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Berlin
Fully-illustrated, The Passenger collects the best new writing, photography, art and reportage from around the world.
IN THIS When the Circus Came to The Resurrection of Potsdamer Platz by Peter Schneider・Berlin Suite by Cees Nooteboom・ A Field of Dreams by Vincenzo Latronico・ the controversial reconstruction of a Prussian castle, Berlin's most transgressive sex club and its disappearing traditional pubs, a green urban oasis, suburban neo-Nazis, North Vietnamese in the East, South Vietnamese in the West, techno everywhere and much more...
"Berlin is too big for Berlin" is the curious title of a book by the flaneur Hanns Zischler, who joked about the low population density of a city so spread-out and polycentric--one of the reasons why it still inspires feelings of freedom and space. But the phrase also carries a symbolic, broader how can a single city encompass and sustain such a weighty mythology as that of contemporary Berlin, "the capital of cool"?
In order to find out, it is necessary to travel to the 1990s, the origins of today's Berlin, when time seemed to have stopped. The scars of a century of war were still visible coal stoves, crumbling buildings, desolate minimarts, not a working buzzer or elevator. To visit the city then was a hallucinatory experience, a simultaneous journey into the past and into the future. The city's youth seemed to have appropriated--and turned into a positive--the famous phrase pronounced by Karl Scheffler at the beginning of the 20th "Berlin is a place doomed to always become, never be."
The abandoned ruins, the hidden gems found at the flea market, the illegal basement raves are a thing of the past. The era of Berlin as a site of urban archeology is over. Almost all the damaged buildings have been repaired, squatters have been removed, the shops selling East German furniture have closed down. Without its wounds, the landscape of the city is perhaps less striking but more solid, stronger. Even the city's inhabitants have lost some of their melancholia, their romantic and self-destructive today you can even find people who come to Berlin to actually work, not just to "create" or idle their days away. Yet, Berlin remains a youthful city that doesn't cling to its "poor but sexy" past, whose only sacrosanct principles are an uncompromising multiculturalism and the belief that its future is yet to be written. To quote someone who knows the city well, Berlin is and always will be "pure potential."
IN THIS When the Circus Came to The Resurrection of Potsdamer Platz by Peter Schneider・Berlin Suite by Cees Nooteboom・ A Field of Dreams by Vincenzo Latronico・ the controversial reconstruction of a Prussian castle, Berlin's most transgressive sex club and its disappearing traditional pubs, a green urban oasis, suburban neo-Nazis, North Vietnamese in the East, South Vietnamese in the West, techno everywhere and much more...
"Berlin is too big for Berlin" is the curious title of a book by the flaneur Hanns Zischler, who joked about the low population density of a city so spread-out and polycentric--one of the reasons why it still inspires feelings of freedom and space. But the phrase also carries a symbolic, broader how can a single city encompass and sustain such a weighty mythology as that of contemporary Berlin, "the capital of cool"?
In order to find out, it is necessary to travel to the 1990s, the origins of today's Berlin, when time seemed to have stopped. The scars of a century of war were still visible coal stoves, crumbling buildings, desolate minimarts, not a working buzzer or elevator. To visit the city then was a hallucinatory experience, a simultaneous journey into the past and into the future. The city's youth seemed to have appropriated--and turned into a positive--the famous phrase pronounced by Karl Scheffler at the beginning of the 20th "Berlin is a place doomed to always become, never be."
The abandoned ruins, the hidden gems found at the flea market, the illegal basement raves are a thing of the past. The era of Berlin as a site of urban archeology is over. Almost all the damaged buildings have been repaired, squatters have been removed, the shops selling East German furniture have closed down. Without its wounds, the landscape of the city is perhaps less striking but more solid, stronger. Even the city's inhabitants have lost some of their melancholia, their romantic and self-destructive today you can even find people who come to Berlin to actually work, not just to "create" or idle their days away. Yet, Berlin remains a youthful city that doesn't cling to its "poor but sexy" past, whose only sacrosanct principles are an uncompromising multiculturalism and the belief that its future is yet to be written. To quote someone who knows the city well, Berlin is and always will be "pure potential."
- GenresNonfictionTravelGermany
319 pages, Kindle Edition
Published June 8, 2021
14 people are currently reading
88 people want to read
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If an editor is known, however, Various is not necessary. List the name of the editor as the primary author (with role "editor"). Contributing authors' names follow it.
