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Author Archive
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Berlin’s Ghetto Bus: the M41
On a Friday sunny morning I see a large group waiting at the M41 bus stop on Urbanstraße on the ...
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Xenophobia Posing as Social Activism in Berlin
Berlin woke up the over the weekend to an attack on a business on Rykestraße. A business was defaced with ...
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The New Berlin Wall Protests
To see people protesting in front of the Berlin Wall, as they have done this week, is not something new. ...
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Berlinale Wrap-Up 2013: Forum Films
On Cuvrystr. in Kreuzberg there is a famous street art mural of a man chained to his own wealth, a ...
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Berlinale Wrap-Up 2013: Competition Films
The Needle is back after my winter break, and in time to catch the 2013 Berlin International Film Festival, or ...
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You Ain’t No Berliner
Another nasty sticker pasted around Berlin telling you to go home. Of so you think. Is it meant––yet again, in ...
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No Winter Badeschiff
Every winter something remarkable has happened in Berlin. The Badeschiff (or “swimming boat”) is an innovative pool that floats in ...
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Blaming Hipsters for Gentrification in Neukölln?
Imagine you are in a Berlin bar, at your most vulnerable at the urinal or bathroom stall, and you read ...
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Strange Animals Over Alexanderplatz
They come every year from the East. A black cloud swoops around the television tower, or Fernsehturm, at Alexanderplatz, at ...
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What Berlin is Like in Winter
Winter is coming. Is it your first in Berlin? Stick it out and you’ll join the ranks of confirmed expats: ...
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The Crisis From Berlin
It’s with relief that I return to Berlin from disheartening trips around Europe, but I also come back angry. The ...
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Nazi Resistors: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Zionskirche
At the age of 25, in 1931, Dietrich Bonhoeffer became the vicar of the Protestant Zionskirche in Berlin Mitte. What ...
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You Are Afraid of the Venomous Rabbit Saloon
Some people are afraid of Hermannplatz, others of Kottbusser Tor, but many more are afraid of Hasenheide Park. Hermannplatz frightens ...
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Roasting Goat at the Airport
I smelled it before I saw it. God, I smell bad. What poison was my body purging as I sweat ...
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The Hipster Library: The Jacob-und-Wilhelm-Grimm-Zentrum
I’ve wanted to make love with you so many times, but I’m always waiting in line. Everyone wants to put ...
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A Remedy to Berlin Attitude: A Trip to Olomouc, Czech Republic
When I was a kid, we had neighbours from Moravia. My memory is triggered by cuisine: especially strudels and pancakes and spongey ...
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‘This Ain’t California’: The Undeclared Mockumentary
Every once and a while a film comes around that does the truth a real disservice. This is one of ...
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Poland from Berlin: Wrocław in a Weekend
You might never notice walking around Berlin, but a vast and complicated land lies just over 50 km from the ...
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Rockets, Radiation and Slave Labour: A Weekend Trip to Stechlinsee
We came to this region some 80km north of Berlin, a land of lakes and medieval towns built on isthmi, ...
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Weekend Trips: From Berlin to Hiddensee
My dear Needle readers, welcome back after the summer break. It’s a golden autumn, the cultural season starts up again, ...
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How to Fall in Love in Clärchens Ballhaus
Creak open the door to Clärchens Ballhaus. Can’t you hear the jazz band playing? It’s calling out to you all the way ...
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A Tale of Two Pastries on Boppstraße
One of the most obvious signs of changing times in Kreuzberg is the emergence of a new generation of tea ...
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Tear Gas, Riot Police and Barbecue: 1 May 2012 in Kreuzberg
There are two faces to the International Workers Day protests in Berlin. There are the street parties, with DJs setting ...
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Musing about Nazi Exiles in Mexikoplatz Station
‘All the streets around here were named after South American countries, so that when their soldiering grandfathers return from exile, ...
