More than 5,000 Berlin households were evacuated three weeks ago when an unexploded aerial bomb from World War II was discovered at the bottom of the Neukölln shipping canal. That might be big news in a lot of places, but here this happens regularly enough that it was barely a blip in local headlines.

Our first year here, a construction crew working on a new apartment building near the school my son attended unearthed one while digging out the foundation.

Like that bomb, this recent one was retreived and safely disposed of by the police bomb squad at their secure facility in Grunewald.

Public broadcaster RBB published a video of the process here.

Then, a few days later, another Neukölln resident found an old, unexploded grenade in their garden and helpfully decided to just bring it to the police station on Zwickauer Damm himself.

This prompted the Berlin police to issue a statement asking the public to please never do this. Call them and they will send the bomb squad to come get it. They don’t mind—it’s their job.

And even as Berliners continue to face reminders of the last time the city was a war zone, they are coming to realize that they are under attack again. Not with bombs this time - but drones, small-scale sabotage, and social media disinformation campaigns.

What is hybrid warfare?

On September 2, the German government accused Russia of responsibility for the failed August 4 drone attack on a cargo plane at the Leipzig airport.

“We are not at war,” German interior minister Alexander Dobrint stated at a press conference announcing the government’s decision. “But we are the daily target of hybrid warfare.”

Since at least 2022, Russia is suspected in several acts of sabotage on German infrastructure, as well as targeted acts of terror and large-scale disinformation campaigns, designed to destabilize the government and reduce its ability to provide support to Ukraine.

Recently, such attacks have become both more frequent and bold.

In just the previous month:

• a cyberattack on the Berlin state computer network resulted in the theft of a large amount of personal data, including the names, addresses, and birth certificates of thousands of state employees;

• police found several homemade explosive devices placed around a power plant in Jänschwalde in southern Brandenburg;

• a Russian influence operation, Operation Overload, is thought to be behind a series of deepfake videos promoting lies related to candidates for state political offices

• Terminal 1 at Berlin Brandenburg International Airport was evacuated and air traffic shutdown for several hours last Thursday after a woman approached a security checkpoint and told officers there that she had a toxic substance in her purse. (So far, this airport incident is not alleged to have been sponsored by any hostile action. The woman was only briefly held for questioning. But it has contributed to the overall unease.)

Some also believe the Russian government to be behind the arson attack on a power substation last January that left 65,000 residents in southwest Berlin without power. The largest power outage in the city since the second world war.

Although a statement, allegedly from a leftwing environmental activist group calling itself the Vulkangruppe, claimed responsibility for the arson, there has never been any confirmation that such a group exists or that any one group is behind attacks carried out in their name.

That’s the key benefit of hybrid warfare. The attacker can deny they did it—posing as anonymous “left-wing extremists” or “environmental extremists” to take the blame.

Until now, the German government has been reluctant to publicly acknowledge the extent of Russia’s attacks, worried that doing so would escalate the conflict into open war.

But as Russia has stepped up actions both here and in other NATO countries, it has forced the issue out into the open.

Populist parties undermining national defense

Ironically, Russia’s most successful hybrid campaign so far seems to be its support for populist political parties that undermine social cohesiion as well as public support for increased defense spending.

In Germany, both the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party and the (allegedly) far-left Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW) are both openly pro-Russia, supporting the lifting of the embargo on oil purchases and halting German arms support for Ukraine.

As I mentioned last week, the series of social media videos promoting a fake campaign to re-divide Germany has been traced to a Russian disinformation network. The same network also produced several videos spreading lies and false claims about individual political candidates in Saxony-Anhalt.

The AfD recently scored a major victory in elections for the state parliament in Saxony-Anhalt, the first time that a far-right party has come in first in a state-wide election since the end of the second world war. It is also polling among the top three parties in upcoming state elections in Berlin and Mecklenberg-Vorpommern.

The party’s success can spell trouble not only for domestic policies, but also as Germany and its allies try to collectively respond to Russian aggression.

“Europe is stagnating at a time when the external threats were assuming a dimension which is really very serious.” Wolfgang Ischinger, chair of the Munich Security Conference, said at a recent forum in Rome. “These are really huge and existential challenges requiring greater integration in defence.”

But the German public may be waking up to the real threat posed by Russia. A recent national poll by the public broadcaster, ARD, has found that over half of respondents see the country as a threat.

“Some 56% of the eligible voters polled now see Germany's security as threatened by Russia, according to the latest Deutschlandtrend, for which the polling firm infratest-dimap conducted a representative survey of 1,319 German voters for public broadcaster ARD between August 31 and September 2.”

