The Needle: Berlin

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

Burgermeister (a play on words on Bürgermeister, which means the ‘city mayor’ with the simple addition of an umlaut) is a burger

On a Tuesday or Friday, I see the veiled women of Neukölln and Kreuzberg making their way to the canal,

Blood red, sometimes purple, the marble’s colour was signed off by Hitler himself. It decked his grandest building, the New Reich

It has only three stations, it took 14 years to build, it connects a distance that can be easily covered

On Fichte and Körtestraße, just up from Südstern U-Bahn, you might pass by an elegant wine shop, a Michelin restaurant

Their bodies were doused with petrol and incinerated in a bomb crater, here, in what is now a parking lot. Adolf

There’s a blaze of colour on Alexanderplatz. When Berlin is at its winter’s darkest, the sensation of alienation heightened by

Come to Hauptbahnhof, Berlin’s main station, at 4:30 or 15:40, and watch the creaky train carriages depart, carrying passengers for

This underground station in Kreuzberg has had many names. It was born Hasenheide in 1924, it became Kaiser-Friedrich-Platz and then

I walk through the former death strip of the Berlin Wall and relief floods through me. I don’t miss the