All stories about "William Thirteen"

A wise man once sang Don't do the crime if you can't do the time, a warning simple enough for even me to grasp. This threat of long-term incarceration, a staple of justice and correctional systems for centuries, is still the essential deterrent to criminal behavior. Unfortunately in Berlin, with its twelve years of Nazi dictatorship followed by four more decades of communist authoritarianism, one might end up doing the time -- or worse -- while never having actually "done the crime." Politically and racially motivated confinement, torture, and murder stain the histories of Berlin's prisons, and the process of Vergangenheitsbewaeltigung ("coming to terms with the past") has also involved examining the injustices and atrocities which have occurred within the walls of the big house. While the city now has a normal correctional system for the punishment and rehabilitation of its criminal population, several of Berlin's prisons have been converted into memorials -- remembering those innocents who suffered without cause and warning those who would forget how justice can be perverted by politics.

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Most of what one needs to know about Finland is easily summed up in just a few lines:
Wintersun: From August to May, the Finnish night lasts twenty-five hours.
Vodka: It's kept on ice in the freezer, and the traditional Finnish breakfast is a half liter of it accompanied by a piece of smoked fish.
Reindeer: They're quick to bite, have a greasy coat, and the whole country is rotten with them.
Linus Torvalds: This king of Linuxland keeps a harem of "virtual" wives and commands a geek army.
Saunas: The Finns sweat out their vodka-and-fish breakfasts at lunchtime saunas with the boss.
Sexy: Finnish law requires all citizens to be lanky sexpots, with shimmering hair and perfect teeth.
Suicide: Finland has Europe's highest suicide rate -- but after death Finns transmigrate into even newer, sexier bodies.

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Babylon on the Spree has been all atwitter this past week with the news that Pope Benedict XVI is planning to visit Berlin sometime next year. Big Bennie's visit, ostensibly to help celebrate the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, will mark the third time he has returned to Germany since becoming Pope, but it would be his first time in Berlin. Born in Bavaria in southern Germany in 1927, Bennie visited his childhood home two years ago and even made it to Cologne back in 2005 to hang with the homeboys as part of World Youth Day. Since then, eighty-year old Pope hasn't been traveling much, spending most of his time dictating his memoirs to a cat named Chico. But just like the rest of us sinners, he has difficulty passing up an all-expenses paid junket in Berlin. Like every other newbie in the city, Bennie is sure to hit Berlin's notorious hot spots -- the after hours parties, fetish clubs, and dimly lit backroom bars which keep Berlin humming all night long -- while the daylight hours will be filled banging out emails and sipping milchkaffee or shopping for fabulous new Pope-wear in Mitte's fashion-shocked frock shops. God knows he's got the budget! But there is just so much to see and do in the city, and tourists (even those with a direct line to Mr. Big) are always running short on time, so we thought we'd help His Holiness by pointing out the places that are definite must-sees for every new Pope in town.

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Having survived the twin terrors of twentieth-century Budapest, the Nazi occupation and then forty years of communism, the antique buildings and narrow streets of District VII's historic Jewish Quarter are now facing a more modern, but no less destructive, force -- real estate development. Built up in the 19th and 20th centuries as Budapest's Jewish community shared in the economic expansion of the Austro-Hungarian empire, the area contains dozens of beautiful art nouveau structures, many still impressive despite often crumbling facades.

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Once the happening center of Sixties West Berlin, Wilmersdorf was a splash of international jetset color dropped into a gritty, grey Eastern Europe. Around Wittenbergplatz and down the glamtastic Ku'Damm, the West's besieged citizenry enjoyed the fruits of the free market ripened in the political hothouse of the Cold War. Wilmersdorf's crowded cafes and smoke-filled steakhouses served as beacons of delectable, Western decadence shining out across the captive nations. But reunification was not kind to the leafy district. Berlin's cultural vanguard moved hungrily into the crumbling facades of P-Berg's and Mitte's mietkäsernen. As the all-night parties, renegade waffle shops, and anarchic artist's squats began to remake the reputation of the once off-limits neighborhoods, Wilmersdorf was reduced to hawking hotdogs and T-shirts to tourists too timid to make their way across town to the wild, wild East.