In response to the Leipzig attack, Germany announced it would close the Russian consulate in Bonn and the Russia House in Berlin. Officials in Brandenburg and North Rhine - Westphalia are sharing information about the similar acts of sabotage attempted on power substations in their areas and exploring strategies for protecting critical infrastructure.

RELATED

• DW.com: Berlin: BER Airport Terminal 1 reopened after security scare

• Reuters: Berlin launches crisis response after hackers publish stolen data

• DW.com: Germany news: Explosive devices found near power plant

• The Guardian: Europe calls out Russia’s ‘hybrid war’ in public. But how can it make Putin pay?

📕📺🎧Read, watch, listen

Here what I have been reading (Berlin- and Germany-related) this week. Yes, more politics—but also racism and, of course, real estate.

Zeitgeist: Is today a historic day in Germany?

Historian Katja Hoyer puts the AfD victory in Saxony-Anhalt in context of the development of democracy in postwar Germany.

When West Germany was founded in 1949, it was acutely aware of the fact that it had inherited a population that had been deeply nazified, affecting younger people especially, who had known nothing but Hitler’s ideas. With that in mind, the watchful eyes of the Western Allies on all their doings and the experience of the collapse of Weimar democracy in vivid living memory, it set out to tolerate only political parties that were within the moderate spectrum.

The first West German Chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, applied a whole range of methods to achieve this. He banned a Nazi successor party and the Communist Party in the 1950s. He integrated former Nazis into his own government, as well as the civil service and society more widely. And he built a domestic security service to monitor and potentially ban other political organisations if they were deemed to sit outside the constitutional boundaries.

Effectively, this meant that Adenauer’s own conservatives (CDU/CSU) were as right-wing as Germans were supposed to go and the Social Democratic Party (SPD) covered the other side of the political spectrum.

Read her article here.

Paul Sullivan: A Warning Sign—and a Glimmer of Hope

I regularly read (and link to) the website, Slow Travel Berlin. Now its founder, Paul Sullivan, has a Substack covering climate change and German politics. I appreciated his take on the recent AfD victory in Saxony-Anhalt.

BUT—the AfD does not have a majority. Sachsen-Anhalt’s parliament has 83 seats, meaning 42 are needed for an outright majority. Current projections give the AfD 39 seats, with the BSW on five. If the BSW ultimately falls below the 5% threshold and loses its seats, the AfD could rise to 41; still one short of a majority.

More here.

HEIST: Goodbye to Berlin: Why I’m Leaving This City After 15 Years

Berlin’s worker-owned online news magazine featured this essay from Zara Rahman, a German citizen of British-Bangladeshi ancestry, on why she can no longer call this country home.

It’s not the AfD, nor the rise of the far-right. No. It’s because of the dishonesty within the left and ‘progressive’ part of German society.

Read the rest here.

The Berliner: Berlin’s Empty Office Problem is Building

A question I always ask myself whenever the tram I’m riding on passes empty commercial buildings is, “Why isn’t the city building more housing when it still has abandoned buildings?” Here, writer Salome von Stolzmann also asks this question.

“Berlin has an abundance of empty buildings. To be exact, there are over two million square metres available, room enough for tens of thousands of people to live. The problem is that it’s currently in the form of not-in-use offices. So why in the name of a widely agreed-upon housing crisis aren’t we turning them into places to live?”

Read more here.

It’s election season here in Berlin and campaign posters and party volunteers knocking on doors and handing out leaflets are everywhere. Berliners who can vote will go to the polls on Sept. 20 to elect a new government.

It’s a weird feeling of nostalgia for us. The last election (actually a snap election in February 2023) took place just after we moved here and we had no clue what anything was about.

In my opinion, the CDU-led governing coalition that resulted from that election has been terrible for the city. And I am glad at least we know current governing Mayor Kai Wegner will not be returning.

Wegner announced earlier this year that he would not stand for re-election after facing pressure to resign over his mishandling of the January power outage crisis in southwest Berlin.

(Short version: While more than 45,000 residents were without power after an arsonist set fire to power cables and a substation, Wegner went to play tennis. Then, he claimed he had been coordinating relief efforts by telephone the whole time—which turned out to be untrue.)

The national news has been focused on the upcoming Sept. 8 state legislative elections in the state of Saxony-Anhalt, where the far-right Alternative for Germany (Alternative für Deutschland - AfD) party is expected to win a majority of votes for the first time and lead the state government there, potentially without the need for a governing coalition.

