Our West Berlin! The beloved urban island where bars and pubs were open all night so the locals could plot the revolution! Where beer was cheap and sausage on a roll was considered dinner. Where the tenements still bore bullet holes from World War II, and the draft did not exist. Where the city government regularly stumbled over some real estate scandal and where the Communist-controlled S-Bahn train did not run (mostly). Where old-timers, Turkish immigrants, and students from West Germany lived side by side without much talking to each other, where winter smelled like coal, and summer smelled like weed. This book is devoted to this half-city, surrounded by the Wall, which ceased to exist in 1989. Two dozen authors who are, or were living in Berlin have contributed stories, from JFK touring Checkpoint Charlie to squatters at the Wall. It is a book for those who remember, and for those who wish they did.
Ralph Blumenthal, a Distinguished Lecturer at Baruch College of the City University of New York, was an award-winning reporter for The New York Times from 1964 to 2009, and has written and co-authored seven books on organized crime and cultural history. He co-authored a series of groundbreaking Times articles on the secret Pentagon program to investigate UFOs.
Paul Hockenos, born in Boston in 1963, has lived in Berlin as a correspondent since 1989. He has written for The Nation, Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, The New York Times and the digital CNN. He has authored several books on European politics and was a fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. His book Berlin Calling was published by The New Press in 2017.
Wladimir Kaminer hails from Moscow where he was born in 1967. Since the fall of the Wall, he has lived in Berlin. He has authored more than thirty books, including the bestseller Russendisko that was turned into a very successful movie. He also produces Kaminer Inside for the public brodcaster 3 SAT. The film series is about traditional cultural venues that showcase modern art.
Rosa von Praunheim, director, author, and winner of many film awards, is considered an important representative of the post-modern German film scene and a pioneer of the gay and lesbian movement. In over fifty years he has made more than one hundred fifty movies. Born Holger Mischwitzky in 1942 in Riga, Latvia, he grew up in Frankfurt / Main and has lived in Berlin since the sixties.
Tanja Dückers was born in 1968 in West Berlin. Today she lives with her family in East Berlin. She has published seventeen books. As a journalist, she writes about social and political topics for Der Tagesspiegel and ZEIT Online, among other publications. She has lived in the USA several times as a writer-in-residence. Since 2016 she has been working for Weiter Schreiben mentoring refugee writers.
Born in 1955 in Yonkers, NY, Mary Pepchinski studied at Columbia University and worked as an architect in New York. 1987, she relocated to West Berlin. Now retired, she was a professor in Dresden and held guest professorships in Mainz and Graz, Austria. She publishes widely about architecture. In 2017, she was an advisor to the "Frau Architekt" exhibition at DAM in Frankfurt / Main. Photo: private
Harald Martenstein, born in 1953, is the author of the "Martenstein" column in ZEITmagazin and also an editor at the Berlin daily Die Welt. In 2004, he received the Egon Erwin Kisch Prize. In addition to his award-winning novel Heimweg, several of his collections of columns have appeared as a book, including Männer sind wie Pfirsiche and Jeder lügt so gut er kann. Photo: C. Bertelsmann Verlag
Andreas Austilat, born in Berlin-Lichterfelde, is a reporter for Der Tagesspiegel, where his column "Austilat spart sich's" appears regularly. He has published several books, among them Hotel kann jeder about the joys of camping, Vom Winde gesät, about gardening and Mark Twain in Berlin. His last book is Auch das geht vorbei, a book about men navigating their midlife crisis.
Sharona Legner-Zuriel was born in Haifa, Israel in 1955 and grew up in West Berlin. After a foray into law, she was a reporter for Volksblatt Berlin and Berliner Morgenpost. She also worked for the Quadriga-award, the Hasso Plattner Forum, and new formats. She was married to journalist Johann Legner, they have two sons. In August 2023, one day before her 68th birthday, she passed away in Berlin.
Gretchen Dutschke was born in Illinois in 1942. After her bachelor in 1963, she studied theology in Germany. There she met Rudi Dutschke; they married in 1966 and have three children. In 1985, five years after Rudi's death, she went to the U.S., but returned to Berlin in 1990. She has written a biography about her husband and has also published the book 1968: What We Can Be Proud Of. Photo: private
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