"Weltschadt" should be Weltstadt.

Kudos for Christine Smallwood for a very nice and good article, however one important voice is missing in his list:

Vladimir Kaminer,

This russian-jewish-berliner Writer/DJ in writing a very nice and real panorama of the inmigrant to Berlin (there are registered citizens from about 126 nationalities in Berlin). Read "Russian Disco" and you will get some the feelings of the Berlin Life on the early 90's.

As a part time Potsdamer-Berliner give my thanks to Her.

For an engaging, brief, thoughtful meditation on Berlin, and for a bracing tour through some other urban disasters and triumphs, I highly recommend ‘The City In Mind’ by James Howard Kunstler.

Also, Albert Speer, Hitler's architect, wrote at length in his memoir ‘Inside the Third Reich’ about the plans they made, and only partly achieved, for an imperial capitol filled with monuments to the Fuehrer. Fascinating and spooky.

When "Weltstadt" becomes "Weltschadt" we recognize Berlin in all of its menacing glory...the verb "schaden" means to damage or harm. When Christine writes, of Potsdamer Platz, "But outside its curved reflective walls, the city is decked out in graffiti, pockmarked with empty lots; some buildings are still marred by bullet holes. Berlin is fabulous, but wounded," she's seeing Berlin through such a tidy American lens that it's clear that she isn't appreciating Berlin on its own terms...the bullet-holed walls and manically inconsistent architecture and weedy, over-grown parks and punk-infested squats and surly clerks all add to Berlin's apocalyptic charm. The sleek little American mirage of Potsdamer Platz, by the way, is considered almost without exception by hip natives and long-term expats alike to be a soullessly tacky abomination. If the rest of Berlin looked like Potsdamer Platz, we'd all have to flee to Budapest.

(Prague is already hopelessly McStarbucked...)

Thank you for calling our attention to the typo, we will make the change accordingly.

PS: For an informative tour across Berlin's psychic terrain, check out an insider-expat's sometimes bitter but often hilarious blog: www.weblogsky.com/berlinbites.

(Those of you reading this from The States will recognize the blogger as Ed Ward, NPR's rock historian and the elegist of choice when counter-culturistas kick it. Those of you reading this in Berlin will probably owe Ed a very dark beer.)

Good to see someone else with a Berlin fixation! I was there in 2001, and it was a fantastic experience: the wall, the former East Berlin with its copper-coloured government buildings and its statues of Lenin and Marx. The vast building projects, the young Berliners speaking perfect English willing to engage in conversation with gormless tourists like myself. The WWII era buildings left standing by the Soviets still showing the Red Army bullet holes as Berlin was overrun.

Did you have a chance to read 'Berlin' by Anthony Beevor, detailing the last battle for Berlin in WWII? I havn't myself, but have read his book on Stalingrad, which was fantastic.

I spent a year working with Holocaust victims in Berlin in 2003-4, and Ms. Smallwood's article brings back all sorts of tingly memories. Layers of history pile on top of each other in that city, pride mixed with a guilty defensiveness, slicked over and brightened up with tentative post-reunification hopefulness. It's a gorgeous and unstable blend.

My flatmates and I (seven of us in a crumbling and colorful volunteer flat, two Americans, two Germans, three Poles) learned Berlin from the underbelly up, everything from secret Russian bars to a tiny movie theater where you knock to get in, order tickets and drinks at the bar, and curl up with a cigarette in a sofa to watch the show. But we also figured out that the roof and the fountain at Potzdamer Platz start changing colors at 10 p.m. We felt like spies, wandering around the fancy spots in our second-hand clothes, rationing our volunteer stipends, but it sure was pretty.

Christine Smallwood's evocative article on Berlin, triggered many memories. I worked there for two summers in the mid-seventies, before and during college, and lived and studied there for a year after graduation.

Being plunged into Berlin's peculiar mix - part glittering outpost of capitalism, part leftist student/punk/dropout countercultural mecca - when I found a job there the summer before starting college, was quite a shock. The jagged geography of the city forced me to learn, and come to terms with, its equally jagged history. The ethnic diversity, and the obvious tensions between affluent middle-class Germans and the Turkish "guest-workers", relegated to the ghettos of Kreuzberg and Neukölln, were an eye-opener to someone who grew up in the conservative, homogeneous milieu of Catholic Ireland.

Berlin is the city where I went through many rites of passage. My first real job - on a filling line in a schnaps factory, mind-numbingly boring, but the pay was good. The first time I got really drunk - on "Persiko", Berlin's signature peach liqueur - bad mistake! The first time I got comfortable enough with being gay to act on it. My first romance and my first breakup. The first (and only) time I got arrested - for jaywalking in East Berlin - was basically an intimidation scam, through which the East German police could "justify" relieving me of every pfennig of hard currency I had with me.

The year I studied there was like a gift. I was on full scholarship and I knew that any academic credits were non-transferable, so basically I was being generously paid to take any classes I liked. Free to learn Spanish and Russian, never mind that I was a math major. Free to hear von Karajan at the Philharmonie, to see Shakespeare at the Schaubühne am Halleschen Ufer, or Brecht at the Berliner Ensemble. Or just to catch "Harold and Maude" at one of the many funky moviehouses scattered throughout the city.

Memories of the border and the wall. I was lucky enough to make some really close friends in East Berlin, despite the practical obstacles posed by the wall. To spend the weekend with them required recrossing the border each night before and after midnight, as visitors' visas were valid for 24 hours only. Occasionally, I would smuggle across books that my friends had asked for - I remember one long conversation trying to convince the border guard that the reason I had a copy of Freud's "Totem and Taboo" was because I was reading it for a class. By then, my German was good enough to get away with it. But crossing the border was always a crapshoot - we used to gauge the local temperature of East-West relations by the frequency with which we would be taken aside and strip-searched.

The cold war cliché was that Berlin was a symbol of political and economic freedom. For me, it was the city where I found the personal freedom to explore and experiment, and ultimately, to grow up. I have a godchild there who just turned 21 - I can't wait to get back to visit.

I hesitate to add to Christine Smallwood's excellent reading list, but Peter Schneider's "The Wall Jumper" is worth mentioning, as is Alexandra Richie's history of the city, "Faust's Metropolis".