Back to Berlin. This article reviews three recent novels set in the city, and uses that format as an excuse to make some sharp, but accurate, comments on us aimless expats:

The Berlin of the present exists in a state of rare double-consciousness, hurtling into the future while keeping a steady grasp on its past. From a writerly perspective, the coexistence of multiple selves is inspiring\u2014what writer wouldn\u2019t want to summon so many layers of injury and experience when creating a character? Aridjis and Winger have both, for better or worse, written books representative of their expat brethren\u2014the city is just one more instrument in the arsenal of their (our?) solipsism. It can\u2019t possibly stay that way forever. As manicured greens and glassed-in apartment complexes crop up in all those empty lots, they need not represent loss or erasure, but simply the city moving on.

I’ve contacted the metblogs admins about keeping an archive of the site online, but have so far had no response. If anything here is particularly important to you, please take your own copy of it. You can also email me via daniel at ohuiginn dot net, and I’ll try to provide copies from my own backup.

I don’t think there’s sufficient interest in this blog to keep it running outside of metblogs; if I’m wrong, please contact me and we can move the blog to another site. Otherwise, it’s time to start saying your goodbyes :(

The bioplastic pioneers are impressively idealistic about turning this enjoyable goop into a fundamental material for a decentralised, post-oil culture of open-source design:

We have a dream. A dream where everyone can manufacture, repair, create and build products in their own home. Where everybody has control over the design, and the ability to personalise the products they build. We believe that these products should be environmentally friendly, biodegradable and sustainable and accessible in every meaning of the word.

They have an open session every Monday evening, and other events fairly frequently. More here

More intriguing as a space is the Salon Populaire, defining iself as “a meeting point for conversations on art and neighboring topics, and for the convergence of different ideas, positions and contexts.”

We want to experiment with formats which both intend to break the hierarchical forms of traditional presentations, podium discussions and seminars on the one hand, and the increasingly popular category of the event on the other, and which exceed the private talk at home, at a café or a at dinner with friends in a restaurant. A prerequisite is: the currently ruling situation in the art context of ‘one talks, the others listen’, is to be suspended, and the audience as a mere witness of the production of cultural surplus value should be abolished. In contrast to this, we understand the SALON POLULAIRE as an invitation for joint debate.

Granted, organizations which successfully break away from dull and hierarchical presentaitons are far outnumbered by those which try and fail. Still, a worthy attempt.

Berlin-based British poet Catherine Hales launches her stunning new
poetry collection, Hazard or Fall, in the first of Dialogue Berlin’s
poetry events at Café Hilde in Prenzlauer Berg. Published by Shearsman
Books, Harzard and Fall is Catherine Hale’s first full-length
collection.

[I assume there is some kind of a reading as part of this; the event announcement is oddly non-specific on that point]

Wednesday 14th April, 7.30 pm – 9.30 pm, Café Hilde, Metzer Straße 22, 10405 Berlin, FREE ENTRY

Some of Catherine’s work is already available online here, here, here, and here, if you’d like an idea of what to expect.

Tom Atkins Blues, one of the films premiering at Achtung Berlin

The Programme is, as ever, somewhat overwhelming, but I’m reassured and delighted to find a frisbee session nestling in there among the premieres.

At almost the same time is the FilmPOLSKA, showcasing films from Poland. The glitz has been toned down in light of last week’s plane crash, but the films are as many and varied as they would otherwise be.

Much longer-established are Berlin’s several umsonstläden, or Free Shops. This one was part of the Brunnen 183 squat, and so was evicted last summer. But there are others in the TU, at Systemfehler in Friedrichshain, and in Weißensee, part of a loose national network

It survived the Depression, the 30s and the war, only to be destroyed by the Waffen-SS in 1945 to stop it falling under Soviet control. Sections have been rebuilt over the intervening decades, but it’s hard to imagine this — or anything else in Neukölln — ever recreating the grandiose over-optimism of 1929.