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Spying on the soul of Berlin – Il Sole 24 ORE

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The writer Bodo Morshäuser places in his collection of prose almost six pages dedicated to a list of the 129 verbs that in German define the different ways of getting around the city. So, all that remains is to experience those verbs, for now mentally, through streets, neighborhoods, dark and dazzling areas of Berlin. This is what Gian Piero Piretto, who taught Russian culture and methodology of visual culture at the University of Milan, did in his Wander around Berlin. Eccentric itineraries between present and past.

A guide full of ideas and news

The title is a mission statement. A ban on the usual guides but a lot of life in the shadow of the Wall that has wounded a country and Europe: “With the bias typical of the character of flâneur – writes the author – I will try to tell and share some of my walks through Berlin. Not as a specialist, nor as a connoisseur. Rather than a curious explorer and aficionado used to“. And his curiosity becomes our wonder, an active memory full of ideas and questions: the former GDR, the infamous East Germany, can be glimpsed almost everywhere with that pinch of Ostalgie, the nostalgia for some traits of the everyday life of the East, but the perspective gaze wins. It is true, before 1989, plastic objects reigned, the Nudossi, the gianduia cream recently back into production, the Trabant, the socialist subcompact, a counterpart to the western Volkswagen, and the Späti, who served food and drink to the workers. shift workers and who today have Turkish or Arab masters who offer the cuisines of the world on the banks of the Spree.

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Multiethnic Berlin

Here is the new soul, which Piretto outlines in many pages: «Berlin is a multiethnic and multicultural city. Each neighborhood has its own characteristics and something to offer, if you know and want to read the messages: faces, smells, clothes, noises, foods. But, at the same time, the territories of hybridization are very wide, those where from the clash-encounter between different cultures an unprecedented series of new, mestizo behavioral practices was born ». You can walk along Sonnenallee, the Arab street today a meeting place for Syrian refugees, or stop at Thai Park for a papaya salad or at the Turkish Maybachufer market, in the Neukölln district, where in 1950 the Karstadt department store was blown up so that the reserves stored in the basements would not fall into the hands of the Red Army. From curiosity to curiosity, the book recalls pages of history, inspires reflections on a memory – the German one – which was able to elaborate, unlike what we Italians were not able to do, the great dramas of the twentieth century, until they became source of tourism business.

Distant neighborhoods full of life

Piretto’s magnet takes him to extreme quarters, far from addicted and distracted looks. Marzahn was born as a large residential area at the end of the 70s (because the GDR had preferred to build from scratch, not having specialized workers in renovations), today it is a melting pot of industrial archeology, woods, empty spaces, socialist-brand housing settlements between urban gardens and small gardens. Then there are the legacies of the great Nazi architecture, from the Olympiastadion complex built for the 1936 Games, which should have crowned the Aryan race, or those of the hammer and sickle architecture, as in the Lichtenberg district, headquarters of the command. Soviet in Berlin.

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The city, with its almost a thousand gardens, is for everyone, for those who choose the tram (line 21 is a historical overview from Wilhelminian Germany to industrial archeology) or the boat along the Spree to Altstadt Köpenick, among half-timbered houses, the Baroque castle and the newly reconstructed stadium of Union Berlin, the other team of socialist Berlin. On the one hand the Dynamo, subservient to the Stasi, on the other the Union of workers. The story flows in this way, fast and sudden, while the city shows itself in its beauty, in its austerity, in its secrets that exude from all the walls, as well as from the windows. Almost all windows look at you, as they watched, spied on, stole the lives of others.

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