#462: Ice everywhere, €1 million reward, landlord fined
Germany's other capital
Dear 20% Berlin,
I took the day off yesterday, rode the S-Bahn to the Brandenburg Gate, wandered around an almost human-free Tiergarten for an hour. Escaped the dirty urban slush for the gentle crunch of frosted leaves underfoot. It did me no end of good. Who needs Brandenburg when you have this enormous, never-full forest in the centre of town?
News below.
Maurice
🤓 Two weeks to go till the next 20% Berlin News Quiz!
Iced
Freezing rain on sidewalks, my bike and everything else. I made the mistake of taking an e-scooter last night — but was forced to ride with traffic, since bike lanes were full of frozen slush. Most tram lines aren’t running today, thanks to ice caking the overhead lines. At the time of writing, the U2 is interrupted between Potsdamer Platz and Wittenbergplatz, thanks to damage done to equipment during de-icing. Don’t forget to check the BVG site before you leave the house! BSR didn’t collect the trash on Monday due to slippery pavements but has promised to catch up on Saturday. BSR recycling centres were also partially closed. Emergency rooms are filling up with people breaking limbs on slick streets.
€1 million reward
The mysterious Volcano Group has been claiming responsibility to various acts of sabotage since 2011 — from last year’s attack on a power mast supplying the Tesla factory to this month’s arson that resulted in 100,000 people and 2,200 businesses losing power for days. The police have had zero luck and zero leads with respect to the group. Federal investigators are treating the case as terrorism — and have now announced a cash reward of up to €1 million for tips leading to the arrest of the perp. Good luck finding him, says Andrew in our podcast: the Volcano Group is probably just one angry guy in a basement.
Judge: “Rent’s too high!”
A Berlin court has fined a corporate landlord for charging exorbitant rent, basing its decision on a 1954 law that is seldom evoked, according to RBB24. The tenant had been paying €400 “cold” (before side costs) per month for a one-room, 30sqm flat in Kreuzberg’s Oranienstraße, which seems pretty cheap these days. But the rent was found to be higher than the permissible 20% above the “local average rent”. Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg fined the unnamed landlord €10,000 and its CEO another €1,500 but the court reduced the €10,000 fine to €1,300 and dismissed the fine against the exec. The company also had to return the €4,600 in excessive rent to the woman, who no longer lives in the property. Sebastian Bartels, director of Berliner Mieterverein (tenant’s association, English info) said it was a “a good day for renters”.
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🍺 🥨 Germany-wide news 🥨 🍺
📈 Investor morale highest in 5 years
🚨 Alleged Hamas member arrested at Berlin Airport
🦥 Crackdown on “lifestyle part-time work”
⚽ Time for Germany to boycott the World Cup?
Events this week, curated by The Next Day Berlin
🖼️ David Lynch
Opening: Thursday, 29.01, 6-9 pm. Exhibition runs until 29.03. Pace Gallery, Charlottenburg. Free
Paintings with unsettling text, lamp sculptures casting uncanny light, and 1999 photographs of abandoned Berlin factories. Lynch treated film as “moving painting” - here you get the source material: Surrealist imagery, watercolors in reds and inky blues, frames he designed himself.
🎹 G Sessions: Ife Ogunjobi, Kwame Yeboah, Future3
Thursday, 29.01, 7:30-11 pm. Gretchen, Kreuzberg. €16
360° jazz sessions hosted by Outernationals’ house band. Ife Ogunjobi (Ezra Collective) merges Afrobeat and London jazz, Ghanaian multi-instrumentalist Kwame Yeboah blends highlife with modern production, Berlin trio Future3 delivers nu-jazz spanning punk to electronica.
🍲 Torhaus Kochkollektiv Küfa
Saturday, 31.01, 4 pm (cooking), 7 pm (eating). Torhaus, Collumbiadamm, 10, Kreuzberg. Donation-based
Collective cooking with rescued ingredients, fundraiser for Berliner Kältebus supporting unhoused people through winter. Berlin's Küfa tradition with shared pots, mutual aid, and warm atmosphere. Pay what you can; proceeds go directly to the cause
🥟 Pierogi & Friends: Speed Dating Edition
Saturday, 31.01, 6-10 pm. Location upon registration. €39
Friendship speed dating over handmade pierogi and Polish natural wines. Platonic connections only - guided sessions to build new friendships.
🪩 Animistic Beliefs & Jeisson Drenth + mobilegirl
Saturday, 31.01, 8:30 pm. silent green, Wedding. €10-16
Animistic Beliefs and Jeisson Drenth rewire Vietnamese, Moluccan, and Pre-Columbian sounds through IDM and global club frameworks with ancestral memory as rave fuel. mobilegirl follows with her genre-collapsing sets that move from introspection to aggression without warning
Factoid
“We need more efficiency!” Nothing gets mayor Kai Wegner (CDU) riled up like the fact that a third of federal bureaucrats (about 20,000) still work in the old West German capital, Bonn — even though Berlin became the capital of reunified Germany in 1999. Several ministries and federal agencies are still headquartered in the small city near Cologne. Millions of euros are spent on 20,000 official trips back and forth every year — but moving all the bureaucrats to Berlin sounds like it would be very, very expensive and would inflict unnecessary pain on the housing market.
🔗 🔗 🔗 Useful links 🔗 🔗 🔗
🎙️The 20% Berlin Podcast on Spotify
"Emergency rooms are filling up with people breaking limbs on slick streets. "
Does anyone know why the city/Bezirke do not clear the snow/ice off the sidewalks? Of course the roads are nice and clear. It's so scary out there for pedestrians. I have lived in places with more snow and cold and it wasn't this bad.
1. how the hell is €400 on Oranienburg Straße an overcharge
2. “Ice everywhere” can u not 😭😭😭 some of us are twitchy af from following the US news