Note: WorldCat is an excellent resource for finding author information and contents of anthologies.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
July 19, 2021
A very thoughtfully assembled collection of essays. I am intrigued by the extent to which long-term citizens of Berlin are nostalgic for the former East. Angry at western consumerism and rising housing costs, they effectively write against capitalism without that being the point of the book at all. I loved walking through the streets of Berlin through the eyes of its dearest inhabitants. The essays did a great job of displaying the diversity of Berlin.
October 27, 2022
I read The Passenger: Berlin in readiness for a trip to the city in November 2022. The book contains 12 contemporary, magazine-style articles about the city illustrated with photos. The combined effect of these wide ranging pieces provide an interesting overview of different aspects of life and culture for Berliners. The articles include the South Vietnamese community, Tempelhof airport/park, Potsdamer Platz, disappearing traditional pubs, Berlin football particularly Union Berlin and BFC Dynamo, the Kitkat sex club, Checkpoint Charlie, the Island of Youth, the growth of Techno clubs, and property prices and gentrification. Great preparation for a trip to Berlin.
4/5
4/5
December 4, 2022
Berlin is too big for Berlin is a humorous take on the sparse population of this sprawling, polycentric city. This emptiness creates a sense of liberty and space, but Berlin is too big for Berlin in a broader sense, too: how can it live with and simultaneously feed the flame of its somewhat burdensome reputation as an ultra-cool city? The city's youth seemed to have assimilated completely Karl Scheffler's famous 19th century aphorism that Berlin is a city 'condemned for ever to becoming and never to being', although that was seen as a good thing.
Searching for abandoned ruins, hunting for antiques at flea markets, illegal parties in basements, all these are things of the past. That era of urban archaeology is definitely over. The buildings have been renovated, the squats have been cleared and the shops furnished in typical East German style have gone. With the healing of the scars of the past, the city's body is perhaps less dramatic, but it is certainly stronger and in ruder health. Berliners, too, have lost something of that sense of heartache - that romantic, self-destructive streak - and today some people even come to Berlin to work and not to create or simply do nothing. But Berlin is still a youthful city with no morbid attachment to its poor-but-sexy past, committed instead to holding on to what it holds most dear: its uncompromising multiculturalism and the certainty that the future is yet to be written. To quote someone who knows the city well, Berlin is and always will be 'pure potential'.
Whereas once people moved to Berlin to feel part of an anti-establishment community, nowadays people come to take advantage of professional opportunities that are all but unthinkable elsewhere. The seeds of creativity that fell almost by chance on the fallow ground of a city that people imagined would always remain 'poor but sexy', ended up attracting investors in search of an unconventional environment to grow their start-ups.
Visitors to Berlin are often surprised at first to see so many homeless people on the streets - until it dawns on them that what they're seeing is just Berliners dressed in their regular clothes. Dress codes here are different from the rest of Germany; Berlin is distinguished by higher levels of tolerance, but because the rules are less sharply defined it can be difficult to adhere to them.
The 1990s saw a generation of young people experiencing Berlin as a wild frontier, one they could explore and make their own. They occupied abandoned buildings, transforming them into clubs of legend, and anything seemed possible. It was in this climate of incurable optimism that the native Berliner and DJ Ellen Allien began to play her part in the development of what was to become the soundtrack of those years: techno.
-------------------------------------
It smells of hot sex. Someone is sitting on a bench next to me unlacing her boots, and in the background a woman leads a man by the chain-link collar around his neck. Somewhere, water is splashing. That innocuousness of KitKat's facade dissipates the moment you step inside, because you smell nightclub and sex right away. It's cramped and warm, and the heated bodies bump up against the newcomers who have entered on this ordinary Saturday evening.
A woman stands next to me wearing a black-lace bodysuit that readily reveals her breasts and labia. At the cloakroom, a small group of men talk to the attendant in English. She is wearing a leather harness around her hips and no underwear. A glass filled with lollipops sits on the counter in front of her. "Yes, the T-shirts definitely have to come off," she says. Fetish, leather or nude - that's the dress code. Goth and glamour are OK, too, but not jeans.
We have come to the KitKat, a name that tourists whisper reverently when talking about Berlin's club scene. After 27 years of operation, the place has stood for sex, excess, hedonism, for Berlin itself, because freedom for all reigns here, or maybe it's just because a few ground rules hold the place together. One of so many loose ends in this city, this is somewhere that doesn't belong to anything other than itself.
