Sim Sala Bim's Secrets?

ngl the exposed mechanics are my favorite part too but i think ppl miss the connection to the building itself. that space on oberbaumstrasse used to be a factory for printing presses, you can still see some of the old floor bolts if you look around. the unfinished stuff is prob a nod to that history, like the building's own mechanics showing through. also if you go on a weekday morning around 11 its way less crowded and you can actually read the little info cards next to each piece, some of them have really specific stories about where the trick came from

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the unfinished ones are my favorite part honestly. they remind me of the old zircus berlin displays from the 90s, the ones at the friedrichstadt-palast before it got renovated. simon pierro grew up around that stuff, his dad was a stagehand there apparently. the one with the half-built card trick near the coat check is actually a prototype from his early days, he left it in because it shows the trial and error. kinda cool to see the process instead of just the polish

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yeah the unfinished thing is intentional, it's part of the whole "magie der mechanik" concept they lean into. if you look at the plaque near the entrance it mentions how some pieces are meant to show the machinery because the original berlin magic shops from the 1900s did that to teach apprentices. the one with the floating keys near the back wall is a direct replica of a trick from a shop on oudenarder strasse that got bombed in the war. simon pierro actually collects old magic manuals and a lot of the smaller exhibits are based on those, complete with the exposed gears and strings

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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.

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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

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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.

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