Clare Wigfall’s debut collection of stories The Loudest Sound and Nothing (Faber and Faber) was published in 2007. In 2008, she was awarded the BBC National Short Story Award for the opening story in the collection. Her work has been published in Prospect, A Public Space, New Writing 10, Tatler, and The Dublin Review, and has also… Read more »
Chloe Aridjis grew up in the Netherlands and in Mexico. She studied literature at Harvard and then wrote her PhD in 19th-century French poetry and magic shows at Oxford. She lived in Berlin for 5 1/2 years and became enamored of its public transportation system. Her first novel, Book of Clouds, is set in Berlin was recently… Read more »
Emily Hass’ series, “SIDES Berlin”, is based on the original architectural plans and sections of her father’s childhood home on Altonaer Strasse in Tiergarten where he lived up until 1938, when he and his immediate family escaped Nazi Germany to live in London. (The building was subsequently bombed in 1943.) This work visually echoes the loss of… Read more »
Oh superlative Sauerkraut. When we first moved to Berlin my attitude to sauerkraut, the stinky, fermented cabbage, was disparaging in the extreme. The level of cabbage-worship displayed in this country gave me excellent ammunition for illogical, verbal assaults on the entire nation, usually fired off during a non-cabbage-related argument with my German husband. Then, one… Read more »
I was sitting on Berlin’s lovely U Bahn minding my own business, or writing in my journal to be more exact, when a man dressed in ripped jeans, an old leather jacket and smelling strangely like a mixture of eggs and ash plopped down next to me. He was the same man who I had… Read more »
I was sitting on Berlin’s lovely U Bahn minding my own business, or writing in my journal to be more exact, when a man dressed in ripped jeans, an old leather jacket and smelling strangely like a mixture of eggs and ash plopped down next to me. He was the same man who I had… Read more »
Around 1980, a “Spiegel” cover showed one of the grimmer portraits of Luther in furs and the headline “New Little Ice Age?” Intricate frost patterns brocaded our windows. Back then, every apartment in Kreuzberg heated with coal. West Berlin’s government stored hundreds of thousands of tons of it in warehouses against the chance of resumed communist… Read more »
Robert A. LeVine is an anthropologist and professor emeritus at Harvard University. His most recent book is Anthropology and Child Development: A Cross-Cultural Reader (2008). He lives in Massachusetts but often visits his granddaughter in Berlin. Please click here to watch a music video of the Hans Beimler song on YouTube! Portrait of Hans Beimler courtesy… Read more »
I spent a summer in Japan when I was 15 and discovered that Japanese chefs can take any foreign pastry– Italian tiramisu, French puff pastry, and even Spanish churros– and improve on perfection. The Japanese versions of western style cakes tasted lighter and more flavorful. And boy were they pretty. But try as they might, the… Read more »
