criminal’ and ‘A German Requiem’, make up this series, which centres around a Berlin private investigator Bernie Gunther solving crimes during the Nazi regime (March Violets is set in 1936, Pale Criminal in 1938 and German Requiem in 1947). Kerr’s Berlin is a dark place full of corruption and moral ambiguity and his stories are tight, complex page-turners.

2. The Gift by Vladimir Nabokov

“A multitude of streets diverging in all directions, jumping out from behind corners and skirting the above-mentioned places of prayer and refreshment, turned it all into one of those schematic pictures on which are depicted for the edification of beginning motorists all the elements of the city, all the possibilities for them to collide.”

The Gift tells the story of a Russian writer Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev living in Berlin, and his love affair with Zina Mertz. It is filled with vivid descriptions of 1920s Berlin, and focuses on the Russian émigré population in the city.

Nabokov lived in Berlin between 1922 and 1937 and for anyone interested in his literature and relationship with the city, I would really recommend Dieter E. Zimmer’s article on Nabokov’s Berlin, complete with pictures and all. (And if you like that, he‘s written a book with the same name too).

1. Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood

“Berlin is a skeleton which aches in the cold: it is my own skeleton aching. I feel in my bones the sharp ache of the frost in the girders of the overhead railway, in the iron-work of balconies, in bridges, tramlines, lamp-standards, latrines. The iron throbs and shrinks, the stone and the bricks ache dully, the plaster is numb.”

Goodbye to Berlin is one of the two novels that make up Isherwood’s Berlin Stories (the other being Mr Norris Changes Trains). Set in Berlin between 1930 – 1933, Isherwood depicts an intriguing array of characters, from prostitutes to wealthy Jewish store owners, and their lives in the city during the Nazi rise to power.

The fact that Isherwood lived in Berlin during this period, the novels’ easy style, and the claim that his main character (also a writer named Christopher) makes as being ‘a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking’, fools the reader into thinking that this is a memoir. However, it is a well-crafted piece of fiction as James Wood’s insightful analysis of the following paragraph shows:

““The entrance to the Wassertorstrasse was a big stone archway, a bit of old Berlin, daubed with hammers and sickle and Nazi crosses and plastered with tattered bills which advertised auctions or crimes. It was a deep shabby cobbled street, littered with sprawling children in tears. Youths in woollen sweaters circled waveringly across it on racing bikes and whooped at girls passing with milk-jugs. The pavement was chalk-marked for the hopping game called Heaven and Earth. At the end of it, like a tall, dangerously sharp, red instrument, stood a church”

The more one looks at this rather wonderful piece of writing, the less it seems ‘a slice of life’, or a camera’s easy swipe, than a very careful ballet. The passage begins with an entrance: the entrance of the chapter. The reference to hammers and sickles and Nazi crosses introduces a note of menace, which is completed by the sardonic reference to commercial bills advertising ‘auctions and crimes’: this may be commerce but it is uncomfortable close to commercial graffiti – after all, isn’t auction and crime what polititians, especially the kind involved in communist or fascist activities, do? They sell us things and commit crimes.

The Nazi ‘crosses’ nicely link us to the children’s game called Heaven and Earth, and to the church, except that, threateningly enough, everything is inverted: the church no longer looks like a church but like a red instrument (a pen, a knife, an instrument of torture, the ‘red’ the colour of both blood and radical politics), while the ‘cross’ has been taken over by the Nazis. Given this inversion, we understand why Isherwood wants to top and tail this paragraph with the Nazi crosses at the start and the church at the end: each changes place in the course of a few lines.” (Wood, How Fiction Works 44-45)

Goodbye to Berlin inspired the play I Am a Camera and the Tony Award-winning musical Cabaret, which in turn was adapted into Bob Fosse’s film Cabaret starring Liza Minnelli.

About The Author

This post was reprinted with the kind permission of Madhvi Ramani, whose musings about life and culture in Berlin can be read at her excellent blog, An English Man In Berlin. Please feel free to share your favourite books about – or set in – Berlin in the comments section below…

Ku'damm - one of Berlin's most famous streets.

One of the great joys of reading books set in the city you’re visiting is the way they can help you understand your surroundings. I like to read novels as if they’re maps – keys to places I’ve not yet unlocked. Some people like guide books…I’d rather read a novel.