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No Water for You, Unless It’s ‘Still or Sparkling’?
Getting a glass of water in a German restaurant is not an easy task. Unless you are willing to pay ...
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Erotica and White Asparagus Season
Asparagus season makes me uneasy. This is a problem living in Germany, because Spargelzeit* is unavoidable. The alien fern crops ...
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The Sixth Borough: Berlin as New York
New York in the seventies without the crime? New York with a type-B personality? The way ‘the East Village used ...
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Finally Spring in Berlin
On Sunday in the wee hours clocks go forward one hour, the days are longer, and it’s official: spring. That ...
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The Arab Spring in Berlin
On Hobrechtstraße in Neukölln, that corner of Kreuzkölln between the Lebanese community on Sonnenallee and the canal, there is a ...
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Gerhard Richter Unaccompanied: The Retrospective at the Neue
Gerhard Richter was flying to New York on September 11th 2001. His exhibition 40 Years of Painting was opening at MOMA ...
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London in Exile: Literati, Scones and Hudson’s Cakes
Walk through this door and into the story of many English speakers in Berlin. Jim Hudson worked for an architecture practice. ...
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How to Survive the Berlinale (the Berlin Film Festival)
Potsdamer Platz is suddenly teeming with people. There isn’t the density of midtown Manhattan but, restrict your peripheral vision, you ...
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Hidden Mid-Century Modernism at the Haus der Kulturen
I am about to visit one of Berlin’s most beautiful, undiscovered and under-appreciated interiors. Take the 100 bus through the ...
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Literaturhaus Café
It’s winter and there is finally snow on the ground. I go to the Literature House on Fasanenstr. 23 in ...
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The Troubling Fate of the Karstadt Rabbits
When I’m at the Karstadt department store on Hermannplatz, I visit the rabbits. The pet section has a surprising assortment ...
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The End of Cheap Housing in Berlin?
Once upon a time, artists moved to Berlin because it was cheap. These days, they move to Berlin because they’ve heard ...
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Fireworks
Video from Canadian Berlin-based video artist Dan Hudson. I flew into Berlin on New Year’s eve, at around 8pm. ...
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Moving to Berlin? The Needle Guide (2012 Edition)
FOR THE UPDATED 2012 GUIDE, FOLLOW THIS LINK PLEASE
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From Istanbul to Kreuzberg
Walking down the main boulevard of Istanbul, in Taksim, İstiklal, one is swept up in a mass of humanity that makes Berlin ...
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Sweating Silence in the Stadtbad Mitte Sauna
The first time you come to the sauna of Stadtbad Mitte, the Bauhaus bath complex on Gartenstraße, certain things take ...
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Traumatised by Gay Oktoberfest
I traumatised a friend visiting from Los Angeles by taking her to Gay Oktoberfest. Oktoberfest, Berlin, Gay? Do all these ...
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Emergency Landing on Graefestraße
I am in love with Christoph. He works for the fire department and he wears yellow overalls. I heard him ...
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State Elections in Berlin: Homophobia and the BIG party
It’s election time in Berlin. On the 18th of September, the seats of the House of Deputies for the Land ...
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Revolt on the Admiralbrücke, Kreuzberg
It’s a Wednesday evening on Kreuzberg’s Admiralbrücke in summer, and there must be 200 people here, drinking store-bought beer, smoking, ...
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Boules in Berlin, Paul-Lincke-Ufer (VIDEO)
On the north side of the Paul-Lincke-Ufer in Kreuzberg, along the canal, locals gather to play boules. The Sunday traffic–-bicycles, ...
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After the Nazis, are the Wertheims Coming Home?
The commercialisation of the former Wall’s no-man’s land progresses as fast as the cranes can haul girders. Awful, says a ...
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The Berlin Wall at 50
Today is an anniversary. The Berlin Wall went up 50 years ago. Imagine a family arriving at Friedrichstraße station in ...
