Berlin Companion Podcast

Send us Fan Mail Love it or hate it - Berlin can and will keep surprising you. Sometimes those surprises will be less welcome but sometimes they will make your day, your week or even your next 20 years. Like this story did for me. In the last episode of Season 2 of the podcast, let me take you to a place I fell in love with from the go. Not a palace or a fancy apartment house - a factory site in K...

Send us Fan Mail An old Yididish proverb says: "If you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans". The author heard booming laughter from above and thus planning to launch the last episode in the series had to be postponed. In the meantime you can enjoy a repetition of one of my favourite stories from and around Potsdamer Bahnhof: the story of a cemetery that was the first Berlin...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode of "Berlin Companion Podcast" we are travelling back in time to the second half of the 17th century to witness some royal shenanigans (including several weddings, an extramarital affair, a couple of deaths and a crowning) and follow the fate of a lovely royal palace, whose ghostly outline might or might not be still visible there on quiet moonlit Berlin n...

Send us Fan Mail Those of us living in the city centre, close to industry sites or a very busy street junction know the smell only too well: fuel, burnt rubber, melting plastic and unspecified chemical stench that might or might not make your skin crawl (sometimes literally). Luckily for most, the days of potentially lethal air pollution in big cities like Berlin seem to be over. But in February 1...

Send us Fan Mail Are you afraid of the dark?  The answer is is most probably yes. Few people are comfortable not seeing where they are going, or what might be lurking ahead. An extreme form of that fear is known as noctophobia.  When in the 1930s Nazi authorities introduced blackout regulations in Germany - strict orders forbidding using any sources of light that could potentially reveal the size...

Send us Fan Mail In December 1989 US department stores expanded their pre-Christmas offer by a very attractive item for late or for undecided Christmas-present buyers. It was small yet profound - filled with more deep meaning than it modest size or weight could suggest. It was well-known to and caused a certain frisson among all Americans, yet it came straight from Europe. It was being sold in the...

Send us Fan Mail Hello Berlin and Beyond! This is a repetition of a Series 1 episode - my family and I are about to say goodbye to a very dear person, and my mind is understandably elsewhere. It turned out to be impossible to get the planned episode ready. It will be launched next week. Today, those of you who have not listened to Berlin Companion's 2022 series and do not know the stories yet...

Send us Fan Mail The sky over Berlin is never dark. Even at night. The main cause is the city's heavy light pollution. Berlin's streetlights, its signs, its permanently illuminated buildings - all they contribute to the problem. So much so that for the past two decades the city's observatories, like the Planetarium am Insulaner , have not been able to see the Milky Road. Light sprea...

Send us Fan Mail During 2022 excavations in the area of Berlin's Molkenmarkt - a historic plaza and the city's oldest market place - archaeologists discovered Berlin's oldest street, a Bohlendamm (corduroy road or log road). Two years later they made another great discovery - this time a series of small white clay figurines of Christian saints. What would they find, though, should t...

Send us Fan Mail Eight out of ten people in our (scientifically absolutely unreliable) survey with only one question "What is it that you could never imagine Christmas without?", named it. You can live with less or different Christmas dishes, fewer present are not a issue if the company is a match. And even spending the festive time away from your family can have its hidden charm (and be...

Send us Fan Mail The first episode in the new series is both a starter and the main dish. It's a story of soup. Of instant soup that from the late 1860s on fed Prussian, German and even foreign armies, filled stomachs both on and off the battlefields, and was tested for its combat suitability not by one but by two "Soup Commandos". Until less than a decade ago it was a staple in mos...

Send us Fan Mail Last week we  talked about the long-vanished cemetery railway line which connected Berlin-Wannsee with Germany's second largest burial site, Berlin's Südwestfriedhof Stahnsdorf. This episode remains in the realm of both the dead and the railways but with a serious shift towards Berlin's centre. This time we are travelling to the first half of the eighteenth century...

Send us Fan Mail What do large cities do when they run out of space to bury their dead? They go beyond their limits. Traditionally all large European cities like Paris, Vienna or London eventually established new burial sites further and further from their centre. Vienna even considered using the pneumatic tube system to transport their deceased to the Zentralfriedhof (Central Cemetery). By the en...

Send us Fan Mail Many old Berlin flats in the typical 19th century apartment buildings are equipped with a curious feature: a small storage space under the ceiling, usually installed in the bathroom, the kitchen or the corridor. What makes these so curious is not their function today - a storeroom for suitcases, skis and snorkels or that gear you wore for your first Love Parade in the mid-1990s  -...

Send us Fan Mail The 1920s in Berlin were an incredible time, full both of misery and wonder. It was the time which brought both the worst and the best in people who lived there. And sometimes it helped pave way for genius. Or future classics. Episode 5 of Berlin Companion Podcast tells the story of one such classic made in Berlin. Sound effects: BBC Sound Effects Archive bbc_animals---_07037493 p...

Send us Fan Mail We all know how annoying air traffic can be these days for those who experience it from the ground - not only is it a time-bomb just waiting to make our environment  go belly-up but it can also bring any conversation to a halt, if said conversation takes place under what is known as a flight corridor. But whenever if you think this is bad, here is a little story from the days wher...

Send us Fan Mail In the 1920s elegant Berliners fell in love with a scent called "Treffpunkt 8 Uhr" (Rendezvous at 8PM). Made by a legendary local manufacture Schwarzlose - which still exists today - it stood for the Exciting and the Romantic but also for what Berlin seemed never to have enough of: time. From 1787 when the first public clock appeared in Unter den Linden, clocks dictated...

Send us Fan Mail When in April 1893 German Empire introduced new time measuring system based the Greenwich meridian, Berlin lost something big for good. It lost its own time. Here is the story behind it. Main theme for the podcast: “ Assembly Line Frustration " © Ionics Music | TerraSound.de  Sound effects: ChaliceWell, Bidone, JRosin and LG (CC Licence https://freesound.org/s/56874/) via fre...

Send us Fan Mail For anyone interested in history, Berlin is your playground. From old Slavic and Germanic tribes through Crusaders, alchemists and feuding houses to Prussian expansion, Emperors and world wars, including the Cold one. But next to big events, which often changed the world  - and not always for the better - myriads of smaller things happened here daily, turning the city into what it...