I think I’m right in saying that for most non-German speakers, the street names in Berlin can be a bit overwhelming. But even with this in mind, Kurfürstendamm – whose origins stretch all the way back o the 16th Century – is a whole new challenge, a street name even the Germans shorten to Ku’damm.

At 3.5 kilometres long, walking the entirety of Ku’damm is not a job for the faint-hearted or the stiletto-heeled. Today the avenue is known for its large department stores, high-end fashion houses and luxurious jewellery shops, as well as its restaurants, theatres and cinemas – and of course its rows of graceful plane trees.

In the days of the Wall, Ku’damm was the centre of commercial activity for West Berlin. People shopped, protested and met for coffee here. For West Berliners at that time, Ku’damm was the place to be. With the fall of the Wall, people and businesses began to explore the East, and suddenly shoppers had several commercial centres to choose from: Friedrichstrasse, Alexanderplatz and Potsdamer Platz, for example, all of which still hold their own appeal.

Sven Regner "Berlin Blues"

Sven Regner’s novel ‘Berlin Blues’ gives a pre-Wall perspective of the street. The book is set in 1989, just before the fall of the Wall and tells the story of Frank Lehmann, an aimless 30-something bartender. Lehmann’s view of the city and its people is deadpan and sarcastic, but his description of a stressful journey down Berlin’s most famous boulevard gives an insight into the Ku’damm of years past.

Lehmann is on his way to meet his parents, and is struggling to make the appointment on time. “He broke out in a sweat and swore under his breath as he skipped to and fro between his fellow mortals, evaded obstructive groups of strolling, rubbernecking, chattering tourists who always walked seven abreast at least, swerved around old ladies in fur coats, and blundered into huge, unpredictable gaggles of youngsters who abruptly altered or changed direction just as he endeavoured to overtake them.”

After an unsuccessful attempt to make part of the journey by bus, Lehmann is back on the pavement and determined to stay calm. “Herr Lehmann crossed Joachimsthaler Strasse, firmly resolved not to allow his better mood to be spoiled by the site of the Cafe Kranzler, which to him symbolised all that made the Kurfürstendamm so intolerable. He strode swiftly along the extreme outer edge of the pavement, where dogshit proliferated and no one else cared to tread, and made for his destination past hotels and motor-show rooms, steak houses and cafes, souvenir stalls and kitsch shops, thimbleriggers and three-card tricksters.”

While Ku’damm remains a main shopping thoroughfare, it feels relatively calm in comparison to such feverish descriptions. Anna

Anna Winger "This Must Be The Place"

Winger’s book ‘This Must be the Place’, published in 2008 and set in 2001, gives a more up-to-date description. It tells the story of two strangers who live in separate apartments in a once-grand Charlottenburg building. Walter is an actor who’s star is fading as he approaches 40. Hope is an American who travelled to Berlin to accommodate her husband’s career. They are both lonely and, inevitably, a friendship develops between them.

“When he’d (Walter) first moved to Charlottenburg sixteen years earlier, the streets he walked now had been busy with nightlife. But since the inclusion of its eastern half, the city had completely shifted its topography, pushing Charlottenburg to the western fringe, so that he might as well have moved to the suburbs…Gone were the bars and crowds of his youth, and in their place only hair salons and jewelry stores, women of a certain age who wore tent dresses and dyed their hair bright red, and yuppie families with children.”

Hope, through the fresh eyes of the newly-arrived, holds a more romantic view. “On Ku’damm white Christmas lights decorated the trees in the middle of the avenue and the sidewalks, brightening the grand buildings on either side. In the right light, this street reminded her of the Champs-Élysées. She waited for a light to change in a crowd of pedestrians packed together at the corner of an otherwise unoccupied stretch of the sidewalk thirty feet wide. No cars were coming up the side street, but not a single person stepped off the curb.”

Even more revealing are Hope’s thoughts when they turn to World War II: “Walter had explained that these buildings were completely flattened in the Allied bombings in World War II and had been rebuilt afterwards. Staring up through the scrim of her eyelashes, Hope tried to imagine the fancy facades ripped off to reveal furniture and wallpapered rooms, fires burning, people screaming.

