Berlin Berlin. A city of nations and a place of individuals, beautiful and ugly Berlin. Born on a river and set in a marsh on the edge of christian Europe. Berlin grew in spurts and finally became a royal and later an imperial capital.
In more recent memory and amidst all the struggles Berlin saw two world wars as well as two totalitarian regimes ultimately resulting in it’s almost total destruction and division.
Since 1945 the city has grown in ways tangential but not unlike it’s austere roots. Both East
and West Berlin have become both a home and haven for different groups of people from all over the world bringing with them culture and ideas that otherwise might not have organically taken root here. Many have come here simply to be left alone and do things their own way: conscript army service dodgers, queer freaks, punk jerks, multilingual hiphoppers, burnt out skaters and surfers, rising poets to list only just a few who all found their way here to take part in the grand and unifying great Berlin experiment.
That said, the city of Berlin might have reminded the new strangers here of those cities they came from, places like San Francisco or Brooklyn New York, Melbourne and Toronto …
once affordable, multicultural and with a little bit of a European feel.
Today as the city changes in leaps and bounds one can still find and see if you look hard enough vestiges of all that postwar growth whether it be jazz, queer, working class, punk and hiphop, personalities and architecture, sounds and smells and even nature!
The New Strangers tour is a three hour walk through Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain offering conversation and insights into all of the above and plus a little more !
The tour starts in Friedrichshain and ends in Neukölln and leads along a couple of significant spots.
- RAW Grounds
- East Side Gallery/Berlin Wall
- Kottbusser Tor/Waldemarstr. (Squats, bars, venues, youth and culture)
- Front Kino, KZ36, Fat Records, Bethanien
- Dresdenerstrasse: Nick Cave and friends
- Neukölln ( bars, venues, youth and culture)
Get in touch for more information: albinocobra at yahoo dot com