But in Berlin, the race is still very tight with four major parties showing roughly equal support. The Left party (Die Linke) currently has a slight lead, with current polls suggesting 20.7 percent of the vote. the imcumbent Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in second place at 18.8 percent, the AfD at 17.7 (!), and the Greens (Die Grünen) at 16.4 percent.

If you are new to Berlin, you can learn more about Berlin’s government and how the election process works at the links, below.

The WahlhYmat website, in particular, is focused on informing and including in the political process the over 1 million Berlin residents who are not citizens and are inelgible to vote.

RELATED

• WahlheYmatPost: How Berlin’s Government is Formed

• RBB24: All You Need to Know About the 2026 Berlin Elections

📕📺🎧Read, watch, listen

Some Berlin and Germany-related links that caught my eye this week:

Slow Travel Berlin: In the Shadow of the (Berlin) Wall

Thalia Gigerenzer’s profile of a Treptow family who lived for 28 years with the Berlin Wall just outside their house door. The pictures alone are worth clicking over to view, but the story is also amazing.

There aren’t that many people still living who remember both the end of the war — Mr. Neumann was 11 when it ended and an adult when the Wall went up — and a divided Germany. It is important to listen to their experiences while we can, and to not forget.

Read the rest at Slow Travel Berlin

DW Fact Check: The ‘Time to Divide Germany’ campaign

A Russian influence operation known as Operation Overload (a.k.a Operation Matryoshka) has produced dozens of videos for social media that are promoting false claims that there are political leaders and celebrities supporting an effort to re-divide Germany.

The videos and a hashtag #TimetoDivideGermany appear to come from reputable news sources, but contain altered logos and edited video footage of real events. In reality, there never was a summit or a conference about dividing Germany again. And the people who are alleged to be supporting it have had their images and voices stolen and copied using artificial intelligence.

Other fake posts have posted false claims about some of the candidates in the upcoming state elections in Saxony-Anhalt, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Lower Saxony, and Berlin.

More details are available in the video, below, and the DW article here.

🗺️Beyond Berlin …

Links to other writers that I definitely recommend reading. This week from Japan, Italy, and Ukraine.

Italy with Antonio

Moving to a Tiny Village in Italy Is Almost Always a Mistake

Italy with Antonio. Honest guides for moving to, traveling in, and understanding Italy from a native Italian. Three articles a week, with deeper resources for paid subscribers. Join 1,000+ subscribers…

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4 months ago · 263 likes · 4 comments · Antonio Cangiano

Nomadic Mind

Swimming in the Zero Zone

Suddenly a siren howls nearby, announcing an imminent drone strike. We should run to the shelter. Natasha finishes her cigarette, reaches for another, and offers me one. I watch an old lady make her way slowly to a small grocery store. The siren continues. This is Kharkiv, forty kilometers from the front line, the “zero zone…

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3 months ago · 42 likes · 11 comments · Pablo Naboso

I don’t know if I had a lot of preconceived notions about what Dublin would be like before I went. If I did, they were mostly subconscious and rooted in my teenaged obsession with the music of Sinead O’Connor and U2.

So I guess I was expecting more dark and angsty, but loud.

I certainly did not envision bright sunshine and a day at the beach, and regretting the choice not to bring suncreen and swimsuits.

Our first day coincied with a local heat wave - temps in the high 70s Fahrenheit and clear, blue skys. It felt like every living being in the city - men, women, children, dogs - was headed to the shore.

Having left behind a dry-roasted Berlin with highs in the mid 90s and almost negative humidity, it felt like heaven. We took a DART train along the coast to the suburb of Howth, a port and small village on Howth’s Head, a peninsula on the north side of Dublin Bay.

There are seveal scenic trails for hiking and taking in the views from seaside cliffs or visiting the historic Baily Lighthouse and Deer Park, the grounds of Howth Castle.

We did the Howth Summit Walk and I was surprised a couple of times along the way when people emerged suddenly along the main trail from smaller paths alongside that led down closer to the shore. The trail was so steep I didn’t see them coming up.

There’s even a small beach right off the Cliff Walk Loop, appropriately named Tiny Hidden Beach, though I don’t think I would be brave enough to hike down there.

We grabbed a delicious lunch at O’Connell’s Pub and Restaurant and saved our energy for shopping at Howth Market, with vendors selling a variety of local crafts, as well as organic produce and fresh seafood.