Truemmerfrauen after WWII

“Walter had told her that it took years to clear the rubble. Since most of the men had been killed or imprisoned, or had to walk home from war fronts in Russia or France, the women had cleared Ku’damm themselves. Truemmerfrauen, they were called. They passed the chunks of stone and concrete, wood and tiles, one to the next, all the way down the avenue and another mile or so through Grunewald, where they made a massive pile. The pile was apparently a proper mountain now, grown over with grass. People liked to hike and picnic there.”

The mountain in question is well known to many Berliners – it’s called ‘Teufelsberg’ or ‘Devil’s Mountain’. Not only is it a great place for hiking and picnicking, in winter it provides a toboggan run and a nursery slope for skiiers. It also hosts the mysterious former listening station.

There are many other landmarks around Ku’damm mentioned in ‘This Must be the Place’ – from the Fasanenstrasse Synagogue burned during Kristallnacht to the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church which lost its steeple to a bomb during the war, and was never replaced.

Both these novels are fine reads in their own right, but also serve as unique guides to the city, both past and present. Not many conventional guide books, after all, are going to discuss dog poo on Ku’damm or the street-crossing habits of Berliners. Reading novels are a wonderful way of getting under the skin of a city.

Packabook is a project dedicated to exploring place and history through fiction. See their website for more details.

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 eighty-a-day fashionista in six-inch Manolo heels. The Kreuzberg itself, meanwhile, rises to the dizzy, Himalayan heights of 66m.

Photo by Owen McGuire

From a walker’s point of view, Berlin’s absence of steep ascents, high ground, vantage points and succeeding declines might suggest the reason why the postwar authorities built Teufelsberg, an artificial hill to the west of the city, right in the thick of the Grunewald. But it wasn’t, of course. In the reconstruction period after WWII, Teufelsberg was constructed from pulverised rubble created by the Allied bombing raids and the Red Army offensive – 12 million cubic metres of brickdust, equivalent to 400,000 apartments, according to one popular internet encyclopaedia.

There are a range of myths attached to the 115 metre-high Teufelsberg and the strikingly macabre, disused listening station at its summit. David Lynch, it is said, once tried to buy the complex; underneath the rubble lies one of Albert Speer’s projects – a Nazi military college, apparently.

Whatever the truth, with a mythology and name like that (it means Devil’s Mountain), visiting or simply looking upon Teufelsberg is enough to conjure those powerful and uniquely Berlinische resonances of secrecy, eavesdropping and threat, division and trauma. Even in blazing hot sunshine.

One sweltering day recently, I strolled into the Grunewald, from the Pichelsberg S-bahn station south east, up and then down Teufelsberg, returning to the rail network at Grunewald S-Bahn.

Photo by Owen McGuire

Wandering through the woods, the immense central tower of the station, topped off with its antenna dome, formed a beckoning but fugitive presence – visible briefly though the boughs in fractured sunlight, but only to disappear again. Eventually we located a steep, well-worn path leading to the summit.

At last, a hill: as we climbed, soreness grew in the calves and Achilles tendons, accompanied by that familiar stressful rise in the heart rate which, when huffing away in the heat, causes the mind to fill with swear words as pace after pace seems to bring the end no nearer. Eventually we summitted, only to discover three layers of iron fencework preventing entry. We circumvented the complex furtively, before finding a gap in the ring.

Of course, the listening station is one of those places you should go to that you shouldn’t really go to; upon entering, however, we discovered we were far from alone. Other knots of amateur psychogeographers poked about the crumbling, faded architecture of Cold War military surveillance. In the dome at the top of the tower, a pair of artists were doing something artistic with video cameras; meanwhile a gang of teenagers showed up with an idea wise beyond their years: they were carrying a crate of Oettinger beer.

The listening station is by no means a pretty place. Its massive, empty and often wall-less storeys summon anxiety along with questions. It is an absence as much as a presence: what things have happened here, what was known? So too is it dangerous: there are big drops, missing floor tiles, shattered asbestos plates, broken glass, and threatening tagliatelles of sharp wiring, rusted ironwork and reinforced concrete in its gloomy, suspicious corners.

