Berlinale summer screening at Charlottenburg Palace Covid cancelled Berlinale, but summer brought a week of screenings curated from this year’s films. I watched the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize winner last week a short bike ride away at Charlottenburg Palace. Waiting for darkness to fall It was the second-best place I’ve watched an outdoor film. The best was in Malta. We...
Spandau Citadel by A.Savin (Wikimedia Commons · WikiPhotoSpace) – Own work, FAL, Berlin is finally emerging from the pandemic lockdown we’ve been in with increasing forms of severity since mid-December. The biergarten are open, so I guess civilization won’t end just yet. We can go to shops now, too. And barber shops and indoor dining are open to those who show a same...
Rory Maclean Rory Maclean is the author of 15 books, including Berlin: Portrait of a City Through the Centuries, Stalin’s Nose, and Pravda Ha Ha. He’s been called “the outstanding, and most indefatigable, traveller-writer of our time” by the novelist John le Carré. Jan Morris described his work as “a new kind of history, in several dimensions and innumerable moods, that adds up to — across...
I’ll never forget the first time I got sick in Germany. In Canada, the common cold is a trivial annoyance. Simply trudge to the nearest Shopper’s Drug Mart and buy a bottle of Tylenol Cold, perhaps with a Robitussin chaser for the cough. Put the kettle on that night, sip a mug of NeoCitran with a dash of gin, and achieve a fantastic, un-nose-blocked sleep. You’ll wake the next morning feeling...
Teufelsberg — ‘Devil’s Mountain’ — is a man made hill that rises 120m above sea level and provides a 360 degree view of flat Berlin and the surrounding Grunewald. The hill was built from an estimated 12 million cubic metres of war rubble, the remains of all those shattered buildings that were left of the city after WWII bombing. They dumped the broken brick and stone over an unfinished Nazi...
I took a long walk through the neighbourhood again, partly out of a desire for new sights in a year of lockdown drudgery, and partly as an antidote to irritability caused by too little sleep and too much noise. The long curving low rises of my neighbourhood gave way to a small collection of German and Croatian restaurants, a few pharmacies, an optometrist, and small shops, and then the brick...
The barber shops reopened in Berlin this week. I’d booked an appointment as soon as I saw it coming, to beat the mad rush of involuntary hippies. And so I set out this morning to put an end to my out-of-control hobo chic. For the wielders of the clipper and comb, it must be a lot like shearing sheep. At a time like this, I’m thankful to have a Welsh barber. Although the guy who mans the front...
It’s beginning to feel like someone broke the weather. We had snow here two weeks ago — the most snow I’ve seen in four years in Berlin. It didn’t snow at all last year. Before that, a few centimetres once or twice which melted within a day. This year we had 10cm to 15cm. While such an amount would hardly be noticed in Canada, it caused a surprising amount of chaos here, with cancelled trains and...
It’s easier to get into North Korea than it is to rent a flat in Berlin. I can say that with great confidence, having done both. In Canada, renting a flat was simply a matter of replying to a few ads, viewing a few places, and filing out an application. The landlord might ask your permission to do a credit check — at their expense — but that was it. It doesn’t work that way in Berlin. When it...
The largest Red Army base outside the Soviet Union was a 40 minute drive south of Berlin. It was just beyond where the new airport — and the old Schönefeld SXF — is today. Wünsdorf-Waldstadt was completely off limits to East Germans during those long, dark Iron Curtain years. They called it Die Verbotene Stadt (the Forbidden City). Others called the massive base ‘Little Moscow’, and I guess it...
Author of Vagabond Dreams: Road Wisdom from Central America. Host of Personal Landscapes podcast. Editor-at-Large (Europe) for Canada's Outpost magazine. Columnist at The Shift. Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.