We scout the place like wide-eyed little kids, working our way past the many sweaty bodies through a labyrinth of rooms and side rooms. The place is full. Psychedelic paintings shimmer on the walls. Pole-dancing podiums and booths surround the dance floors. A woman wearing neon-bright lacy underwear dances up against a pole, pressing her backside against the metal and looking around the room invitingly. A woman walks up, then a man, their lips and bodies quivering with desire. A small balcony above them wraps around the dance floor, where we spy bodies slapping against each other rhythmically - a semi public orgy hovering over us. In one of the back rooms we come across a bondage show where a woman writhes, red ropes pinching her body tightly. We sit down. A man offers me a lap dance, but I refuse, thanking him anyway. We want to understand the place before we use it. We head for the swimming-pool room, which is humid and smells faintly of chlorine. The light-blue water casts luminous reflections on the walls. Several guests sit along the edge, dangling their legs in the water. It's as if everyone is waiting for something to happen. This room is legendary. Everyone who talks about the KitKat talks about the swimming pool and the big swing that hangs over it, because anything can happen here. Or nothing at all. Somehow, the water represents all the bodily fluids mixing here tonight. It's both repulsive and erotic.
We dance, we laugh, we gape in astonishment, and after just one hour our initial shyness gives away to a sense of normality, as if this were a sauna where no one is surprised by the nudity and the only remarkable thing is seeing people putting their clothes back on afterwards in the changing room.
For decades subculture niches like the KitKat survived and thrived in Berlin, because the city, a West German island smack in the middle of East Germany, ringed by walls, was able to flout many of the rules that applied elsewhere. This was a place for people who wanted to do things differently or who simply didn't fit in anywhere else. People came to Berlin because there was no mandatory community service and no closing time - instead, plenty of breathing space. As a result, even today, the club scene is queer, and very diverse; there are places for spanking, swingers, dark rooms, Silverfuture and Ficken 3000. The freedom they provide is queer because they don't follow the heteronormative rules by which our society largely lives. This is where people mingle to play out their desires with one another.
As I made my way through the rooms, I saw flabby bellies bulging out from thongs on one side and taut six-packs on the other. People lie on the red upholstered chairs, masturbating, French kissing, fondling each other. The bodies are so diverse, as they are in real life and as they aren't in pornography. I see young students, seasoned swingers, ample women, bearded men, gay, straight and in between, anyone who refuses to categorize their sexuality in any way. The queer Sunday after-hours party here used to be called the Frak Show, and now it is simply known as the Peep Show.
"Can I watch?" I turn around to see a young man, perhaps just a few years older than me, as I lean in the doorway, waiting for a toilet to free up. He's pretty, with his silver earrings and tousled blond hair. I don't understand. "What do you mean?" I ask him. He asks me whether I am waiting to use the toilet, and if I have to go for a number one or two. "I have to pee," I tell him. He again asks me, "Can I watch?" I feel the alcohol. My body feels lighter than usual and, amazingly, I find the question reasonable and not intrusive. Consent culture. In 25 years the KitKat has not had a single complaint of sexual misconduct. Perhaps it doesn't ever happen, which would be quite unusual for a nightclub.
So I take the guy with the tousled hair with me into the small toilet cubicle. He squeezes into the corner and begins to fumble with his fly. As my urine splashes loudly in the toilet bowl, he looks at the underpants pinched in between my knees and begins to masturbate and moan. Suddenly it's too much for me. Perhaps it's because I just don't understand fetish culture or perhaps I have just become aware of the intimacy within this tiny space, just two meters square. "You have to leave," I tell him, opening the door latch before he manages to pack his dick away properly. I stumble out of the toilet and find my friend. We wander off again into the crowd on the dance floor and watch a group of young gay men wearing briefs with a small opening at the rear, their six-packs smeared with gold glitter. "Welcome to the unicorns," one of them says. I let my hand brush against the glitter and join their dance circle. We exchange compliments and shake our bodies to the beat.
A permeable, parallel culture has sprung forth at the KitKat, essentially because anyone is welcome here, be they curious party people looking for adventure or experienced sex clubbers who know where all the real hard-core places are in Berlin. Some come for the exoticism and others to feel at home. Somehow the KitKat manages to preserve its identity, despite these contradictions. Today is CarneBall Bizarre, and the name means exactly what it sounds like: this is where people come to celebrate extravagance, in full knowledge that normality is an illusion.
The club hosts a series of explicitly queer events, the best known of which is probably the Gegenparty. Gegen in German means to be against something. In this case, it means to go against the norms of being white, heterosexual, living in Berlin with your small family in Prenzlauer Berg. It means living out a different idea of what your life could be.
