Gate of Hohenschönhausen prison. The East German Stasi’s (Ministry for State Security) secret prison in the Berlin district of Hohenschönhausen locked up and interrogated some 11,000 enemies of the state for crimes as terrible as criticizing government policy, listening to Western music, and simply wanting to emigrate. Originally a makeshift basement prison run by the DDR’s Soviet overlords, the...
Waiting for the Nightjet to Paris My attempt to reach the Pyrenees by train failed before it began. I had planned to go to the Atlantic end of the Pyrenees this week, where I would begin a long mountain hike. Here’s how it looked on paper. I would hop an expensive ÖBB Nightjet from Berlin at 7:04pm on Tuesday, arriving at Paris Est at 9:38 the next morning, alongside other...
Berlin residents must have felt one step closer to the future in the decade before the Cold War ended. That’s when a 313-metre-long spacecraft materialized in Westend. East Berlin was building their Palace of the Republic in the 1970s, and the West’s Congress Hall in the Tiergarten — known as the pregnant oyster for its unfortunate shape — was too small. A competition was held to...
The villa of the Wannsee conference Remembrance Day isn’t observed here in the country that started and lost two World Wars. But Berlin is filled with memorials which commemorate the Twentieth Century’s darkest events. I normally stand alone in my study for the 11am moment of silence. But this year I decided to observe Remembrance Day by visiting the Wannsee villa where Nazi bureaucrats met to...
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...
How big is your head? I’m not suggesting you know its exact circumference in centimetres, but you do have an idea of how much space it takes up, right? I don’t think this is the case for German people. How else would you explain their pillows? The sleep-deprived foreigner has two choice of pillow here in Germany, and each is terrible in its own way. The most common type is the pointlessly huge...
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...
I’m moving flats next month and saying goodbye to Tempelhofer Feld, my favourite space in the neighbourhood. But before I pack up my books and lug them across town, I’d like to tell you a bit about the history of what was once the world’s largest building. The 1.2 km long complex was built by the Nazis to be the most advanced airport the world had ever seen, but war cut short their plans and they...
I’m moving flats soon, after four years, leaving this neighbourhood behind for another pre-war altbau in a different part of the city. Imminent departure has prompted me to poke around some of those minor historic sites I’ve passed so often but never gotten around to exploring. One of the largest is just down the block. I biked past that strange concrete mass so many times over the past four...
The second-largest island on Germany’s Baltic Sea coast is a summer vacation paradise. But it once housed a massive secret weapons program that the Nazis hoped would allow them to snatch victory from the closing jaws of defeat. I made my annual summer pilgrimage to the island of Rügen last weekend — much later than usual in this year of pandemic, but it was still just warm enough to swim. The...