The basics: Getting around

Dublin is super easy to navigate by public transit—with an extensive bus and streetcar network as well as the DART commuter rail. You can buy an integrated Leap Card to pay for fares on all modes of travel, and it offers a 30 percent discount over individual fare prices.

You can also buy individual tickets at individual stations or on the buses, but you cannot use your own debit or credit cards to “tap in/tap out” the way you can in London and some other cities.

One thing to note: You have to hail the bus from the bus stop. Buses there do not automatically stop at every location. If no one is disembarking and you don’t wave at them, clearly, from the stop, the driver won’t stop. I learned this the hard way after getting skipped over the first time.

Also, we had a lot of difficulty using walking directions from Google Maps in Dublin, for some reason.

The time estimates were really off, and the live directions would tell us to make weird detours and loops through different areas. I had an sneaking suspicion that the app was deliberately routing us past businesses that advertisesd with them. But it may have been that we just didn’t empty our browser caches in our phones and they were using wonky location data.

I wrote about this in more detail here.

On the upside, bus drivers—like everyone else we encountered in Dublin—were very friendly and patient. The first time I couldn’t get the LEAP card to scan, the driver just waved me on in with, “Eh, it’s fine.” This would never happen in Berlin. the best you can hope for in the same circumstance is an eyeroll and stony silence.

Surprise hit: The Irish Rock and Roll Museum

The Irish Rock and Roll Museum is located inside The Button Factory, an event venue in the Temple Bar district, also home to Temple Lane Recording Studios.

You can only visit the museum by booking a guided tour. Our guide, Brian, was clearly a devoted fan of both music and musicians and his deep knowledge and experience really made the visit special.

My daughter is a fan of the music of U2 and the Cranberries, so we went in expecting some memorabilia and to hear some “band lore,” as she calls it. We came out adding Rory Gallagher, Gary Moore, Phil Lynott and Thin Lizzy to our playlists.

The Irish House Party

Another big hit was seeing the Irish House Party at the Lansdowne Hotel.

The show features traditional Irish music and dance performance and incorporates a lot of fun audience participation. It really did feel like a party. Plus, we learned a lot about Irish music styles and musical instruments.

For example, the uilleann pipes are known as the national bagpipe of Ireland, smaller than the more widely known Great Highland Bagpipe of Scotland. They are more suited to playing in small ensembles and gatherings.

(I later learned that both Ireland and Scotland have their own “great” pipes, sometimes called warpipes, used primarily for military functions. These are both too large and too loud to be used in a band.)

Irish traditional dance also has different styles, in addition to the step-dancing style popularized by Riverdance, there’s the Sean-nós style of solo dance with more fluid movements of the dancer’s arms and upper body.

If you are interested in folk music and other art forms, I highly recommend.

Honorable mentions

• The pizza at Little Pyg. Rated the “best pizzeria in Ireland” and one of the best places to eat Neopolitan pizza in Europe, our experience did not disappoint. We ended up seated near the kitchen, and the chef sent us over a complimentary caprese salad after he saw us coveting the one on a neighboring table. FYI, it’s located behind the Pygmalion bar and nightclub in the Powerscourt Townhouse, hence the name.

• Forging your own silver ring at Silver Works on Drury Street. My daughter and I loved this experience making our own unique vacation souvenirs.

• Viewing the 4,000-year-old Lurgan Logboat at the National Museum of Ireland’s Archaeology Museum, and learning about life in Ireland during the Bronze Age.

Missed the mark: What not to do in Dublin

We mistakenly booked a tour for Trinity College, the Book of Kells Experience + Dublin Castle with an independent tour provider instead of booking through the college itself—which was a mistake.

First, only Trinity’s officially authoritized tour guides are allowed to work on the campus itself. When we got to the meeting location, our tour guide met us and informed us the first part of our tour would be an hour guided walk around the neighborhood near the college, which we had just walked around ourselves the previous day.

Also, Dublin Castle is closed to visitors until January 2027 because Ireland is hosting the Presidency of the European Union this year and the castle is the main venue for the attendant conferences, dinners and receptions. So, no castle visit. We got to look at the wall surrounding it outside the locked date during our “hour walk” that turned into two hours.

After two hours walking through the area around campus, she then brought us back so we could view the Book of Kells, which was the main thing we originally wanted to see.

By that time, we were tired and moving through the exhibit in Trinity’s Old Library, felt very rushed. It was also the middle of the day by that time, and the space was extremely crowded.

It was hard to feel immersed in the “immersive experience” when you are trying not to bump into other people while you wait six-people deep to get close enough to see the different items and pictures, as well as the actual book itself.