According to one major Berlin newspaper, even the KitKat's new investor wants to change its use. Queerness and counterculture are only tolerated if they obey the market. An anarchic case of meningitis doesn't fit in well with the Senate's new fire-safety regulations and noise-abatement ordinances. It doesn't fit in with the explosion of rents and people moving to the city who, with their complaints, are transforming this former island into a global centre with its freshly painted facades.
There is no room for any of that tonight - at this hour. I throw myself into the darkness. We are among ourselves, falling over one another. Tonight we build a sense of oneness out of our diversity.
--------------------------------------
The annual cost of cleaning up graffiti on the S-Bahn is 35 million Euros, and 49.8/1000 people each day of MDMA found in wastewater (second in Europe only to the Netherlands).
Searching for abandoned ruins, hunting for antiques at flea markets, illegal parties in basements, all these are things of the past. That era of urban archaeology is definitely over. The buildings have been renovated, the squats have been cleared and the shops furnished in typical East German style have gone. With the healing of the scars of the past, the city's body is perhaps less dramatic, but it is certainly stronger and in ruder health. Berliners, too, have lost something of that sense of heartache - that romantic, self-destructive streak - and today some people even come to Berlin to work and not to create or simply do nothing. But Berlin is still a youthful city with no morbid attachment to its poor-but-sexy past, committed instead to holding on to what it holds most dear: its uncompromising multiculturalism and the certainty that the future is yet to be written. To quote someone who knows the city well, Berlin is and always will be 'pure potential'.
Whereas once people moved to Berlin to feel part of an anti-establishment community, nowadays people come to take advantage of professional opportunities that are all but unthinkable elsewhere. The seeds of creativity that fell almost by chance on the fallow ground of a city that people imagined would always remain 'poor but sexy', ended up attracting investors in search of an unconventional environment to grow their start-ups.
Visitors to Berlin are often surprised at first to see so many homeless people on the streets - until it dawns on them that what they're seeing is just Berliners dressed in their regular clothes. Dress codes here are different from the rest of Germany; Berlin is distinguished by higher levels of tolerance, but because the rules are less sharply defined it can be difficult to adhere to them.
The 1990s saw a generation of young people experiencing Berlin as a wild frontier, one they could explore and make their own. They occupied abandoned buildings, transforming them into clubs of legend, and anything seemed possible. It was in this climate of incurable optimism that the native Berliner and DJ Ellen Allien began to play her part in the development of what was to become the soundtrack of those years: techno.
-------------------------------------
It smells of hot sex. Someone is sitting on a bench next to me unlacing her boots, and in the background a woman leads a man by the chain-link collar around his neck. Somewhere, water is splashing. That innocuousness of KitKat's facade dissipates the moment you step inside, because you smell nightclub and sex right away. It's cramped and warm, and the heated bodies bump up against the newcomers who have entered on this ordinary Saturday evening.
A woman stands next to me wearing a black-lace bodysuit that readily reveals her breasts and labia. At the cloakroom, a small group of men talk to the attendant in English. She is wearing a leather harness around her hips and no underwear. A glass filled with lollipops sits on the counter in front of her. "Yes, the T-shirts definitely have to come off," she says. Fetish, leather or nude - that's the dress code. Goth and glamour are OK, too, but not jeans.
We have come to the KitKat, a name that tourists whisper reverently when talking about Berlin's club scene. After 27 years of operation, the place has stood for sex, excess, hedonism, for Berlin itself, because freedom for all reigns here, or maybe it's just because a few ground rules hold the place together. One of so many loose ends in this city, this is somewhere that doesn't belong to anything other than itself.
We scout the place like wide-eyed little kids, working our way past the many sweaty bodies through a labyrinth of rooms and side rooms. The place is full. Psychedelic paintings shimmer on the walls. Pole-dancing podiums and booths surround the dance floors. A woman wearing neon-bright lacy underwear dances up against a pole, pressing her backside against the metal and looking around the room invitingly. A woman walks up, then a man, their lips and bodies quivering with desire. A small balcony above them wraps around the dance floor, where we spy bodies slapping against each other rhythmically - a semi public orgy hovering over us. In one of the back rooms we come across a bondage show where a woman writhes, red ropes pinching her body tightly. We sit down. A man offers me a lap dance, but I refuse, thanking him anyway. We want to understand the place before we use it. We head for the swimming-pool room, which is humid and smells faintly of chlorine. The light-blue water casts luminous reflections on the walls. Several guests sit along the edge, dangling their legs in the water. It's as if everyone is waiting for something to happen. This room is legendary. Everyone who talks about the KitKat talks about the swimming pool and the big swing that hangs over it, because anything can happen here. Or nothing at all. Somehow, the water represents all the bodily fluids mixing here tonight. It's both repulsive and erotic.
