Start: An Enigmatic Banana

Welcome to my tour, “Charlottengrad and the Sunken Village of Lietzow”. My name is Agnes von Witzleben - Psycho-geographic flaneur, cosmopolitan globalist, opportunistic archivist and host of the Berlin footnote. I've lived her for 23 years, most of them, right here in Charlottenburg.

If this is your first VoiceMap tour, here’s how it works: the app uses your location to play audio automatically at the right time and place, so you can put your phone away and focus on your surroundings. If I go quiet for a while, don’t panic – that usually means you’re walking exactly where you should be. And if you do wander wildly off course, VoiceMap will let you know. If you’d like to stop for a coffee or some food. go ahead. You can always resume the tour later from where you left off.

So: phone away, shoulders down, walk naturally and listen.

Side note - Keep an eye out for cars, bikes, dog shit, and those E-scooters that appear out of nowhere.

Our tour begins at Charlottenburg’s S-Bahn station and moves through the neighborhood tied to Nabokov’s A Guide to Berlin, written here in the winter of 1925. Along the way, we’ll look at traces of the Russian émigré community, the radical social experiments of Kommune 1, and landmarks like the Klick Kino, Micro museums, Music train records, Persian bookshops, and the antique dealers of Suarezstraße. The walk ends with a stroll around the Lietzensee, where local folklore speaks of a sunken village beneath the water, and where, for a time, mystic Aleister Crowley used Charlottenburg as his base of operations.

A quick disclaimer: when we wade into the whole mystics, spirits and nymphs thing, don’t expect 100% historical accuracy. We’re mixing documented history with local gossip and half-remembered myths, and a bit of creative license. This is a story-walk, not an exam. So don’t fact-check the ghosts.

We start our tour in a very precarious place on the narrow median beneath the S-Bahn bridge, Where Lewishamstr turns into Kaiser Friedrichstraße just south of Stuttgarterplatz.

Look at the concrete barrier between the north and southbound lanes.

Look closely.

That, improbably, is an enigmatic concrete banana. Securely mounted, un-labled without any obvious purpose. Inexplicable. Oddly permanent.

To your right, stands the Russian store at the entrance to the station. You'll spot it by the Cyrillic signage. It's the neighborhood's only 24 hour grocery. the story of why this particular store is allowed to stay open at night and god-forbid also on Sundays, has to due with the original contract the owner’s signed when the S-bahn which was operated by the GDR, Inside, the shelves are stacked with tins of caviar, jars of pickled mushrooms, slabs of cured herring, Georgian wines, and frozen pelmeni.

At the adjoining cafe, you might find taxi drivers sipping black tea from glass tumblers, or students still nursing a beer from before dawn.

If you were to decide to jaywalk instead of crossing at the light, you'll probably feel the silent judgment of the modern Charlottenburger, an archetype both maligned and misunderstood, we'll meet more of them as we go.

For now, walk along the median and make your way to the station entrance.

When you get to the intersection, cross to the left.

Linger a minute when you're there. You can sit in front of cafe Rossiya, or step inside the grocery store and browse.

Just avoid walking too far in the green patches on either sides of the station. That's where things tend to get a bit sketchy and where you'll find whatever crawled out from under the underbelly of Charlottenburg. Be advised.