Berlin

Glass: Five Sonnets

April 16, 2025 Dispatches

Author’s Note:

Cold War divided Berlin haunted me growing up because it was a place where history was unavoidably visible, and when I lived there for two-and-a-half years as a student in the 1990s, I was always watching and trying to document the city’s rapid changes after the Wall fell. In 2022 a cousin found an advertisement on Ebay from circa 1939 that showed images of the Potsdamer Platz S-Bahn station from my great-grandfather’s glass factory in Waldenburg (now Wałbrzych, Poland). I’m still processing what it means to have my family history connected to a place that is a central, broken image of Berlin and so crucial to the imagination of the Cold War, particularly at a time when we in the U.S. are (or should be) thinking about what the world looks like when democracy yields to authoritarianism.

Photo courtesy of author.

Berlin, Germany

Potsdamer Platz, Berlin, April 1939

We were successful in securing major commissions—for the Reichsbahn–
underground station Potsdamer Platz and Anhalter–Bahnhof—and in
fulfilling them on time. Such large-scale projects are crucial for breaking
fresh ground for sales of Opaxit glass.

—Annual Report of the Schlesische Spiegelglas Manufaktur
Carl Tielsch G.m.b.H., 1938

Geist

October 31, 2022 Fiction, Issue 24, Issue 24 Fiction, Poetry Recordings

By KATHLEEN HEIL

The Common Magazine · “Geist” by Kathleen Heil

At an artists’ collective near the Polish border about an hour from Berlin, I’d been taking a break from translating texts into English, a task I once enjoyed but was beginning to resent, as I was beginning to feel invisible—or was it burnt out?—in any case, I was glad to get away for a few days: it was my first vacation since I-don’t-know-when, and I’d begun to feel my soul was spent. Over lunch on my last day there, a woman from Seoul who went by the nickname Hae—a transliteration of the word “sun” in Korean, she said—asked what the word in German was for “soul.” Actually, the woman sitting next to her asked, but the woman sitting next to Hae came from Spain and was shy about her English, so when she directed the question at me I heard the word as “sol”—we’d spent the week speaking both Spanish and English—and said, in reply, “Sonne.”

Quarters

January 12, 2022 Dispatches

By BEINA XU

Berlin, Germany

I live in the wrong colonial quarter of Berlin.

My neighborhood is called Afrikanisches Viertel, and my flat is on Guinea Street. There’s Kongostraße, Togostraße, Kamerunerstraße, Transvaalstraße, Sansibarstraße, Otawistraße—I could go on, but you could also just Google Germany’s colonial conquest of Africa.

Berlin (Eulogy 1)

October 28, 2020 Issue 20, Issue 20 Poetry, Poetry

By PETER LABERGE

Sept. 2019

The Wall: A Short Story Excerpt

September 29, 2020 Fiction

By MERON HADERO

Meron Hadero is a finalist for The Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing.

Original version published in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern Issue 52, finalist for the 2019 Caine Prize for African Writing

When I met Herr Weill, I was a lanky 10-year-old, a fish out of water in –, Iowa, a small college town surrounded by fields in every direction. My family had moved to the US a few weeks earlier from Ethiopia via Berlin, so I knew no English, but was fluent in Amharic and German. I’d speak those sometimes to strangers or just mumble under my breath to say what was on my mind, never getting an answer until the day I met Herr Weill.

The Globe

May 23, 2018 Dispatches

By SEAN GILL

Berlin, Germany

Inside Berlin’s Deutsches Historisches Museum, there is a quiet passageway which serves as a spatial juncture between the Nazi era and the Soviet one. There is only one exhibit in this place: an enormous metal globe, encircled by wooden framing and encased in glass. Its lands are tinted municipal yellow-brown, its seas faded cyan. This particular globe may once have belonged to Ribbentrop, Goebbels, or perhaps Hitler himself. This is not a shock; Hitler’s actual desk rests in the preceding room, about forty meters behind you. You have therefore already experienced such a flood of icy association; an anxious dread similar to when you behold a steep precipice, or pass by a policeman toting an automatic weapon.

Ask a Local: Christopher Kloeble, Berlin, Germany

April 27, 2017 Interviews

With CHRISTOPHER KLOEBLE

Your name: Christopher Kloeble

Current city or town: Berlin

How long have you lived here: 8 years

Sunday Night in Mauerpark

September 9, 2015 Dispatches

By NOOR QASIM

I wake up from my three-hour nap because of a text from my brother.

I’ll be there in five!

After reading some texts and checking Facebook, I summon the strength to pull myself off the mattress, leaving the sheets damp with sweat behind me, and approach the red-framed mirror on the bright yellow wall of our hostel room. The nap had been good and deep but my head feels swollen with the heat and the grogginess of an interrupted sleep cycle. My eye-makeup is slightly smudged, which makes sense considering I’d applied it five minutes before I passed out. It didn’t have time to dry.

May 12, 2015 Dispatches

By COCO DE CASSCZA

Then

it was a

place refracted

by the prism of history and

still in a kind of shock

of the past,

Haben Sie Schleim?

June 11, 2014 Dispatches

By GEOFF KRONIK

Because I had a roomy exit-row seat on a full plane to Berlin, I sent a photo of my gloriously unbent legs to my wife. A petty triumph, the frequent-flyer’s tame version of sexting. My seatmate was a small, physically non-intrusive man, but troublingly prone to coughs and sneezes.

All posts tagged: Berlin

Glass: Five Sonnets

Geist

Quarters

Berlin (Eulogy 1)

The Wall: A Short Story Excerpt

The Globe

Ask a Local: Christopher Kloeble, Berlin, Germany

Sunday Night in Mauerpark

Berlin

Haben Sie Schleim?

Discover the extraordinary in The Common.