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From Berlin to Lviv, Ukraine
Turn your back for a moment on the West, and travel East as a corrective. Jump the train from Berlin, and ...
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Getting Messy at Burgermeister
Burgermeister (a play on words on Bürgermeister, which means the ‘city mayor’ with the simple addition of an umlaut) is a burger ...
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A German Market on the Maybachufer
On a Tuesday or Friday, I see the veiled women of Neukölln and Kreuzberg making their way to the canal, ...
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Hitler’s Bloody Palace: Mohrenstraße
Blood red, sometimes purple, the marble’s colour was signed off by Hitler himself. It decked his grandest building, the New Reich ...
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Felix Mendelssohn in Wannsee
Last month, at the American Academy in Berlin, I had the pleasure of hearing students from the Curtis Institute of Philadelphia play ...
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The U55: The Shortest Subway
It has only three stations, it took 14 years to build, it connects a distance that can be easily covered ...
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The Other Face of Kreuzberg: The Werner-Düttmann-Siedlung
On Fichte and Körtestraße, just up from Südstern U-Bahn, you might pass by an elegant wine shop, a Michelin restaurant ...
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Forcing Hitler Underground: The Führerbunker
Their bodies were doused with petrol and incinerated in a bomb crater, here, in what is now a parking lot. Adolf ...
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Chaos and Colour: Haus des Lehrers
There’s a blaze of colour on Alexanderplatz. When Berlin is at its winter’s darkest, the sensation of alienation heightened by ...
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Paris-Moskau Restaurant: In the Shadow of the Railroad
Come to Hauptbahnhof, Berlin’s main station, at 4:30 or 15:40, and watch the creaky train carriages depart, carrying passengers for ...
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The Changing Names of Südstern U-Bahn
This underground station in Kreuzberg has had many names. It was born Hasenheide in 1924, it became Kaiser-Friedrich-Platz and then ...
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A Sigh of Relief on the Death Strip
I walk through the former death strip of the Berlin Wall and relief floods through me. I don’t miss the ...
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Blind Trust: The Otto Weidt Workshop
You are deaf in an air raid. Imagine the mouths open, but you cannot hear the screams. No sound, just ...
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A Trip Home from the Club
Get up! Aufstehen! The sun’s up already and somehow Noah’s woken this crazy old man with his cane and his ...
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Hitler and the German Historical Museum
It’s easy to forget that Germany is a new country and that, for much of its history, the term ‘German’ ...
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Footbridge, Bahnhof Friedrichstraße
If Berlin has a tear in its fabric, a trap door to an alternate reality, it’s here. Suspended under the ...
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Berlin in Ruins
A voice in the hallway says, Doch doch, as if it is safe to come out, where the walls ...
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Bahnhof Alexanderplatz
Berlin scares the hell out of me, a Parisian friend confesses on a weekend visit. Putain! Look how empty the ...
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Café Einstein, Kurfürstenstraße 58
You love this Viennese-styled café, but at times it fills you with grief. You were here in late autumn and ...
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Ex-Pat Disorientation: Kawaguchi’s Andropolaroid at Dock 11
Being an expat can be profoundly frustrating and disorienting. It is like having no points of reference, it’s the struggle ...
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The Berggruen Museum
On the top floor there is a flat where the old man himself lived. Not a bad solution for old ...
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Charlottengrad
It’s not just the rumble of S-Bahn Charlottenburg’s train tracks above that makes you feel in-transit. In the Rossia supermarket, ...
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When You’re From Kotti
Kottbusser Tor, the centre of the ertswhile-radical SO36 district in Kreuzberg, is affectionately known as just ‘Kotti’. The surrounding kiez ...
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The Jewish Museum
(bear with us as we try to correct some formatting problems with this page) I first visited the Jewish ...
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Starship Tunnels No More
Not far from Hermannplatz, the cusp of Kreuzberg and Neukölln, at Hasenheide 13, are two tunnels that lead to another ...
