Originals: Clare Wigfall On The Neighbors

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  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 »

Originals: Chloe Aridjis On The Ghost Stations

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

  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 »

Originals: Brittani Sonnenberg on Graffiti Love

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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.

Kunstwerk: Emily Hass

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 »

Cold, Back Then by Mitch Cohen

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 »

Originals: Robert A. LeVine on a Mysterious GDR Hero

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Portrait of Hans Beimler courtesy of Gedenkstätte Deutscher Wilderstand.   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… Read more »

Baumkuchen & Kaffeeklatch

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 »

Baumkuchen & Kaffeeklatch

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 »

Originals: Paul Beatty on Emperor Penguins

Image courtesy of Paul Mannix

Image courtesy of Paul Mannix


 
Paul Beatty is the author of three novels: White Boy Shuffle, Tuff, and the recently published Slumberland, which takes place in Berlin. He is also the editor of Hokum: An Anthology of African-American Humor.