Originals: Hilda Hoy on Horticulture

Photo by Michelle Cormier

Photo by Michelle Cormier

  Hilda Hoy grew up between the concrete jungles of Taiwan and the woods of central Ontario. A one-time hard-boiled news reporter for the Toronto Star and the Prague Post, she now fills her days working as the managing editor of sugarhigh, the Berlin email magazine she’s been heading since its founding in 2009. When not freelancing… Read more »

Our Contributors: Elizabeth Skadden on GDR Cassette Culture


 

Required Reading: Peter Schneider on the Wall

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If you missed the German writer Peter Scheider’s Op-Ed about the 50th anniversary of the building of the Berlin Wall in the New York Times this Sunday, you can read it here. Meanwhile, if you haven’t read his incredible 1980 novel The Wall Jumper, which paints an unparalleled portrait of the divided city, and was reissued… Read more »

Originals: Alistair Noon on the East German Police

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  Listen to the podcast above. Author Alistair Noon was born in 1970 and grew up near London. He first came to Berlin in 1989, and has lived in the city, bar a couple of years in China, since 1993. His poems have appeared in four chapbooks from various presses: At the Emptying of Dustbins (Oystercatcher, 2009), In People’s Park… Read more »

Originals: Adam Butler at the Stasi Museum

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  Adam Butler lives in Berlin. He is currently working on a novel, extracts from which have appeared in 3AM Magazine and Nitro. As a musician he has released 5 albums of electronic chamber showtunes under the pseudonym Vert, and has performed throughout Europe, the US and Asia. A longer version of his Berlin Story was originally… Read more »

Originals: Ralph Martin on the christmas spirit

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photo courtesy of wf-foto-aktuell.de   Ralph Martin is a writer and journalist who has lived in Berlin since 2003. His book EIN AMERIKANER IN BERLIN: WIE EIN NEW YORKER LERNTE, DIE DEUTSCHEN ZU LIEBEN, was published at the end of 2009 by Dumont Verlag. His forthcoming book about fatherhood in contemporary Germany, LULU UND ICH, will appear… 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: 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 »

Originals: Eric Banks on Hanns Eisler

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Portrait of Eisler above courtesy of the International Hanns Eisler Gesellschaft.   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… Read more »

Originals: Alix Christie on the Dacha

Alix Christie's dacha outside Berlin

Alix Christie's dacha outside Berlin

  Alix Christie cried when she left her red dacha after five years in Berlin. She now lives in London with her Wessi husband and two kids, and is finishing a novel. She is a journalist and writer whose work has appeared in the Washington Post Magazine, San Francisco Chronicle, Other Voices, Salon.com and The Economist,… Read more »