Lesson learned: Next time, we will book a tour through the college or book just the visit to the Book of Kells itself.

(I should know by now that the large, combination private tours are a bad idea, But too often I forget…)

For next time

As always, there is never enough time to see and do everything we want to do when we visit.

When we come back, I definitely want to visit The James Joyce Center, take a boat from Howth to Ireland’s Eye, and come prepared for a proper visit to Burrow Beach.

Have you been to Dublin? What are your must-see sights and experiences? Leave a comment online and share.

Leave a comment

I just got back from a wonderful vacation to Ireland and Scotland (more on that after I unpack). I didn’t post anything from the road, because I wanted to get back to my home base so that I could research Substack’s latest update.

Since the end of July, users of Substack’s app have the option to scan articles and Notes to detect the presence of AI-generated text before reading them.

You can read more about the details on the official Substack blog here:

The Substack Post

Against Claudefishing

It’s getting harder to tell what’s real on the internet…

Read more

2 months ago · 7041 likes · 1739 comments · Chris Best

I don’t often talk about Substack on Substack because my newsletter is about my life in Germany, not about writing. And I want it to function independently of the platform I use to publish it.

But this is a significant change that may affect how readers experience Alte Frau - New Life, and one I fear will lead to negative unintended consequences in the future - both for me and for Substack as a whole.

To get the obvious question out of the way: I do not use AI to generate text or edit any of my posts, comments, or Notes.1

However, I do occasionally use a translation program (DeepL) that translates German texts into English. And, I sometimes use Grammarly or GrammarTool to check spelling and grammar. When I interview sources, I often use a tool called OtterAI to transcribe the recorded audio.

Technically, apps that translate, transcribe and/or check grammar and spelling are making use of machine learning (‘AI’), too.

But that’s not what they are checking for.

Main concern No. 1 - false positives

When I first heard about the Pangram integration, my main concern was that its AI detection tool would falsely flag my content as AI-generated. I mean, I was using the em dash before before the internet even existed. And I have been blogging and writing for online publications since the early 2000s. My writing style is probably all over the training data.

And the error rates of various AI agents are just not great. Pangram claims that its detection tool has a false-positive rate around 1 in 10,000.

Outside estimates have indicated it is higher.

Individual writers have reported disturbing results.

The writer Laura Brooke Robson tested Pangram by scanning parts of her novel, as well as Claude-edited versions of it, and found the opposite—that Pangram tended to rate AI-assisted writing as human more often than it flagged her unassisted text as AI.

Substack allows writers to opt out of allowing their readers to use the Pangram tool, but only if the writers scan the text with the tool, first, and then choose whether or not to show the results to readers.

This brings me to …

Main concern No. 2 - theft of intellectual property

So I guess Pangram is scanning my work whether I like it or not.

Substack claims that nothing that is scanned is used for their training data.

I am not sure that I believe them. But I am also not sure it matters.

In reality, that horse has already left the barn. I already opted into allowing my content to be used in AI training data in the Substack publication settings. I discovered early on that opting out tanked my SEO. (For those not well-versed in internet content development - this is how high your links rank in search engine results.)

I am also way more worried about human plagiarizers on Substack than agentic ones. Last year, social scientist Katie Jagielnicka, who publishes the newsletter, The Noösphere, discovered another user was stealing her work.

Despite reporting the issue, complete with evidence that Jagielnicka published her essay months before the plagiarized version, Substack took no action against the second writer. The writer later paywalled the stolen content, even while admitting to ‘unintentionally’ lifting whole passages of it verbatim from Jagielnicka’s work.

The Noösphere

Mama, There’s a Plagiarist Behind You

Around a year ago, I opened the TikTok app and was served a video of Maalvika discussing an essay she’d just published. ‘It’s my most well-researched Substack,’ she announced proudly…

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a year ago · 5470 likes · 563 comments · Katie Jagielnicka

This is why I don’t trust Substack’s operations team when it comes to the issue of the integrity of the writing.

So, using AI is bad, but straight up stealing someone else’s intellectual property and passing it off as yours is a non-issue?

Whatever.

Be your own judge

Personally, I think I can probably detect AI writing much better than Pangram can.

I do hate to see it. Not because I think I am being deceived, but because it’s usually painfully obvious and a waste of my time.

I know there are writers of some of the newsletters I subscribe to who use AI in their process, though they probably are deluding themselves into thinking people can’t tell.

We can tell.

