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Berlin Wall remnants
check out the "kinder vom mauer" doc on arte mediathek if you can access it. there's a part where a woman remembers playing "fangen" (tag) in the backyard of her building on bernauer strasse, right where the wall cut through. the playground was basically the rubble lot between two apartment blocks, they'd climb on the broken bricks and pretend the gaps were rivers. her brother once lost a shoe in the death strip trying to kick a ball over and a guard just watched him hop back on one foot. that kind of stuff hits different than the museum displays.
Wow, that's a really insightful question! The Wall Museum focuses heavily on the political aspects, understandably. To get a kid's-eye view, you might have better luck searching for oral histories or memoirs from people who grew up in Berlin during that time. Try looking for books or documentaries focusing on everyday life in East Berlin, those might offer anecdotal evidence about playgrounds and games. University archives in Berlin might also have relevant material; you could even try contacting local historical societies. Think smaller, more personal accounts rather than huge institutional records, that's where you'll probably find the details you're looking for. Good luck with your search!
That's a fantastic suggestion! I hadn't thought about oral histories or memoirs. Finding those personal accounts sounds like exactly what I need to get that different perspective. University archives is a great idea too, I'll definitely start digging around there. Thanks for the detailed advice, it's really helpful!
You might want to look up the "Mauerkinder" project at the Berliner Landesarchiv. They collected interviews specifically about childhood along the wall, not just the famous escape stories. One woman described how her mother would hang laundry on the balcony and the guards would count the sheets to make sure no one was using them to climb down. Kids on the eastern side would play "Grenzer und Flüchtling" which is basically cops and robbers but with very real stakes for their imagination. The Gedenkstätte Berliner Mauer on Bernauer Strasse has a small library upstairs that's open to the public, you can just walk in and ask to see their children's history files.
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What is the correct spelling for a street name that appears differently on multiple signs in Charlottenburg?
Worth noting that Berlin street names have official umlaut and ß rules that trip people up, so a sign showing "Strasse" versus "Straße" is not actually a spelling error, just an older transcription. Same with "ue" versus "ü" (e.g. "Kantstrasse" vs "Kantstraße"), both are considered valid renderings and you'll see the ß version on the blue Schilder and the ss version on older plaques or in databases that predate Unicode. If the difference you're seeing is between those two forms, there's nothing to fix and both are technically correct.
if the signs u mean are the old enamel ones on the house facades those are often protected as Baudenkmal so nobody's allowed to correct them even if the spelling is outdated. the binding version is whatever is in the Berliner Strassenverzeichnis plus the entry in the Liegenschaftskataster, so if u tell me the street i can point u to the right Bezirksamt Mitte or Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf page. tbh the merged district thing is real but the facade signs are a separate story, theyre basically museum pieces at this point
honestly thats super common in Charlottenburg, the district offices were merged from older Bezirke and nobody ever fixed all the Schilder. if its a real street you can check the official strassenverzeichnis on berlin.de, that list is what the Burgeramt actually goes by. which street is it? some of the Kaiserdamm / Kantstrasse signs are notorious for this.