Charlottengrad

As we walk down Kantstraße, at number 79 you’ll pass the Wilmina hotel and bakery.

It was built in the 1890s as a women’s prison and courthouse; during the Nazi years many political prisoners were held here before being processed by the justice system next door. The complex only closed in the 1980s, then slept for decades until architects turned the cells into hotel rooms and exercise yards into gardens.

And few doors further, you’ll pass one of the surviving Russian bookshops of “Charlottengrad,” the nickname Charlottenburg earned in the 1920s. Back then, this stretch of Kantstraße was packed with Russian bookshops, lending libraries and kiosks stacked with émigré newspapers and periodicals. At the peak, there were said to be nearly two hundred Russian publishing houses, bookshops and newspapers in the city, many were clustered right here.

Let's stop for a moment.

Imagine the clientele: aristocratic refugees and intellectuals who had fled the Bolshevik Revolution, turning up with trunks full of silver, jewellery, and maybe a bit of hard currency. In the chaos of German hyperinflation, a suitcase of dollars or Swiss francs could buy an improbable amount of Berlin pie. Contemporary guides describe “rich Russian ladies” on Charlottenburger shopping sprees, buying furs and perfume while the Reichsmark melted away in their purses.

For writers, the suitcase of dollars wasn’t the real fortune. Their currency was memory; portable, endlessly reprinted, and ideally scandalous. In Berlin they converted that vanished world into chapters, selling nostalgia by the page, the way others sold single cigarettes. A “lost estate” became a product with a cover, a subtitle, and a preface that swore it was all true, except for the parts that were improved for literary reasons.

Continue ahead towards the street corner.