If we aren’t unsubbing, it is probably that we find the information shared is—on balance—worth the trouble of sifting through the stilted prose. Or, we think the information shared is readable and useful, whether you got help from an LLM or not.

I don’t need an AI agent to warn me about AI slop.

The whole premise of needing Pangram to detect the use of AI in order to maintain the integrity of the information that is published on Substack is just another example of AI hype disguised as AI criticism.

Shoving AI detection down our throats gives the impression that AI-generated text is so close to human-generated writing that it can only be reliably detected by … another AI.

I disagree.

I think Ed Zitron said it best in his essay, Revenge of the Business Idiot:

So, scan it if you want.

Yes, I am somewhat worried about readers who will scan it without even reading a word, first. I have no idea whether my writing style will render a false positive.

You can see I love a good em dash, even now. But I hate the negative/positive pluralisms that ChatGPT has rendered cliche. (‘It’s not X! It’s Y’…) And I refuse to describe anything that doesn’t produce sound as “quiet” or “loud.”

But, aside from a test scan I will run on this article before publishing, I am not going to pre-scan my posts to disable the tool.

Pangram - away.

What Others Are Saying

Some posts by other Substack writers also writing about the Pangram issue.

Unstack Substack

For Anyone Panicking About the New AI Detection System on Substack

Today’s post is short and sweet, and hopefully sheds some light on all the controversy around AI scanning and detection here on Substack…

Read more

2 months ago · 109 likes · 154 comments · Kristi Keller 🇨🇦

Nobody Famous

Pangram Flagged My Own Writing as AI

Full disclosure: I used to work in Big Tech, before I left it all behind to live the writer’s life. (FWIW, Big Tech pays better). I worked with AI. A lot. And I used to be a Pangram champion. I touted it as a good way to tell if a writer here (or anywhere, for that matter) was trying to pull the wool over our eyes…

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2 months ago · 894 likes · 393 comments · Katharine English

Privacat Insights

One Weird Trick for Opting Out of Pangram on Substack

So, I initially wasn’t going to weigh in on the Pangram announcement posted by Substack’s CEO Chris Best on Wednesday, because 1) everyone is talking about it, and 2) I didn’t have much to add…

Read more

2 months ago · 222 likes · 77 comments · Carey Lening

And, last but not least, what Pangram says about itself.

Pangram

How does Pangram work?

We think it is important to be able to reliably identify AI-generated writing, so we built a detector that does it. Because the problem is so important, it’s only prudent to be transparent about how that works…

Read more

2 months ago · 296 likes · 141 comments · Pangram

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Today it’s hard for me to believe that a few weeks ago, at the end of May, I had several geraniums still ‘over-wintering’ next to the windows in my apartment, waiting for nighttime temps to be warm enough to put them back outside.

I was worried we were in for a repeat of last summer, when there were only a few isolated days it got hot enough to want to go to the lake or a swimming pool.

Who would have thought Berlin would follow up its the coldest winter in 16 years with its hottest summer weekend in, well, ever.

On Saturday and Sunday, the high temperature in Berlin reached 40C (that’s 104F) both days - with parts of central Berlin recording 41C on Sunday afternoon. That breaks the previous record high temperature of 38.9 that was set in August of 2015.

Farther east in Brandenburg, near the border with Poland, it was even hotter, with the Spree-Oder district setting Germany’s new heat record at 41.7 (107F).

T…

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Visitors and residents new to Berlin - especially those who have been to other German cities - often have a common question upon first experiencing it: Why doesn’t Berlin have the typical ‘Altstadt’ at its center?

If you’ve been to other German cities and towns, they are all, to some degree, centered around an “old town” plaza that is centered on two anchors: a large, old church and a large, old town hall.

And Berlin does have this physical center area in Alexanderplatz - where the Rotes Rathaus is, as well as the Nikolaiviertel, the oldest part of the original city of Berlin. On its borders reside the Berliner Dom, the elaborate neo-Renaissance cathedral church of the imperial kaisers, and also the controversially reconstructed royal Berliner Schloss (Berlin Palace).

But it doesn’t really feel much like the center of Berlin, just one of many popular places in a very large metropolis.

Some have speculated that the total destruction of most of the city d…

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My friend Joe at ZenKimchi wrote a post a few days ago lamenting the Korean tourism industry’s promotion of curated, Instagram-ready tourist hotspots while neglecting many unique and more authentic experiences that tourists are more likely to enjoy.

READ: The Fish Versus Ducks Problem in Korean Tourism. ZenKimchi. May 14, 2026.

