In Berlin, no one is surprised when they have to get up at five in the morning and head to the department of motor vehicles in order to register a car before noon. Or when they notice that a construction site blocking part of a major road has been devoid of even a single worker for months. Or when it takes days to get a particular city administrative employee on …

Many streets in Germany bear the names of individuals who served the common good in one way or the other. In Berlin, this honor is often bestowed upon people whose names are unfamiliar to the broader public and whose merit and deeds are equally unknown. Yet there are also plenty of individuals who have had a huge impact on the city but go entirely neglected when it comes to street …

There are certain things in life we should probably refrain from doing, but we do them anyway. Almost 15 years ago and under constant advisement to let it rest, Jörg Woltmann remained undeterred in pursuing his business idea: “It has to be saved.” And so Woltmann, a banker by trade, paid €13.5 million and invested a further €30 million to rescue one of Berlin’s most historical cultural assets, the Royal …

The Berlin Wall came tumbling down in 1989, yet was not torn apart and pulverized in its entirety. Large sections of the Wall were sawed into pieces, painted and transformed into art. The global symbol for division, espionage, permanent surveillance, constraint, dogma, captivity and death was symbolically liberated through art. Countless segments of the Wall still stand today all across the world as monuments to (very) recent history.

Since time …

Can trees grow out of houses? Are robots taking over? Are we done with globalization? At first glance, these three questions have nothing in common. If we take a closer look, however, we see a shared theme: the future.

At their core, the questions revolve around future scenarios of human life on planet Earth. How are we going to live in the future? And, more importantly, how do we want …

This summer, two major events caused a sensation in the world of soccer in Berlin and throughout the country. First up was the fact that 1. FC Union, the eternal second-division club from the eastern Berlin district of Köpenick, finally made it to the Bundesliga, thus becoming the second Berlin team in the league’s top tier. The citywide celebrations surrounding the ascent of the “Unioners” were almost as euphoric as …

On that fateful night of November 9, 1989, there was no sign of revolution in the air. Sure, change was coming – but slowly, we thought. As the US Deputy Ambassador to East Germany at the time, I lived on the communist side of the Berlin Wall, but I was spending the afternoon in West Berlin at an Aspen Institute reception with leaders from both sides of the divided city. …

For seven long years, there was nothing I feared more than the annual inspections carried out by members of the Schöneberg-Friedenau Association of Allotment Gardeners. As far as I’m concerned, these inspectors are nothing more than a terror squad masquerading as two seasoned garden pros who summer after summer are intent on examining every corner of our 240-square-meter lot in the Tulpenteich garden colony in southern Berlin. Although the inspections …

In the fall and winter of 1989– 90, the entire world watched in anticipation as events unfolded in Germany. It seemed that every day brought something that would have been considered impossible only a day earlier. The highpoint was the evening of Nov. 9, 1989, when the Berlin Wall – that decades-long symbol of communist rule over half of Europe – came tumbling down.

Today, individual pieces of the Wall …

Farmer Sven Geelhaar has set up five rolling chicken coops, each with 220 hens, in the countryside around Chorin in Brandenburg. “On the upper floor, they’ve got nesting areas, perches for sleeping as well as food and water,” says Geelhaar, who owns 97 hectares of arable land near the Chorin biosphere reserve. Every week, the chickens roll to a different meadow, where they can peck away to their hearts’ content …