Who lives here
It wasn’t exactly love at first sight. The city was chaos, that Friday night in 2001. The Love Parade was in town, and Berlin always showed its ugliest side on those occasions: a large-scale event, too many people dancing to too much noise on too big a pile of garbage.
In the end we became friends, the city and I. Before moving here in the summer of 2012 I visited Berlin between ten and twenty times. Every time you scrape off a layer of paint, which isn’t hard in run-down Berlin. Every time you discover new spots, new subcultures. Every time the city has changed, if only slightly. Or as one famous writer once said: Berlin will always be damned to become and never to be.
You keep discovering in Berlin. The metropolis keeps changing into another identity, a new incarnation. I think of Heimat Berlin as my personal notebook of the city, from a Dutch guy in Berlin.