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Turmstrasse is a busy thoroughfare in Moabit, just north of Berlin's city center. Lined with shops, drugstores, and döner stands that cater to the needs of the district's working class, it's a world away from Mitte's trendy galleries and precious boutiques. The shoppers here are more likely contemplating the rising prices of potatoes and socks rather than those of Chiharu Shiota pieces. So the recent "limits of artistic freedom" dust-up at Turmstrasse's Galerie Nord came as a bit of a shock. Founded three years ago to bring "Kunst und Kultur" to Moabit's mean streets, the gallery finally attracted the attentions of local residents with its exhibition ZOG - Surrend / Subversive Practice in the Public Space. It wasn't exactly the type of attention they would have preferred though, when six Muslim youths threatened violence unless the gallery staff removed a poster featuring a photo of the Ka'aba in Mecca below the words "Dummer Stein" -- "dumb rock." Refusing to remove the work, and fearing for the safety of their staff, the gallery closed -- only to reopen earlier this month, the gallery's staff now reinforced with two security guards and hourly police patrols. (photo)

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Now that the Berlinale is over and its retinue of worn out rockers, leering leading men, silicon starlets, and easily enthused media mavens have moved on to greener pastures, Berlin's filmgoers are once again left to their own devices. But as the success of European film at last month's Oscars indicates, there is no shortage of talent outside of Hollywood's narrow realm, and even as the star machine continues grinding out the usual bland fare, far more interesting work often lies far beyond tinseltown's glare. To celebrate Berlin's return to the cinematic sidelines, local theaters have arranged enough festivals and retrospectives to keep us bleary-eyed types knee-deep in popcorn and gummi bears these chilly March nights. (photo)

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Berlin, 20 May 1928. The years of political upheaval and economic chaos that accompanied the end of WWI and the birth of the Republic are fading into memory. A fragile stability has followed the catastrophic reordering of society, and the city's residents are enjoying a return to more mundane concerns: the daily struggle to put food on the table and the nightly attempt to forget the day's miseries. But not all Berliners clock their hours during the day -- Karl Lehmann for one. A night watchman in Moabit, Lehmann works the graveyard shift, keeping watch over the State Finance Office, which lies between the Lehrter Rail Station and the river Spree -- and in whose vault this evening sits nine million Reichsmarks, a sizable portion of Germany's war reparation payment to France. But Lehmann isn't the only one working in Alt-Moabit 145 tonight. In the darkness others are also busy -- busy slicing through the iron bars of a cellar window, breaking locked doors, slipping down office corridors, and working at opening the vault with the hot flash of cutting torches. Suddenly an alarm is tripped, warning lights flash, an alarm bell cries out! Lehmann hurries to investigate, and two shadows flee into the Berlin night. The police arrive, and the cutting torches and break-in tools are found, but the nine million Reichsmarks are safe. No fingerprints betray the thieves' identities, but then, none are needed. The bold break-in is obviously the handiwork of Berlin's own working class Robin Hoods -- Erich and Franz Sass, the master thieves of Moabit.

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This year marks the 150th birthday of one of Berlin's most beloved artists. Heinrich Zille's photographs and comic drawings of the city's less glamorous neighborhoods, lumpenproletariat inhabitants, and their hard-won amusements helped the city see itself as never before. Like his friend and comrade Kathe Kollwitz, Zille had an eye for the injustices of the era and the sufferings of the poor and downtrodden working class warehoused in Berlin's tenements, saying famously "one can kill a man with an apartment as easily as with an axe." His books and prints found an audience not only among the leftists and working classes of the day but also with members of the city's cultured elite -- the National Gallery bought works in 1921, and three years later he was nominated for membership in the prestigious Prussian Academy of Art.

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Berlin's gigantic, dirt-cheap apartments are the stuff of urban legend. Expats more acquainted with the exorbitant rents and floorplans measured in centimeters common in London, New York, and Paris are often rushed to our local krankenhäuser (hospitals) after fainting dead away upon getting a gander of their spacious new digs. Even as the dollar drops into the muck, it can still procure a comfortable flop in the city center convenient to transit, shopping, and the hot-bodied waitstaff of the local watering hole. But as noted here and there, furnishing one of these cavernous pads brings challenges of its own.

