An ongoing series
Strange Constellations
Berlin is a city where unrelated histories keep turning out to share an address. A mural of contented workers put up on the building where the uprising against them began. A parliament that still carries its conquerors’ handwriting on the walls. The series collects those coincidences — and asks, each time, whether the coincidence is the whole story.
The empire on the forehead
27 September 2026
In German, French and older American Sign Language, the word for Germany is one raised index finger held to the top of the forehead. It is the spike of a Pickelhaube.
The Gestapo chief in the Jewish cemetery
24 September 2026
One of the chief architects of the Holocaust, Heinrich Müller, ran the Gestapo, participated in the Wannsee Conference, and is the highest-ranking figure of the Nazi state never accounted fo…
The only crime the Stasi's boss was convicted of
20 September 2026
Erich Mielke ran the Ministry for State Security from 1957 to 1989. The single criminal conviction ever entered against him was for shooting two Berlin police captains on Bülowplatz on 9 Aug…
The front doors were in one country and the pavement in another
17 September 2026
On Bernauer Straße the boundary ran along the housefronts. The buildings on the south side belonged to the East; the pavement outside them belonged to the West.
The world's first TV service, for a public with no televisions
10 September 2026
On Christmas Eve 1883, a Berlin student filed a patent for a spinning disc that could take a picture apart into lines. Paul Nipkow let it lapse and spent his life as an engineer.
The Great Silent One is the oldest voice on earth
3 September 2026
Helmuth von Moltke planned three wars and barely spoke; Berlin called him der große Schweiger, the Great Silent One.
The men who burned people came back as tourists
31 August 2026
The plaque at Bebelplatz quotes Heinrich Heine, written in 1820: where they burn books, they will in the end also burn people. The books were burned on that square on 10 May 1933.
The chemist who fed the world and gassed it
24 August 2026
Fritz Haber worked out how to pull nitrogen out of the air, which is roughly why eight billion people can be fed. He also directed the first mass gas attack in history, at Ypres in 1915.
Marlene Dietrich's sister
21 August 2026
Marlene Dietrich left Germany in 1930, took American citizenship, and sang to Allied troops close enough to the front to be shelled. Germany called her a traitor.
The opera house that voted democracy away
16 August 2026
History rarely moves in straight lines. It twists, overlaps and occasionally produces connections so improbable they sound invented.
Most of these connections were found while walking. If you would rather be shown them than read them, that is what the tours are for.