When walking my daughter’s dog in Charlottenburg, I enjoy examining the plaques on buildings. My favorite is the one marking the building on Mommsenstraße where Hanns Sachs lived from 1920 to 1932.  Sachs was a Viennese lawyer who was trained by Freud and became a member of his inner circle.  Karl Abraham, another early student of Freud, returned to Berlin and founded the first psychoanalytic institute anywhere in 1920. Freud sent Sachs to Berlin to be the training analyst. He remained in Berlin analyzing future psychoanalysts in his Mommsenstraße apartment until 1932, when he moved to Boston, Massachusetts and performed the same function for the Boston institute.  Another such plaque marks the residence of Ernst Simmel, psychoanalyst and socialist, in Westend.  He founded the first psychoanalytic hospital, in  Schloß Tegel, in 1927.  Arrested by the Nazis, on his release he moved to Los Angeles, where he organized the first psychoanalytic study group in 1934. (Bob LeVine)

This is the first in our ongoing series of essays written by German writers about America.

Thomas Pletzinger was born in 1975 and grew up in Germany’s industrial area Ruhrgebiet. He holds an M.A from Hamburg University and an MFA from the German Literature Institute Leipzig. He worked for publishers and a literary scouting agency in New York and also participated in the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program. Pletzinger now lives in Berlin where he works as a translator and editor. His stories and poems were awarded several awards and grants. The translation of his critically acclaimed novel Bestattung eines Hundes (Funeral for a Dog) will be published in the U.S. in spring of 2010.

For more, please visit the author’s website.

Photo courtesy of destination360.com

Herbie Hancock’s piano intro follows with a short riff of staccato trumpet. The 10 o’clock crowd is excited and attentive; beers sprawled across the packed tables.  This is just a regular night at the historic A-Trane jazz club. Or at least I picture it that way. This Charlottenburg musical institution can boast the likes of Alice Coltrane and Wynton Marsalis among its long list of famous performers, though I have never seen these people. More important than them, the pricey 30 Euro concerts and the magical performances of eras past is the egalitarian, convivial atmosphere of the place.  Free Saturday night jam sessions, when musicians and enthusiasts stroll in past midnight evoke that cool, improvisational nonchalance that we want from jazz. The waitresses will pass you tall glasses of beer through the arms and coats of eight people. You can go alone or in a group, but loneliness and company become irrelevant as you are blasted away by simple noise. After, walking out into the cold quiet of Bleibtreustrasse at 3am, in the dead of December, your blood is warm and pulsing—maybe from the beer or the lingering bass vibrations—and you feel ready for anything and nothing at the same time. (Bettina Warburg-Johnson)

Eric Banks is a writer based in New York. While at Columbia in the late 1980s, he had a radio show on WKCR. He has since written for The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, the New York Times, and the Chronicle of Higher Education and is a contributing editor of Men’s Vogue among other publications. He is also the former editor in chief of Bookforum and senior editor of Artforum. He is on the board of the National Book Critics Circle in New York.

Portrait of Eisler above courtesy of the International Hanns Eisler Gesellschaft.

Ralph Martin is a writer and journalist living in Prenzlauer Berg. He has written for the New York Times, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, GQ, and other publications; his book Ein Amerikaner in Berlin, a comic ‘gonzo memoir’ in ten chapters of German-American culture shock, will appear on August 24 from Dumont Verlag. Visit his website at ralphmartinwrites.com.

EIN AMERIKANER IN BERLIN, Berlin Stories Editorial Director Ralph Martin’s very funny book about how he learned to to love all things Deutsch, is published in German by Dumont Verlag.

EIN AMERIKANER…is the nonfiction tale of an ex-New Yorker who moves to Berlin, settles down, and to his sometimes horrified fascination, becomes German. Ten chapters of culture shock and misadventure cover everything from the German rules of romance to the Teutonic love affair with Aldi to what it feels like to be the only Anglophone father at the local Kita (and how it feels to have a puppet theater pushed onto your head by a crowd of rowdy German preschoolers). It’s funny because it’s true. For more information please go to: www.ralphmartinwrites.com

To buy the book, please click here.