That made me think of Berlin’s double Venices. Two different districts nicknamed after the Italian city.

Neu-Venedig (New Venice), probably the better known of the two, is a neighborhood in southeast Berlin that is crisscrossed with canals. Residents and visitors get around the neighborhood with canoes and rowboats.

The neighborhood was first developed in 1890 when the city of Köpenick, now part of Berlin, acquired the property of the former Rahnsdorf manor and Hessenwinkel estates. The city originally planned to drain the marshy meadows near the S…

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I am convinced that the biggest myth that needs busting about life in Berlin is not that it’s still ‘poor but sexy,’ or that non-millionaires can still get a new rental contract in Prenzlauer Berg.

It’s that taking a taxi when the bus is late will get you there on time.

I was reminded of this Thursday as I strolled past a long line of cars stuck in traffic on a small street near my apartment. Although I saw the occasional taxi or work van, behind the wheel of most vehicles sat a single, very frustrated driver.

I was almost sitting among them. Road and tram-line construction have created traffic bottlenecks all over Lichtenberg and Friedrichshain, leaving tram riders depending on replacement buses to complete their journeys, and drivers taking detours off main roads through neighborhoods.

I was coming back from a parent meeting …

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I woke up our first morning in Gdańsk the same way I fell asleep, lulled by the church bell at the nearby Basilica of St. Mary chiming the hour. Cool air wafted through the kipped windows of our hotel room in the heart of the city’s historic center, the Główne Miasto or Main City.1

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My husband just passed his Leben in Deutschland test, with a perfect score—33 out of 33 questions correct.

This is important because it was the last required task before he could apply for permanent residence (the Niederlassungserlaubnis). Leben in Deutschland (literally, “Life in Germany”) is the official Einbürgerungstest, the same test you take if you want to become a German citizen. But it’s required for permanent residence, too.1

Because David is here on an EU Blue Card, he can apply for PR after just three years. Non Blue-Card holders (like me) have to wait for five.2

He is our anchor here - in more ways than one. His job with an international tech company allowed us to move here in the first place. His security as a permanent resident will mean that we won’t have to leave if he changes jobs or loses this job and has to look for another one.

This is important as layoffs in the tech sector become more common…

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Berlin is in the midst of a lovely false spring after experiencing its coldest winter in 16 years. Despite my earlier attempts at positive winter spin, I have never been more ready to see the end of the season. It feels like Christmas was six months ago.

I’m not so foolish as to think that actual spring has arrived.

I know we can expect at least one more hard freeze, if not another round of snow, before the end of April when sun + higher temps are more reliable.

And if the city has taught me anything in the three years we’ve lived here, is that when you see the sun in March, the housework, school work (and blog updates) can wait.

So posting will continue to be light over the next several days is what I’m saying.

In the meantime, check out these links to things I’ve been reading, watching and listening to, recently.

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It is a mystery that has puzzled European historians for hundreds of years and is still hotly debated. Who constructed the thousands of narrow, empty, underground tunnel networks scattered all over Europe?

Known as ‘Erdstalls’ — the etymology is from the Middle High German erde for ‘earth’ and either stelle for ‘place’ or stollen (mineshaft) — they are most heavily concentrated in southern Germany and Austria. (There are more than 700 in Bavaria alone.) But they have also been documented in Hungary, Spain, France, Ireland and Scotland.

I first heard about them from this article in the newsletter, weird medieval guys.

…

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This is probably the most common misconception many people (particularly Americans) have about moving to Europe.

That everyone gets “free healthcare.”

It is true that all countries in Europe have what is known as “universal healthcare,” meaning that all people in a given country or region are able to get the medical care that they need, when and where they need it, without financial hardship.

And, it is true that the governments in all of these countries assumes some degree of responsibility for ensuring this — whether it is by a single-payer, government-funded system (like the UK or Sweden) or a system that combines the use of public and private health insurance (like Germany, France and Italy), these systems are all supported by taxes paid by the people benefiting.

Remember what I wrote here about our taxes almost doubling when we moved to Germany?

It’s not free.

And, in Germany, we still pay insurance premiums and have some very limited out-of-pocket…

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After a brief interlude where the temps climbed above freezing and the snow and ice melted away, the cold returned again last week and with it the ice-covered streets, sidewalks, lakes and streams.

This January was Berlin’s coldest in 16 years, according to the German weather service, with the average temperatre just -1.9C. (That’s 28.6 Fahrenheit, FYI. It just always sounds more hardcore in Centigrade.)