Some possible future uses for the listening station could be: a paintballing venue (it’s like being inside a gigantic 3D video game), fantasy “un-wellness” sparesort for oddballs, or a film location for Hollywood producers with preconceived ideas about what European rave parties are like. Today, though, Teufelsberg seems popular with graffiti artists, urban explorers and others with a yen for the aesthetics of decline, or a frisson of the spooky.

Photo by Owen McGuire

Two secondary antenna domes squat enigmatically on the roof while above the shredded fabric skins of the tower whip in the wind like the sails of a ghostly pirate ship. Teufelsberg’s true delight, though, is its 360º panorama across the Berlin hinterland. You can see the Olympic stadium, planes entering and exiting Tegel, the endless deep-green canopy of the Grunewald, the TV tower at Potsdam along with an assortment of power stations, chimneys, high-rise blocks, spires and other civil-engineering protuberances, as far as the eye can see.

Staring west, it makes sense to consider Teufelsberg as a kind of anti-tourist destination: an ersatz-rural reply to the dominating Fernsehturm TV tower spiked into Alexanderplatz, which forms the stroke-of-midnight fulcrum in Berlin’s more usual panoramae. Its intrigue today is as a looking station – a lofty destination for those seeking a alternative perspective on the alternative city.

And then, underfoot on the descent, you notice in the pathways etched into the slopes and woodland, protruding bricks and broken masonry, remnants of other buried histories. What unrecorded agonies and shocks lie in those stones?

Naturally, we didn’t mention any of this to the young Canadian dancer we met on the final leg westwards across Teufelsberg’s lower secondary peak and back into the Grunewald (the whole walk was only about 4 miles, by the way). She was looking for a directions, after completing the day’s nannying duties. Which way was the S-Bahn back to reality? Not up that way, we said. We accompanied her back to Hackescher Markt, bade her farewell, and disappeared once again into the horizontal anonymity of flat, flat Berlin.

To Rococo Rot

“This was where the main bohemian scene used to be,” states Ronald Lippok, gesturing out of a large café window in the general direction of Kastanienallee. “When we were younger, playing in punk-rock bands, all the rehearsal spaces were around Schoenhauser Allee and here in Zionskirchplatz. This was the centre of the art scene in the 80s. Places like the Wiener café and the Metzer Eck (on Metzerstrasse) were where you’d find punks and poets hanging out together…”

Myself, Ronald and his brother Robert are perched on stools in Kapelle, a lovely, well-lit café on Mitte’s Zionskirchplatz. It’s around two in the afternoon on a weekday, and the vibe is mellow, a few people reading newspapers or chatting across the venue’s wooden tables. We sit and talk and stare out of the big windows. I remember hearing that Kapelle used to be a meeting point for the local resistance during the war. Robert sips a coffee (black, no sugar), his brother pulls slowly on a beer. As well as similar facial features, they both sport the same lank hair and relaxed, unpretentious air of archetypal echte (real) Berliners.

I’ve met them before, the Lippoks, along with fellow band member Stefan Schneider (based in Dusseldorf) for an interview in their Kreuzberg studio, back in 1999. The trio had formed To Rococo Rot (a cunningly palindromic name, in case you hadn’t noticed) in 1995 and already achieved acclaim for their 1997 album Veiculo. They were about to release a new record, The Amateur View, which would transpire to be a landmark release for them, underlining the uniqueness of their lolloping, melodic Krautrock-meets-Post-Rock-meets-Brian-Eno sound.

Ten years later and they’re on the eve of putting out another album, Speculation. Partly recorded at Faust’s studio in southern Germany, the album is rawer than its predecessors yet equally hypnotic. It’s the first major recording since 2006’s acclaimed Hotel Morgen, though the delay doesn’t phase them in the slightest. “We’ve been busy with other projects,” shrugs Robert, whose recent collaborations have included Ludovico Einaudi and Barbara Morgenstern; Ronald, meanwhile, is part of Tarwater. “Things have their own pace. We didn’t want to put out something for the sake of it. We prefer to wait until there’s a reason to do so, until we have something to say…”

Zionskirche, Zionskirchplatz (Photo: Paul Sullivan)