Andrea Scrima is an artist and writer from New York who has been living in Berlin for much of her adult life. A graduate of the School of Visual Arts and the Hochschule der Künste, she has been the recipient of numerous grants and awards for her art and writing from institutions including the Pollock-Krasner Foundation in New York and the Senatsverwaltung für Wissenschaft, Forschung und Kultur in Berlin. Her short story “Sisters” was awarded a National Hackney Literary Award in 2007. For more about her work, please go to her website.

The image above is taken from Scrima’s installation Shelf Life.

Eve Lucas grew up in England and has a degree in French and German from King’s College London and a Masters in Art History from the University of Maryland. She has lived in Berlin since returning to Germany from Washington DC in 2003 and works as a book critic and journalist for English-language magazines based in Munich and Berlin. She has published a couple of short stories and is currently working on her first collection. Her bike, purchased on a flea-market in Georgetown, is a treasured friend.

As Berlin upgrades its chameleon wardrobe toward something more sophisticated, it’s tempting to find its bohemian foundations provincial or quaint—in any case, relegated to the pile marked, “donations.” But such a linear notion of progress belies this city’s iconoclastic nature. Berlin is a humane place, scaled for human beings. This is clear to anyone who walks along the stretch of the Landwehr Canal in front of the Vivantes Klinikum am Urban (aka the Urban Krankenhaus). Whether this scrappy swath of nature belongs to the city or to the hospital is unclear. Between Admiralbrücke and Baerwaldbrücke, it’s neither park nor strasse. It’s neither here nor really there. Sure, moored on either side of the hospital bank are two cafes in sailboats, whose colored lights strung from the masts certainly welcome tourists. But in between them sits a fat, abandoned ferryboat whose smashed windows and graffiti silently attest to the legends of yesterday’s parties. Maybe the city’s too broke to move it, but for the passers-by who stop here (and perhaps also the patients behind the hospital’s windows), the trashed boat epitomizes Berlin’s sense of humor; it’s a monument to not taking life too seriously. On warm afternoons throughout the year, adventurous readers climb over the low fence along the northern side of the canal to dangle their legs over the edge and enjoy hours of southern exposure. During long days around the summer solstice, the gravel path is crowded with slow bicyclists, wild children chased by strollers, patients in wheelchairs, and the usual flâneurs. Picnickers and laughing sunbathers, a few strumming musicians, chess players and lovers crowd the patchy grass next to the water. From wooden benches many watch these unabashed displays of life, some in spite of a bandaged eye or half-hidden IV. Swans ornament the shores and aggressively hunt for scraps. Sometimes a tall man on an air mattress floats, napping, in the canal. This un-place belongs to anyone who pauses, enchanted by an unexpected glint of sunlight on the canal or the welcoming mood of a motley gathering. Here is something spontaneous and unselfconscious. Something natural. For this nature to reside within the purview of the Urban Krankenhaus is, for anyone, heart-breakingly humane. (Emily Lundin)

In the winter, Berlin streets are notoriously grim; the eye savors any bright spot—a child’s mittens, a circus ad. But at the top of Rosa Luxemburg Strasse stands an oasis of color: local milliner Rike Feurstein’s eponymous boutique, a veritable confectionery of candy-hued hats. Inside, one tries them on like identities: A leopard-print cloche à la Marion Davies, a violet felt fedora–cocked over one eye, of course–a modern-day Dietrich. To cold-reddened ears, the soft wool hats whisper most enticingly. A vermillion shapka says “Russian oligarch’s wife.”  A lime-green rasta cap–paired, perhaps, with a rainbow-striped parabola of a scarf–“ingénue.” Eventually, the modiste herself emerges from her adjacent workshop to assist in the selection, and an ingenious knit visor in petrol blue is wrapped in tissue and dispatched into the cityscape. (Megan O’Grady)