Cities Berlin Research Articles

Dan Stone. Goodbye to All That? The Story of Europe since 1945.

It should be easy to write a history of the tiny half-continent of Europe as our globe shrinks and the “national” becomes subsumed by the “transnational.” Dan Stone's absorbing and provocative work shows that writing this history remains vexingly difficult. Europe was at the heart of the Cold War, and that makes its postwar story much more than European. The single city Berlin reproduced the bipolar world in miniature, with welfare capitalism in its Western sectors but welfare dictatorship just a few streets to the East. Like the old German capital, Cold War Europe focused on big questions but also divided populations: how does one hold together Europeans' divergent experiences in a single narrative? Stone's solution is to admit to the division wrought by the Cold War while arguing for deeper unity. His chapters alternate between East and West but the book as a whole traces the adventures of the single concept “antifascism,” which Stone understands as a consensus favoring reasoned compromise that prevailed across the continent. “[A]ntifascism,” he writes, “became the basis of stability in postwar Europe,” a development that would help explain why Christian Democrats embraced welfare states along with corporatist labor arrangements (p. 9). Because Stone understands welfare states as postwar elites' antidote for fascism he sees the weakening of welfare states since 1989 as a sign of fascism's return. (Hence the book's title.) Is this intriguing intuition correct?

Genetic research at a fivefold children's burial from medieval Berlin

Berlin originated from the two twin cities Berlin and Cölln, which both were founded at the beginning of the 13th century. However the real date of their foundation as well as the origin of the first settlers is still unknown. On the Berlin site the historic city center is still visible in the Nikolaiviertel, but the medieval origin of Cölln disappeared almost completely. In 2007 a large scale excavation, which comprised an area of about 1700m2 of the historical center of the St. Peters church, recovers the remains of Cölln's first citizens and span a period of 500 years of medieval population. Here we present the first genetic analysis of a fivefold children's burial from excavations in Berlin. The genetic data unveiled next to ancestry and eye color data also the kinship and the gender of the five individuals. Together with the archeological context the new gained information help to shed more light on the possible reasons for this burial.

Transforming the electricity generation of the Berlin–Brandenburg region, Germany

We present possible steps for Germany's capital region for a pathway towards high-level renewable energy contributions. To this end, we give an overview of the current energy policy and status of electricity generation and demand of two federal states: the capital city Berlin and the surrounding state of Brandenburg. In a second step we present alternative, feasible scenarios with focus on the years 2020 and 2030. All scenarios were numerically evaluated in hourly time steps using a cost optimisation approach. The required installed capacities in an 80% renewables scenario in the year 2020 consist of 8.8 GW wind energy, 4.8 GW photovoltaics, 0.4 GWel bioenergy, 0.6 GWel methanation and a gas storage capacity of 180 GWhth. In order to meet a renewable electricity share of 100% in 2030, approximately 9.5 GW wind energy, 10.2 GW photovoltaics and 0.4 GWel bioenergy will be needed, complemented by a methanation capacity of about 1.5 GWel and gas storage of about 530 GWhth. In 2030, an additional 11 GWhel of battery storage capacity will be required. Approximately 3 GW of thermal gas power plants will be necessary to cover the residual load in both scenarios. Furthermore, we studied the transmission capacities of extra-high voltage transmission lines in a second simulation and found them to be sufficient for the energy distribution within the investigated region.

The Structural Change of the former Border Area of post-Wall City Berlin and Emergence of Conflict over the Artists House

The Structural Change of the former Border Area of post-Wall City Berlin and Emergence of Conflict over the Artists House

Rail City Berlin: Rail Infrastructure Development and Intermodality in the Reunified German Capital

Berlin is known for an expansive transit system featuring a variety of different rail services. But Berlin was divided by a heavily guarded concrete wall for a quarter century, with rail systems operations developing in quite different ways in East and West Berlin. Berlin's rail system was critically evaluated before, during, and after the times of the Berlin wall, with emphasis on the postreunification period. Several valuable lessons can be learned both from Berlin's best practices and from its less shining moments. Berlin is a particularly interesting example of rail transit redevelopment and expansion because of its repeated “zero hour” situations after war-related destruction and after the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989. After 1990, extraordinary sums were invested to completely restructure Berlin's urban and regional rail networks and to connect the city to the high-speed rail network in West Germany. In the end, postreunification Berlin's triple challenge of simultaneously developing new high-speed connections to other cities, completely overhauling and restructuring its internal rail system, and ensuring that the new system would be properly and intermodally connected to the rest of the transportation network, is not dissimilar to the situation many U.S. cities are facing today. The core issues that warrant critical discussion are the relationships and trade-offs between the various investments into long-distance, regional, and urban rail lines.

Une descente aux enfers : le projet autobiographique ? Andrej Belyj et son séjour à Berlin (1922-1923)