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Berlin's garbage men will be hauling off a double load the next two weeks as the flotsam and jetsam of Hollywood float into town, trailing a wake of industry hangers-on, moneymen, and starfuckers attracted to our 58th Annual International Film Festival. This year's Berlinale has already pushed the city's hype machine into overdrive (and caused much uproar in the geriatric wards) with the expected arrival of the Rolling Stones, Madonna, and Neil Young evidencing the many films made by or featuring pop personalities. Martin Scorsese, himself a creature from ten million B.C., opens the festival with the premiere of his Stones tribute, filmed at NY's Beacon Theatre, Shine a Light. For the dignity of all concerned, we hope the light shone is a gentle forty watt.

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Babylon on the Spree will be soon be overrun with "cross-disciplinary tinkerers, utopian spelunkers, conspiratorial hoaxsters and stealth tacticians" arriving for the city's annual Transmediale, a festival for digital art and culture. The convocation of byte artists, media manipulators, and obsessed academics returns next week to the renovated House of World Cultures after a two-year exile at the Academy of Arts, and the action will be fast and furious as films, performances, and renegade academics lecturing on obscure conspiracies compete for the glassy eyeballs of the digerati. Needless to say, long days spent "exploring subversive artistic methodologies and developing (counter-) conspiratorial strategies" leaves one desperate for soothing sounds and relaxing evening entertainment.

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Berlin's notorious night owls are rarely out of bed before the weak winter sun sinks beneath the western horizon. And frühstuck um fünf (breakfast at five in the afternoon) means most of the city's museums are long closed by the time the party people are finally able to drag themselves out of the house. This weekend, however, the city's culturally deprived vampires will be able to feast, as our 22nd Annual Long Night of the Museums takes place Saturday the 26th. Opening ceremonies (6 p.m. at the Kulturforum's Piazetta) present the night's theme -- "Time" -- with video artist Philipp Geist (responsible for the video projections at the Rome's Palazzo delle Esposizioni last September) transforming the Kulturforum's plain facade into a kaleidoscope of colorful verbiage with his latest work "Time Fades." Huddling around the Piazetta in January's cold night air will get old quick, so the festivities continue inside as dozens of Berlin's museums and landmarks keep their doors open until 2 a.m.

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Berlin is a playpen for winter museum-goers -- those chasing away the season's chill by warming themselves in the golden glow of art and culture. Concentrated classical action down on Museum Island, the Hamburger Bahnhof and New National Gallery for contemporary needs, and the innumerable small galleries cluttering up downtown streets ensure that culture vultures needn't fear for something to pencil into each day's agenda. But what if, god forbid, you've already wandered and wondered at the historical halls of the island, already been perplexed and annoyed by the degenerate abstractions hanging in Berlin's showcases of contemporary art, and already been sickened by the cheap wine, rancid cheeses, chattering sycophants, and adolescent effluvia of the gallery scene?

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As we in the west swap out our calendars this week, our thoughts turn toward the future and its promise of imminent climate catastrophe, oil exhaustion, global economic collapse, and war without end. But it is a pleasant and perhaps necessary diversion to remember when time's horizon offered us only a glimmering urban utopia of clean architectural lines, trimly tailored outfits, and healthy, modern living. Groundwork for this mid-century modernist metropolis was partly realized in Berlin, its war-ravaged urban fabric ripe for reconstruction on both sides of the Wall.

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As hard as it is to believe this time of year, Christians are actually a minority of the world's population. Despite the cloying carols, coniferous carnage, and energy-wasting twinkling, the silent majority expects the 25th of December to be just another Tuesday. But for those of us stranded in the lands of the observant, it can be difficult to enjoy our legally enforced leisure time due to the odd holiday hours of traditional entertainment establishments. Thus that time honored way of spending X-mas for those Zarathustrians, Wiccans, Jews, Muslims, Scientologists, Satanists, and Secularists among us -- Chinese and a movie!

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For a shop-a-phobic like myself, the runup to Christmas consists of weeks of denial followed by a day or two of nerve-shattering anxiety decked out in festive seasonal dress. Preferring a mad dash through the gift list at the last possible moment, I arrive back at the compound exhausted and bankrupt, laden with the usual baubles, bangles, books, and brickbats. Fortunately for Berlin's neglectful shoppers, Mitte is wall to wall with oh-so-precious boutiques and cleverer-than-thou trendshops, so a last minute gift for that elfish cutie needn't just be a six-pack and Twinkie. If you're still on the hunt for something special for that special someone, hop in the sleigh and fly on by.

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