Although such winter weather used to be much more common here, it seems Berlin has grown unaccustomed to dealing with long periods of ice. Doctors’ offices and hospitals reported record numbers of injuries from people slipping on frozen sidewalks and streets.

State law requires inidividual property owners to keep the public sidewalks in front of their properties free, but there seems to be almost no enforcement against those who don’t.

This year did seem particularly bad to me - the sections of sidewalk that were actual…

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In Berlin’s Schöneberg district stands a secondary school named for Sophie Scholl, a member of the White Rose resistance movement executed in 1943 for resistance to National Socialism.

She and her brother were caught distributing leaflets on the campus of Munich’s Ludwig Maximilian University urging passive resistance to the Nazis. They were put on trial, convicted of high treason, aid to the enemy, and distributing subversive propaganda.

The Berlin school is one of many streets, schools and plazas all over Germany and Austria that are named in honor of the young woman revered by Germans, today, as one of “our best.”

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Powdery snowdrifts crunched under my feet as I trudged along a busy Goethestraße in Charlottenburg last night. Soft flakes blurred my vision and collected in the folds of my coat and messenger bag. Strangely, the new surge of winter weather lightened my mood.

Earlier that afternoon, I had been struggle-stomping my way to an appointment along those same ice covered streets, trying to avoid slipping and falling, cursing the lack of enforcement of the Räumen- und Streuenpflict (clearing and ‘gritting’ obligation).

Somehow the new-fallen snow added some traction and walking became less like unexpected ice skating and more like walking on a sandy beach - if a very cold and dark sandy beach.

Instead of studying the ground in front of me for every step, I could look up and appreciate the scene - snowcapped roofs, bright shop windows, people pulling their young children and/or th…

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So, despite all my bitching and moaning about New Year’s Eve in my last post, it was relatively calm over by us.

I think we have the weather to thank for that, rather than any human-led effort. There was quite a lot of rain between 1 and 3 a.m., which seemed to have put a damper on things.

While we did have to deal with people setting off firecrackers in our hof all night, that’s nothing compared to last year when it sounded like people we setting off bombs on the roof.

There was significantly less garbage all over the park to clean up the next morning, which was nice.

That’s not to say I was completely wrong about the outcome. There were still an unacceptable number of injuries and property damage. But, by Berlin…

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Every year around this time I begin to see the same kinds of posts on social media.

I’m coming to Berlin on New Year’s Eve!

Where should I go?

Is the S-Bahn safe to ride late at night?

Where is the best place to see fireworks?

This always brings to mind the advice I got when we first moved here - which are still the words I live by on Dec. 31:

Be where you plan to stay by 7 p.m. and don’t leave there until after sunrise the next day.

Yes, the S-Bahn is generally safe, even at night. And unlike most nights, the trains will be running frequently all through the night.

It’s everywhere around the S-Bahn that isn’t safe on Silvester.1

Unless you are the kind of person who enjoys throwing incendiary devices at others or having them thrown at you, then I advise watching some fireworks from a balcony or bridge early in the evening and then staying inside (shutters closed, if you have them), for the duration.

Think I am exaggerating?

Here is a short list of highlights …

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Today is Black Friday. Yes, even in Germany — though it mostly exists in that virtual no-man’s land of online retail, not in brick-and-mortar stores.

(It’s also called ‘Black Friday,’ instead of the German ‘Schwarzer Freitag,’ in in open acknowledgement of its status as an American import.)

As the purported first shopping day of the Christmas season, this time of year is particularly stressful for Americans in Germany looking to send gifts back to friends and family. Well, unless they are very good at planning ahead.

( And I am not.)

International shippers require packages to be mailed very early to make it to a destination outside Europe by December 25. DHL, which operates Deutsche Post’s package delivery service, requires parcels to be mailed by November 26, for standard delivery - by December 3, if you pay for premium service. Christmas cards can be mailed as late as December 6.

Every year, my good intentions of sending handmade ornaments found in o…

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It was the largest general strike ever in the former West Germany and I had never read anything about it.

I can’t find any mention of it in English-language sources, likely because American and British news outlets were focused on the Berlin Blockade and subsequent Berlin Airlift that were happening at the same time.

(Note: All excerpts and quotations below have been translated from German into English.)

Inflation, currency reform and low wages

On November 12, 1948 - 77 years ago this past Wednesday - around 9 million workers in the American and British sectors (this is out of a total workforce of 11 million) staged a 24-hour work stoppage to protest unaffordable food prices coupl…

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