We dance, we laugh, we gape in astonishment, and after just one hour our initial shyness gives away to a sense of normality, as if this were a sauna where no one is surprised by the nudity and the only remarkable thing is seeing people putting their clothes back on afterwards in the changing room.
For decades subculture niches like the KitKat survived and thrived in Berlin, because the city, a West German island smack in the middle of East Germany, ringed by walls, was able to flout many of the rules that applied elsewhere. This was a place for people who wanted to do things differently or who simply didn't fit in anywhere else. People came to Berlin because there was no mandatory community service and no closing time - instead, plenty of breathing space. As a result, even today, the club scene is queer, and very diverse; there are places for spanking, swingers, dark rooms, Silverfuture and Ficken 3000. The freedom they provide is queer because they don't follow the heteronormative rules by which our society largely lives. This is where people mingle to play out their desires with one another.
As I made my way through the rooms, I saw flabby bellies bulging out from thongs on one side and taut six-packs on the other. People lie on the red upholstered chairs, masturbating, French kissing, fondling each other. The bodies are so diverse, as they are in real life and as they aren't in pornography. I see young students, seasoned swingers, ample women, bearded men, gay, straight and in between, anyone who refuses to categorize their sexuality in any way. The queer Sunday after-hours party here used to be called the Frak Show, and now it is simply known as the Peep Show.
"Can I watch?" I turn around to see a young man, perhaps just a few years older than me, as I lean in the doorway, waiting for a toilet to free up. He's pretty, with his silver earrings and tousled blond hair. I don't understand. "What do you mean?" I ask him. He asks me whether I am waiting to use the toilet, and if I have to go for a number one or two. "I have to pee," I tell him. He again asks me, "Can I watch?" I feel the alcohol. My body feels lighter than usual and, amazingly, I find the question reasonable and not intrusive. Consent culture. In 25 years the KitKat has not had a single complaint of sexual misconduct. Perhaps it doesn't ever happen, which would be quite unusual for a nightclub.
So I take the guy with the tousled hair with me into the small toilet cubicle. He squeezes into the corner and begins to fumble with his fly. As my urine splashes loudly in the toilet bowl, he looks at the underpants pinched in between my knees and begins to masturbate and moan. Suddenly it's too much for me. Perhaps it's because I just don't understand fetish culture or perhaps I have just become aware of the intimacy within this tiny space, just two meters square. "You have to leave," I tell him, opening the door latch before he manages to pack his dick away properly. I stumble out of the toilet and find my friend. We wander off again into the crowd on the dance floor and watch a group of young gay men wearing briefs with a small opening at the rear, their six-packs smeared with gold glitter. "Welcome to the unicorns," one of them says. I let my hand brush against the glitter and join their dance circle. We exchange compliments and shake our bodies to the beat.
A permeable, parallel culture has sprung forth at the KitKat, essentially because anyone is welcome here, be they curious party people looking for adventure or experienced sex clubbers who know where all the real hard-core places are in Berlin. Some come for the exoticism and others to feel at home. Somehow the KitKat manages to preserve its identity, despite these contradictions. Today is CarneBall Bizarre, and the name means exactly what it sounds like: this is where people come to celebrate extravagance, in full knowledge that normality is an illusion.
The club hosts a series of explicitly queer events, the best known of which is probably the Gegenparty. Gegen in German means to be against something. In this case, it means to go against the norms of being white, heterosexual, living in Berlin with your small family in Prenzlauer Berg. It means living out a different idea of what your life could be.
According to one major Berlin newspaper, even the KitKat's new investor wants to change its use. Queerness and counterculture are only tolerated if they obey the market. An anarchic case of meningitis doesn't fit in well with the Senate's new fire-safety regulations and noise-abatement ordinances. It doesn't fit in with the explosion of rents and people moving to the city who, with their complaints, are transforming this former island into a global centre with its freshly painted facades.
There is no room for any of that tonight - at this hour. I throw myself into the darkness. We are among ourselves, falling over one another. Tonight we build a sense of oneness out of our diversity.
