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 been broadcast on BBC Radio 4. She currently lives in Berlin where she is working on her next book. For more information, news, and reviews, please visit her website.

Night Windows by Edward Hopper courtesy of alledwardhopper.com

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 published in the US by Grove Press/Black Cat. Please read a review in the New York Times and the first chapter here

Image from Projektgruppe ‘Licht + Farbe’ by C. Brachmann, M. Hörsch, G. Kohrmann

Brittani Sonnenberg is a freelance journalist and fiction writer living in Berlin. She has written for the Associated Press and Time Magazine, and her fiction has appeared in the O’Henry Short Stories 2008 and in Ploughshares.

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 three-dimensional space by creating a two-dimensional memorial. Using canvas strands, Hass sews the abstracted architectural documents onto large sheets of black paper.

Emily Hass has graduate degrees in Psychology and Design from Harvard University. Her artwork can be seen through The Drawing Center Viewing Program and is sold through the flatfile program at Pierogi Gallery in Brooklyn.  For more images from this series and to see other work, please go to the artist’s website.

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 day, sauerkraut juice sneaked into my apartment – definitely in disguise, otherwise it would have been refused entry. I tried it, gagged, tried it again, and, as the bottom fell out of my world in one great burst of intestinal enthusiasm, I felt purged, smug and suddenly skinny. Drinking sauerkraut juice is not unlike trying to get mild, non-fatal dysentery on a tropical holiday – a little stomach rumble, a little inconvenience, then sit back and wait for people to notice your newly emerged collarbones.

After some online investigation I’ve learned that sauerkraut juice is a wonder food. It not only cleanses your colon and zaps free radicals, it also makes you live forever, improves your German grammar and recalibrates your moral fibre. I am hooked. These days, friends from abroad must sit through my sermons on sauerkraut, their sceptical silence only broken by their stuttering refusal to try my fearfully wonderful juice.

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 earlier seen walking around the station rapidly asking everyone for a cigarette, with a hint of desperation in his voice. He gave one the impression that his mind was not in touch with “reality” to the fullest extent, to the say least.

I was listening to music on my headphones and noticed him trying to talk to anyone who would make eye contact with him. Unfortunately, I noticed his eyes fall onto me, although I looked away. Being a young woman of 22, people often appeal to me for coins, so I had expected this turn of events. Without looking up I saw him ogling me from the side of my eyes, and saw he was trying to speak to me. I pretended not to notice over my headphones and kept writing. Then he leaned over towards me and began reading my journal, much to my shock. I doubt he understood it because it was in English and he had been mumbling in German, and my writing borders on illegible. I began laughing at the strangeness of it. He said something to me and I put my journal away protectively. I had stopped at the line which I had been writing just as he began spying on me which read, “there is a strange man sitting next to me on the U Bahn, who very badly needs a cigarette and some cologne.”

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 blockade. My coal merchant carried 100 pounds at a time in a wooden box on his back: he charged a D-Mark extra per floor climbed, and I gave him a tip and a Schnapps to salve my conscience, which was uneasy because I saved my spine at the expense of his. Once he came with his teetotaler assistant. After downing his own shot, he asked if he could have the assistant’s, too. When I emptied the ash into a metal bucket to carry downstairs to the trash, a fine cloud of it spread a dull, ugly smell through the room.

Once I stayed within a meter of my heater all day, sweltering on one side and freezing on the other, while feeding it two coal bricks an hour. That for a 16-m2 room. Next day, I left for work, all bundled up to walk where strewn salt had cleared the snow from the sidewalk (crushed rock came years later, and nowadays winter no longer means much snow). When I reached the street, I couldn’t seem to get any air into my lungs and I panicked: is this an asthma attack? That particular fear was allayed when, eyes smarting, I looked down the street. It wasn’t my lungs it was the air: thickly yellow with coal smoke, pouring down from the chimneys. When I descended the steps to the subway, the air got a little better.

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 of Gedenkstätte Deutscher Wilderstand.

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 Japanese have not mastered the German Baumkuchen, the self proclaimed King of Cakes.  Germany still has a monopoly on this unique tree cake, and Berlin has expert bakers at Konditorei Buchwald, a cafe near the Bellevue S-bahn in Tiergarten, who have been baking this treat for 150 years. This wonderfully intricate cake is characterized by striations of sponge cake gently baked to resemble the rings of a tree.  In grade school I learned that the rings of a tree reveal its age.  Not so for the Baumkuchen.  Instead the rings reveal the care and consistency that is required to make an especially good slice.  The Baumkuchen is cooked over a flame on an electric spit which looks like a horizontal doner kebab machine.  Batter is lovingly and repeatedly poured over the cake and baked at even intervals.  When it has reached the desired thickness, the cake is brushed with a light coating of apricot jam and sealed with a hard chocolate or clear glazed bark. The cake is then cut into doughnut-shaped rings.  The Konditorei is a great place for Kaffeeklatch;  they also have a brisk to-go business selling Baumkuchen by the pound. While not cheap, this dense and flavorful cake is a wonderful treat to bring to the folks back home.  Even to your Japanese friends in Tokyo.  Oishi! (Amanda Herman)

In April of 1990, I was 20 years old and studying abroad in Vienna. I took a trip with a classmate to Berlin and Prague for the weekend. At that time the city was still divided by the wall, and the currency was still separate as well. We were stopped by the East German border patrol and questioned about where we got our money. At that time it was not legal to bring East German money into the country if it had been acquired at a western bank. So most of our money was confiscated. In addition, at the time Americans could only cross at certain check points and during certain hours. Because the border patrol delayed us, we arrived close to midnight and hastily crossed into West Berlin before the gate closed for the night. When we arrived at our intended address, a cheap youth hostel we had chosen in our travel book, we found it was no longer operating. We had no place to stay for the night, and there were no other options in the neighborhood. Just then a young Berliner approached us on her bicycle, and inquired about our predicament. She quickly proclaimed that we would have to stay with her for the night. She and her fiance fed us bread, cheese, and wine. We talked until late into the night, and the next day they sent us off with a full itinerary of sights to see in the city, the culmination of which was a joyfully affordable performance of the Berlin Philharmonic. It was a wonderful end to an exciting and memorable trip.