Posts Tagged ‘Berlin Wall’
Prenzlauer Berg: A Personal Memoir
Rhea Boyden offers a personal memoir on life in Prenzlauer Berg through the 90s and beyond... Ellen Riorden, the author's mother. At my secondary school in Ireland there was always a big emphasis on the study of German history and geography, and I always loved both classes. We learned all about Bismarck the Iron Chancellor, the Berlin Airlift, and we learned to draw the route of the River Rhine on a bare map. We studied the details of the most important industries in Germany from [...]
Berlin’s Birthday: A History
As Berlin warms up for its 775th birthday celebrations, Natalie Holmes takes a look at the city's previous politicised anniversaries... Despite reaching the ripe old age of 775, Berlin has had a mere three birthday celebrations, two of which occurred in the same year. The city had to wait until the height of Nazi rule before celebrating its first birthday. In 1937, five years after Hitler violently took power of the city, Mayor Julius Lippert saw and seized an opportunity to rewrite [...]
Cycling The Berlin Wall
Jenna Makowski cycles along the remains of the Berlin wall... I imagined the Wall long before I arrived in Berlin to cycle part of the trail. Barely old enough to remember (much less grasp) the events of 1989, my perceptions of the Berlin Wall had come from pictures in American-authored history books and post-Cold War History Channel specials. I’d collected a few of those impressions in my mind: a clip broadcasting Reagan’s keynote speech, the pulsating crowds storming the wall the [...]
ZZB: Berlin’s Historical Eye Witnesses
Paul Scraton goes beyond the museums and the history books to look at the importance of eyewitness history and Berlin's ZeitZeugenBörse... http://youtu.be/v3x2EBKn4PM 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 [...]
Berlin: City Of Street Art & Graffiti
Simon Arms looks at the development of the Berlin street art and graffiti scene... Art critic Emilie Trice has called Berlin “the graffiti Mecca of the urban art world.” While few people would argue with her, the Berlin street scene is not as radical as her statement suggests. Street art in Berlin is a big industry. It’s not exactly legal, but the city’s title of UNESCO’s City of Design has kept local authorities from doing much to change what observers call the most “bombed” [...]
10 great books about the Berlin Wall…
Suzanne Munshower profiles her ten favourite books about the Berlin wall... At 1 am on 13 August 1961, barbed wire was rolled out in the first step of building a wall that would split a city for more than quarter of a century. These books can provide a better understanding of the geography of, the history behind and the collateral damage caused by this monument to humankind's perversity. The starting point for me is Frederick Taylor's The Berlin Wall because of its masterful [...]
Mauerpark Flea Market
One of Berlin’s best-loved fleamarkets offers plenty of browsing, decent eats and a fantastic atmosphere... If there’s a flea market most beloved by Berliners and tourists alike, it has to be the one that takes place every Sunday next to the Mauerpark. You'll find it on Bernauer Strasse - just follow the trails of people walking in either direction, past the rows of bikes, ethnic eateries (Tandoori, Jammi Jammi) and mobile sausage vendors to the large set of gates that lead into a [...]
Book Review: Berlin by David Clay Large
Paul Scraton takes a closer look at David Clay Large's fantastic history of the city... “What Potsdamer Platz resembles is an edge city; one of those private, development-driven urbanoid clusters that have sprouted up across the American landscape in recent years. It is reassuring that the new Potsdamer Platz is notably without nationalist expressions. The downside of this is that the place could be anywhere. Like other edge cities, it occupies a kind of nebulous international airport [...]