--------------------------------------
The annual cost of cleaning up graffiti on the S-Bahn is 35 million Euros, and 49.8/1000 people each day of MDMA found in wastewater (second in Europe only to the Netherlands).
January 7, 2023
Accidentally marked this at read the other day..very disappointing cos I wanted the satisfaction of marking it read now (I've actually finished it). As a result, I've taken off a star cos I'm annoyed
December 25, 2023
I read this in part as preparation for my upcoming trip to Berlin in April next year, for the local insights such compilations of journalism provides. What struck me, as I've also done a lot of reading around the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Cold War period as an adjunct to the history I studied at university, is that there's a distinct theme of nostalgia for the former Eastern bloc and East Berlin and a strong thread of criticism for the gentrification of the city ... itself, a global phenomena affecting everywhere in a neo liberal post 1980's world, now a post GFC and post pandemic world. There's a light touch on the bigger issues of migration, race and of course the festering issue of Germany's troubled past and the resurgence of right wing political ideologies.
A useful and insightful read on many topics.
A useful and insightful read on many topics.
September 6, 2023
Like any essay collection, some pieces hit and some don't. The highlights for me:
• Christine Kensche's profile of DJ Ellen Allien was a neat window into how techno/club culture evolved in 1990s Berlin – first as a free and spontaneous coming-together within a "Temporary Autonomous Zone", then as a more regimented commercial enterprise trading on that anarchic image (even as it was disappearing).
• Thibaut de Ruyter writes about Berlin's heritage of architectural inauthenticity/reconstruction, from Checkpoint Charlie to the Berlin Palace. I don't agree with a lot of what he says (architects LOVE to sneeringly call places Disneyland), but it's an interesting argument posed in a clear enough way that at least you can decide how you feel about it.
• Juliane Löffler describes a night at the KitKat sex club – nothing too profound, but it’s fun being taken behind the scenes somewhere you wouldn’t go otherwise.
• Annett Gröschner writes about the gentrification of Prenzlauer Berg, from living in a run-down squat to being evicted by a rich couple. Embodies the ethos of Berlin as a renter’s city.
• Alina Schwermer compares the postwar histories of BFC Dynamo & Union Berlin – as BFC, the DDR’s top team, sank to the fifth division while Union became a cult club playing in the Champions League. It revolves around questions of what “identity” means for something as amorphous as a football club – what does it mean for BFC to be a Stasi club, or a right-wing club? And for both clubs, what does your heritage as a DDR club mean in reunified Germany?
3.5 stars for the whole book – rounded up to 4 because this is such a great idea as an introduction to the vibe of a city. Would read a collection like this before traveling anywhere.
• Christine Kensche's profile of DJ Ellen Allien was a neat window into how techno/club culture evolved in 1990s Berlin – first as a free and spontaneous coming-together within a "Temporary Autonomous Zone", then as a more regimented commercial enterprise trading on that anarchic image (even as it was disappearing).
• Thibaut de Ruyter writes about Berlin's heritage of architectural inauthenticity/reconstruction, from Checkpoint Charlie to the Berlin Palace. I don't agree with a lot of what he says (architects LOVE to sneeringly call places Disneyland), but it's an interesting argument posed in a clear enough way that at least you can decide how you feel about it.
• Juliane Löffler describes a night at the KitKat sex club – nothing too profound, but it’s fun being taken behind the scenes somewhere you wouldn’t go otherwise.
• Annett Gröschner writes about the gentrification of Prenzlauer Berg, from living in a run-down squat to being evicted by a rich couple. Embodies the ethos of Berlin as a renter’s city.
• Alina Schwermer compares the postwar histories of BFC Dynamo & Union Berlin – as BFC, the DDR’s top team, sank to the fifth division while Union became a cult club playing in the Champions League. It revolves around questions of what “identity” means for something as amorphous as a football club – what does it mean for BFC to be a Stasi club, or a right-wing club? And for both clubs, what does your heritage as a DDR club mean in reunified Germany?
3.5 stars for the whole book – rounded up to 4 because this is such a great idea as an introduction to the vibe of a city. Would read a collection like this before traveling anywhere.
July 23, 2025
Some of this I've read before but some was new. A great way to visit Berlin in my mind in advance of my upcoming trip.
February 9, 2025
Una collezione di storie su persone e luoghi nascosti o turistici a Berlino. Un tuffo nella città in cui abito, vista da altri punti di vista.
Sicuramente leggerò altri libri della collezione The Passenger.
Sicuramente leggerò altri libri della collezione The Passenger.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews