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Sunday Night in Mauerpark

September 9, 2015 Dispatches

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.

The Paternoster

June 10, 2015 Dispatches

By GEOFF KRONIK

I was in Hamburg for a language course, and all week the syntactical floodwaters of German grammar had been rising. By Thursday night I was drowning in homework and would need Friday morning, before my afternoon class, to stay afloat.

Then the friend I was staying with, a German lawyer, suggested I join him in court the next morning. I could attend a session with him, see the German system, meet a German judge. An appealing prospect that alas would leave no time for homework.

Berlin

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.

thread your fingers through whole hinges

November 1, 2013 Issue 06, Issue 06 Poetry, Poetry, Translation

By ANNA GLAZOVA

thread your fingers through whole hinges

if the opening is blocked if there is no new

no old moon in the window.

the superior sun will never move

November 1, 2013 Issue 06, Issue 06 Poetry, Poetry, Translation

By ANNA GLAZOVA

the superior sun will never move

chained into itself by the moving heft.

for us the sun moves and pulls

the heft behind

Changing Places: Ich Bin Ein Berliner

May 27, 2013 Essays, In House

By MELODY NIXON

We painted lipstick on our lips and watched businessmen in suits flip open Die Welt, grazing the top of the newspaper with their line of sight, conspicuously shy in their observations of two foreign frauen. The train shot into Berlin’s Hauptbanhof with succinct precision, confirming one of our German stereotypes: 7.00pm exactly on Dec 31^st, 2003, and not a minute late. My friend and I hoisted backpacks and flowed out of the central station and into a city that was eagerly, furiously rebuilding, was humming with energy, and was dusty and heterogeneous and still could not quite figure out how to contain itself. 2004 seemed like an inauspicious year to welcome.

Their Names

November 14, 2012 Dispatches

By ROLF YNGVE

I told Christopher, the wall passed through here. We stood on the sidewalk and looked down at a plaque set into chic, new cobblestones.

Berliner Mauer 1961–1989.

Currency Exchange

November 9, 2011 Dispatches

By LYNNE WEISS

There’s a big church conference in West Berlin and the streets are amazingly crowded, but many shops are closed. It’s the perfect day, we decide, to visit East Berlin, the land of Godless communism, as my husband Bob calls it. We hope to find bookstores selling cheap editions of classic books (Marx, Goethe). Also, because we are traveling on a tight budget, as always, we hope for some inexpensive but substantial meals. The Wall has been down for about seven months, but East and West are not yet unified, and they still have separate currencies.

All posts tagged: Germany

Sunday Night in Mauerpark

The Paternoster

Berlin

Haben Sie Schleim?

thread your fingers through whole hinges

the superior sun will never move

Changing Places: Ich Bin Ein Berliner

Their Names

Currency Exchange

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