Your Berlin Stories
Do you have your own Berlin Story? Send it to us in 300 words or less. If we like it, we’ll post it here.
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Alicia Oltuski on losing her father in the axis of death
Alicia Oltuski received her MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University and has taught memoir writing at the University of the Arts, in Philadelphia. Her book about diamonds, The Movement of Precious Objects, is forthcoming from Scribner.
Rose-Anne Clermont on seriously bad manners
Rose-Anne Clermont, a New York native, first came to Berlin in 1998 as a Fulbright fellow, after earning a Master’s Degree in journalism from Columbia University. Her articles and essays have appeared in International Herald Tribune, Spiegel on-line, The Root, The Women’s International Perspective and Die Zeit. She lives in Berlin with her German… Read more »
Kunstwerk: Stephanie Snider
Stephanie Snider received her MFA from the Yale School of Art, and her BFA from Rhode Island School of Design. Her work has been exhibited widely, including exhibitions at the Bronx Museum, NY, the Hudson River Museum in New York, Galerie Thomas Schulte Berlin, Künstlerhaus Bethanien Berlin and others. She was the recipient of… Read more »
Dan Crane on the kindness of strangers
Dan Crane is a writer, musician, and retired professional air guitarist. He is the author of To Air is Human: One Man’s Quest to Become the World’s Greatest Air Guitarist (Riverhead, 2006) and co-stars in the award-winning documentary Air Guitar Nation. He also plays in the faux-French band Nous Non Plus. Crane lives in Los Angeles… Read more »
Kunstwerk: Martina Nitsche
Scope 18 by Martina Nitsche Martina Nitsche is a Hamburg-born artist who spent twenty years in New York and currently lives in Berlin. She received her Masters of Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts. She has exhibited widely in New York, Europe and in Asia. This work, a microscopic exploration of the inside of… Read more »
Julian Gough on the art gallery explosion
Julian Gough, in his youth, sang with cult Irish band Toasted Heretic. They released four albums, and had a top ten hit with “Galway and Los Angeles“, a song about not kissing Sinead O’Connor. He is the author of two novels, Juno & Juliet, and Jude: Level 1. In 2007 he won the largest prize in the… Read more »
10 minutes from Mitte
The pre-war, stone row houses on my street in Tempelhof are painted colors unusual in drab Berlin: rhubarb red, periwinkle blue, hunter green and three different shades of yellow. Every house has an old cherry or magnolia tree out front. On the long oval patch of common green in the center of our street, we… Read more »
Biking through Treptowerpark
On the rare late fall day when blue sky pierces Berlin’s chronic dark gray, I bike across the river from my Friedrichshain neighborhood to Treptower Park. Unlike Tiergarten, whose lovely ponds and clumps of flora are constantly interrupted by city streets, the paths in Treptower Park stretch luxuriously for miles, like a good long yawn. … Read more »
The last great hang-out in Charlottenburg
This is actually a eulogy, for a cafe on Knesebeckstrasse that closed last year. It was called The Kitchen. The food was delicious. The proprietress, Patricia Ferer, a warm and wonderful person from St. Louis via New York City, was always welcoming. But it was more than that. Sometimes the stars align such that a… Read more »
