abandonedberlinews
Screenshot from Jordi Busquets’ Abandoned Berlin documentary.
It’s been so long since there was any news update on this site you probably think it’s been abandoned. But as you hopefully see, it’s been totally redesigned and I* hope it’s much better than it was when I tore it up to start again in August 2024.
It’s taken that long to get back to a point when I can just hop on my bike, go somewhere, take photos, write it all up, and post it on the site. There’ll be another new post very soon after I went chasing Stasi shadows on Monday.
It’ll be the third new post in as many weeks! Which is crazy, unprecedented. On top of that, you might have noticed the new “Rudi’s Berlin” section, where Restless Rudi writes about places that tickle his fancy, weird and wonderful places around Berlin that aren’t necessarily abandoned.
One of those places was the Fischerpinte. But then it was suddenly abandoned, so I went there the Monday before and took photos and incorporated Rudi’s text into my own.
The previous post was La Venta del Batán, about an abandoned bullring and bullfighting school that we discovered while out for a walk in Madrid over Easter.
So far on “Rudi’s Berlin” there have been posts about the Schiller memorial, a tribute to Harald Junhke, Pankow’s stone living room, the Tax Screw in Rehberge, and the Anti-War-Café, which was the first of Rudi’s posts because peace needs all the help it can get right now, even if the message is muddled by its adulation of Vladimir Putin.
Just last night, the sixth of Rudi’s posts was published, about Café Achteck and the pissappropriation of Berlin’s public toilets!
As always, if you have any suggestions for improvement or any issues with the site, please let me know in the comments below, or through email, or one of the social media channels.
Abandoned Berlin has a Telegram channel and Signal group, and if more people than the current two join the Whatsapp group, I might also reconsider reviving that.
Otherwise, AB is on Bluesky, Mastodon, Pixelfed, Instagram and Facebook. It’s actually on TikTok too, but I haven’t made any TikTok videos yet, so don’t get your hopes up there. Though TikTok too has a great ring to it. (I just tried logging into TikTok without success, so maybe really don’t get your hopes up.)
AB quit Twitter/X because that site is promoting Nazis, and as we all know, it didn’t go well the last time. Dark times might be good news for AB and the prospect of future abandoned sites, but really I would much rather have boring times with no Nazis and the prospect of peace and happiness for all.
In other news, an AB photo from the Iraqi embassy is going to be used as the front cover of a book from Cambridge University Press called “Circulating Secrets: Intelligence and Knowledge Sharing in Germany, Egypt and Iraq.” I can’t wait to see the book!
And AB is also contributing to a global architecture competition run by IDOARCH that invites participants to re-imagine La Pyramide through adaptive reuse. The challenge is “to preserve the building’s iconic identity while introducing new architectural interventions that give it a meaningful role in the future of Abidjan.” Looking forward to seeing the results!
I’m thinking of starting a newsletter for future updates like this. Nine people already signed up for a non-existent newsletter after buying books or t-shirts on the AB site. Nine! So I feel compelled to start one now. I don’t know how frequent they’ll be, probably not very, but if you want to be on future mailings then sign up below. Your details will not be shared with anyone but the email provider.
The nine subscribers so far apparently signed up for “product updates,” and the only update I have is for large people, that there’s literally only one large t-shirt left! There are loads of small and medium t-shirts, so you guys are OK.
We tried selling books and t-shirts at the flea market in Mauerpark a couple of Sundays ago. Two books sold, bringing in a total profit of €17.60, minus the €69 it cost to rent the stand for the day, leaving a net profit of minus €51.40, so we probably won’t be doing that again.
But I’m thinking of getting one more t-shirt design made, maybe an olive green shirt with a red boar in a circle or something like that. We’ll see. I need to contact the printers to see if it’s feasible.
That’s all the news for now! As always, if you’ve anything to say, any heavy weight you’d like lifted from your heart, please do get in touch, either in the comments or the other ways mentioned above.
And I nearly forgot, AB is still posting out free stickers, so if you want any sent out to you, wherever you are, just shout!
Peace 🐗
*Usual disclaimers apply, I is not me.