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Hammers, Sickles and Bones
The images on the sarcophagi of the Treptower Park Soviet Memorial (Sowjetische Ehrenmal,1949) are idealised and classical, and very very ...
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Luminous and Transparent: the Henry Ford Bau
It’s a late summer day and we are riding our bikes around Dahlem, in the South of former West Berlin. ...
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Nazi Victims and Stumbling Blocks to Memory
“A man is first forgotten when his name is forgotten“. So explains Gunter Demnig, the Berliner artist behind the Stolpersteine, ...
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Swimming in the Past: Stadtbad Neukölln
Berliners are not nostalgic. There is public outcry when architects propose to build in a nostalgic style (the re-construction of ...
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Rape and the Red Army: Sportpalast-Bunker
‘One of them grabs my wrists and jerks me along the corridor. Then the other is pulling as ...
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G-Force Mitte
I feel it, don’t you? It’s like struggling against a fierce wind when you cross the Tiergarten west towards Zoo ...
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State Security in No Man’s Land
Berliners are used to there being a great space off-limits between Mitte and Wedding, hidden behind a wall. The ...
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Anhalter Bahnhof
It’s 1880 and you are in the biggest train station in continental Europe standing under an iron and glass ...
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Bäckerei Balzer, Sophienstraße 30/31, Mitte
Frau Balzer is 77 and her family’s bakery has existed in Berlin-Mitte since 1926. Located in Sophienstraße, once the historic ...
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Ackerkeller No More, Bergstraße 68, Mitte
Last weekend, Ackerkeller staged the last of its demolition parties and closed for good. Ackerkeller called itself Mitte’s living room. ...
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Berlin’s Underground Chess Scene: Night of the Pawn
It’s an abandoned brewery. You enter a gate, a waif-like woman lit by candlelight admits you, but gives no directions. ...
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Pump Action
Doppelkolbenpumpe. I was surprised I could find an online translation: double piston pump. Then what is one doing in a ...
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American Baseball Diamonds
There are few places left in Berlin where the experience of American occupation after the Second World War is still ...
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The Tempelhof Airfield
The gates are now open to the Tempelhofer Feld, a public park on what was the airstrip of Tempelhof Airport ...
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Karl-Marx Allee
It was a place to walk through, and stare. Built in the early fifties, Karl-Marx Allee, leading into Alexanderplatz, with ...
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Urbanstraße, 10967 Berlin, Kreuzberg
This stretch of Urbanstraße is clogged with four lanes of traffic and is not far from the discordant ...
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Linienstraße 113: Bötzow Privat
Pass by in the evening, and look into the picture windows illuminated by candles. Perhaps you will see a penumbra, ...
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A New Museum
Germany’s bold confrontation with its past, its sometimes self-flagellating intent to imprint guilt and scars onto its official history, marks ...
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Rosenthaler Platz, Berlin-Mitte
Dear Berlin-Mitte, We need to discuss our relationship. We’ve got problems. I suppose it’s inevitable after our years together. I’m ...
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Colonnades Unveiled
I was used to the Museum Island as building site. The edifices were interiors, not exteriors. You negotiated your way ...
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Schlachtensee 1940
These photographs taken last autumn I found unbearable to contemplate only a few weeks ago. But now, with warmer days, ...
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Augustraße 14-16
It is 1933 and Hitler has come to power. You are Jewish and live in Berlin. Do you have the ...
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Nazi Ruins: Albert Speer’s Only Surviving Works in Berlin
Most of my German friends are pacifists. They do not like seeing Germans involved in foreign wars. The ...
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A Palace of Tears
In front of Friedrichstraße station, along the Spree River, the Tränenpalast or ‘Palace of Tears’ has reappeared out of the ...
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Welcome to The Needle
The beginning of the 21st Century in Berlin may well be remembered for its outpouring of creativity –like Vienna in ...