Archaeologists have unearthed Berlin’s oldest street, and it is actually pretty cool. Even though it was likely built in the 13th century, the wooden planks look surprisingly fresh.
From the 1860s through the Second World War, Berlin was notoriously crowded, with many of its working-class residents packed into suffocating Mietskasernen (“Rental Barracks”).
On November 14, 1990, approximately 3000 police from across Germany forcibly evicted several hundred mostly young squatters from 13 buildings along Mainzer Straße, in the eastern district of Friedrichshain.
It was one of the largest street battles in Berlin since the (failed) revolution of 1953, and had repercussions that continue to be felt.
If, like me, you’ve spent a lot of time traveling Berlin’s S-Bahn ring, you might have noticed the large empty space directly to the east of the Frankfurter Allee S-Bahn station. It looks like any number of former industrial sites in the city: run-down, abandoned, with a few remnants here and there.
I was surprised to learn that this particular space wasn’t just a random factory: it was a so-called “Containerbahnhof,” where shipping containers could be on- and off-loaded to and from railcars.
Berlin has committed itself to building 100 kilometers of express bike lanes (Radschnellverbindungen) in the next 5 years or so. I made a deep-dive into one section of that network: the route from the Tiergarten to Alexanderplatz and beyond. What I found is very exciting, but construction is still a long way off.
Berlin’s Central Livestock- and Slaughterhouse - the Zentralvieh- und Schlachthof - was the largest of its kind in the city. It was originally conceived at the end of the 19th century as a remedy to the chaotic situation in Berlin’s livestock and slaughterhouse industry. In the 1870s, there were as many as 800 independent slaughterhouses in the city.
Ernst Thälmann Park in Berlin's Prenzlauer Berg neighborhood is located on what used to be an enormous gas production and storage facility. Built in 1872, the facility was expanded until the second world war, when it gradually fell into disrepair. It was almost entirely demolished in 1982 to make way for the Memorial, new housing blocks, as well as a culture forum. Traces of the old gas facility, though, remain.
In 1945, in the immediate aftermath of the Battle of Berlin, Soviet occupation forces settled into House 3 in an abandoned hospital complex in Prenzlauer Berg. They used the building not only as an administrative center, but as a secret detention and torture facility. Prisoners unlucky enough to find themselves in the basement of House 3 often had a long, painful experience before they were finally released - if they were ever released at all.
In 1933, Hermann Tietz & Co., one of the largest department store firms in Germany, was forcibly expropriated from its Jewish owners as part of the Nazi policy of Aryanization. It was renamed Hertie, and remained one of Germany's largest retailers until it was purchased in 1994. The heirs of Georg Karg, who took over the firm from its rightful owners in 1933, set up a foundation in his honor shortly after his death.
It made me really sad when I read in the New York Times the other day that American politicians who had advocated bringing Syrian refugees to the United States had been called the “jihadi caucus” by right-wing conservatives. What a stupid, fearful, counter-productive thing to say, I thought. But American politics is prone to this kind of hyperbole and idiocy.
The German Government has agreed on a set of measures that they will undertake to address the huge number of refugees arriving in the country. The Federal Government will spend at least 6 billion euros over the next year to register, feed, house, and process asylum applications.
Beyond the funds, the government also calls on the EU to develop a comprehensive and unified plan to process asylum seekers, as well as an international alliance to fight the sources of the current refugee crisis, e.g. the civil war in Syria and continued instability elsewhere.
Berlin's Medieval Wall was constructed around 1250, and was only around 6 feet high. It was built because the relatively new city (the first permanent settlement began sometime in the late 1100s) needed a way to defend itself. There aren't any hills in the area on which to build a fortress, so the best that the people at the time could do was throw together whatever stones and bricks they could find.