A typically unhurried Berlin attitude, fully in keeping with the peaceful Platz outside. Dominated by an eponymous and striking 130 year old church, this square is where the brothers were raised. In fact Ronald still lives in the family house they grew up in, just a few doors along from Kapelle. “Our grandparents told us lots of fun stories about how this area was back in the day,” he recalls. “There was a memorable story about a one-legged prostitute that lived in our block. She didn’t work for money but for things like coffee and stockings. She had a heart of gold, it was said. She took care of our father from time to time when he was ill. Slightly weirder were these two sisters that used to walk around  with an axe. I don’t think they ever hurt anybody but they sounded pretty spooky…”

“Back then, just after the war, this here used to be a holding area for prisoners of war,” chimes in Ronald, pointing out of the window again towards the back of the Zionskirche. “There was a big fence around the church and the locals living here would go and swap cigarettes or food through it for bits of woodwork or whatever the prisoners had to offer. Then the Russians took over. Our grandfather had to step in and pull some strings to stop the house being raided at that point. Luckily he spoke some Russian and managed to get some protection.”

Before the wall came down, and before they made their name as acousto-electronica artists, Robert and Ronald were in punk bands. It’s no secret that being a musician in the former East wasn’t easy. It involved playing in front of a committee who would judge your band name, sound and lyrics and decide if you could have a license for public performances.

“The Stasi would come and knock on all the surrounding flats to ask about our illegal jamming sessions,” laughs Robert. “The old ladies who lived there would then come and tell us that they’d been. Our band name was Ornament und Verbrechen (Ornament and Crime), a phrase borrowed from the architect Adolf Loos, which was fairly controversial in itself. Our rehearsals were often broken up. We would have to show our passports and sometimes people were thrown into jail. I was once banned from visiting the Alexplatz area, but in the end they couldn’t keep up with all the activity and kind of gave up…”

So were the brothers happy when the wall came down? “Yes, we were happy,” says Ronald. “It’s not that our life was bad, but after a while we started to realise how much our possibilities were narrowed by not being able to travel and not being able to meet people from abroad and have interaction with other artists. We had West German TV and could listen to John Peel on the radio, but it was still like being in a box…”

“When the wall came down everything changed for us as musicians,” rejoins Robert. “It right away became about getting a deal and becoming more international. We’d started working a bit with the noise scene in West Berlin before the wall and some of the bands would come and do shows, but it was always complicated to get permission and jump through all the hoops. Within three days of the wall coming down we’d moved into a rehearsal room in Kreuzberg. We didn’t really look back”

Speculation by To Rococo Rot (2010)

The subsequent years have been well documented as some of Berlin’s best, or at least most decadent. Abandoned buildings were squatted and taken over for parties and DJs, musicians and artists flooded in from all over the globe to be a part of the history and partake in the optimistic, liberal atmosphere. Events like the Love Parade gained massive momentum. It was the beginning of the modern, international Berlin most of us know and love today.

“I don’t like to be sentimental but the early 90s were so good,” enthuses Robert. “The police from the East just had no idea what to do about all these underground clubs and random caipirinha bars that were springing up everywhere, so they just didn’t do anything. It was total anarchy for almost two years. It was great to experience it, to have that feeling that people could organise themselves easily and really well without any help, and that not everything would fall apart. You can still see a bit of that spirit in Berlin today, with clubs like Picknick and Kim opening right in the center of town. Sometimes you sit back and think, ‘wow, how many other cities would allow that?’”

But Berlin has changed of course. “It’s a bit like the H.G. Wells movie “The Time Machine,” says Ronald, “where he’s looking in the shop window and watching the womens’ fashions changing rapidly from the 1920s onwards. From my perspective, as a resident, it’s been pretty quick. One minute Torstrasse had nothing, the next it was lined with shops and galleries. And not all of the change is positive. In this area we had a lot of older people, now it’s more youthful and in a way more monocultural. A lot of people had to move out…”

Yet the brothers confess to being deeply connected to their Kiez. Ronald never moved at all and Robert lives just a short stroll away.  “We’re pretty lazy,” admits Robert, and Ronald smirks in agreement. “Even though we were born here we still need a map and compass if we go further than Mitte…”

To Rococo Rot’s fifth album Speculation is out now on Domino. You can download a free track here, or check out the band’s MySpace.

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.