A Descent Towards Hell : Belyj's Autobiographical Project and His Sojourn in Berlin (1922/23) The symbolist poet and novelist Andrej Belyj is known to have been a prolific memoir writer as well. This paper examines the emergence of his complex autobiographical project in the wake of his travelogue on a journey to Egypt in 1911 and his memoir on Blok. After the death of his friend and rival Blok in 1921 Belyj embarked on writing a lengthy memoir in which he tried to tell the story of their troubled friendship and to justify his own behaviour towards his dead friend. As he felt unsatisfied by the outcome he continued to rework Blok's image and gradually became intrigued by the prospect of giving a detailed picture of the whole prewar and prerevolutionary epoch. These ramifications were later to develop into the three volumes of his memoirs On the Border of Two Centuries (1930), The Beginning of the Century (1933) and Between Two Revolutions (1934). Yet in 1922 he first went for several months to Berlin probably in order to consider the perspectives of exile, an option which he nevertheless discarded categorically at the end of his stay. Instead he decided to return to the Soviet Union and to write a hybrid description of the city Berlin - part travelogue and part confession of a tormented soul - which already contains key notions of the fully elaborated memoirs. Belyj compares the German capital to an ancient Egyptian necropolis thus highlighting the decline of a quintessential Western city against the backdrop of the rising Soviet capital Moscow, the centre of a new civilization the author is going to choose as his permanent home. The paper gives special attention to the chronotope 'Egypt' which serves as a semantic link between the early travelogue on Egypt, the Berlin memoir piece and the last chapters of the third volume of the memoirs Between Two Revolutions. From this chronotope emerges a complex figure of modernity incorporating ancient as well as contemporary elements and emphasizing a tendency towards ambivalence which precludes any unilateral or teleological interpretation.

Families and their Social Relations in German Cities

This paper looks at the personal embeddedness of families in three German cities (Berlin, Hamburg, Stuttgart) and examines the community question with data collected at the end of 2003. The study is based on the theoretical views of Barry Wellman, who used a network analysis perspective to conceptualize ‘the Community Question’. The results of the German study have reconfirmed the results of Wellman's East York Study and show that networks are not a product of only one community model. As a consequence it is less helpful to talk about saved, lost and liberated communities but more helpful to regard communities as a mixture of strongly knitted nuclear clusters and broader sparsely knitted relations which have access to different groups and their resources. Most networks consist of kinship, friends, local and long distance ties, multistranded and specialised ties. The current analysis of the data of this study indicates that in German cities there is no correlation between the different distributions of the community.

Food allergy and non-allergic food hypersensitivity in children and adolescents.

Previous studies have shown a 10-fold discrepancy of self-reported food-induced symptoms and physician-diagnosed food hypersensitivity. Little information is available on the prevalence of food hypersensitivity in unselected paediatric populations. No data were available for German children. To study the perception of food-induced symptoms in the paediatric population, to investigate the allergens accused, to objectify patients' reports, and to identify subgroups at risk of having food-induced allergy (FA) or non-allergic food hypersensitivity (NAFH) reactions. This paper presents the data of the paediatric group (0-17 years) of a representative, randomly sampled, cross-sectional population-based survey studying 13 300 inhabitants of the German capital city Berlin regarding food-related symptoms. Instruments included mailed questionnaires, structured telephone interviews, physical examination, skin-prick tests, specific serum IgE and standardized, controlled and blinded oral food challenges. Two thousand three hundred and fifty-four individuals were contacted by mailed questionnaire, 739 (31.4%) responses could be fully evaluated. Four hundred and fifty-five (61.5%) participants reported symptoms related to food ingestion, 284 (38.4%) affirmed reproducible symptoms in the standardized telephone interview. One hundred and eighty-four (24.8%) individuals were fully examined. Reproducible symptoms to food were found in 31 (4.2%) children and adolescents: 26 (3.5%) showed symptoms of FA and five (0.7%) of NAFH. The oral allergy syndrome was most often observed. Foods most commonly identified by oral challenges were apple, hazelnut, soy, kiwi, carrot and wheat. The perception of food-related symptoms is common among children and adolescents from the general population. Self-reports could be confirmed in around one out of 10 individuals, still resulting in 4.2% of proven clinical symptoms. However, most reactions were mild and mainly because of pollen-associated FA, while NAFH reactions were less common. Severe IgE-mediated FA was observed in individuals with pre-existing atopic disease, who should be fully investigated for clinically relevant FA.

Berlin: Towards a Global City?

Since 1990, the debate on urban restructuring in the new German capital city Berlin has frequently raised the question of whether Berlin is developing towards a global city type of urban region. Many European metropoles would like to be classified as global cities in order to enhance their reputation in the framework of interurban competition. The vision of Berlin as an upcoming global city had become part of the urban government's programme of innovation and technology development by 1999. This article provides a critical assessment of the global city vision of Berlin. The paper concentrates on two important aspects of the global city's economy: supraregional economic control capacity and the concentration of high-level business services. The findings are based on an empirical analysis of Berlin's interregional capital links and of the urban economy's functional structure, comparing Berlin, Hamburg and Paris. The conclusion is that Berlin hardly has a chance of becoming a 'true' global city in terms of a strategic economic centre with internationally extending control capacities like London and Paris.

Preliminaries for a bibliography of museum collection catalogues: Some Historical Observations on a Hitherto Neglected Aspect of Museum History

Catalogues of 18th century private and municipal collections are the precursors of museum catalogues. But museum catalogues proper date from the establishment of the Musée du Louvre and the publication of its first catalogue in 1793. In this catalogue can be found the essential features of the museum catalogue: a printed list of objects in the collection, in systematic order, and including descriptions which facilitate identification of the objects by the public. From the Louvre catalogue of 1793 a continuing line of development leads to the present day, although different catalogues have adopted different methods of organising their entries, in some cases echoing the arrangement of the collections within the museum building. Two centuries of publishing, and recent developments in editing art historical texts, suggest that there is a serious and growing need for a bibliography of museum catalogues. A few such bibliographies already exist, devoted to single institutions (such as the Louvre) or cities (Berlin, Munich), but there is no comprehensive bibliography comparable to Frits Lugt’s unique listing of auction catalogues. A start should be made on this enormous task.