In the local coffee shop Pausini I have a chat with the barista. Turns out she was born in Alt-Tempelhof, went to school here, left the neighbourhood only shortly for a stay in Pankow and some work in Prenzlauerberg, then to open up Pausini in 2004. She never imagined she would return. While the neighbourhoods in East-Berlin developed and flourished, Alt-Tempelhof stood still. It was "gruselig".
My bike has a flat tire (einen Platten). Pausini's barista sends me on my way to Fahrrad Krause in Mariendorf where she got her first bike when she was five years old. Past the Ullstein Haus, I go by the leftovers of what used to be Seebad Mariendorf, a bathhouse founded by Adolf Lewissohn in 1872. In the hot summer days of the 1920s about 4000 people went swimming here daily. Before Alt-Tempelhof became "gruselig", it was an attraction.
On its website, Fahrrad-Krause promotes itself as "seit über 100 Jahren Ihr Fahrradladen in Berlin". I look up when the first bike was invented and it was in 1817 by Karl von Drais, who immediately biked 14 km on his "hobby-horse" through Mannheim. Since it's my tire that is of interest here, it's good to know that the tire was invented by the vet John Boy Dunlop in 1887, after experimenting with rubber. In 1889, Michelin (Manufacture Française des Pneumatiques Michelin) was founded to commercialise the tire. So in the 1890s bike shops were on the rise. You can imagine how disappointing it was when I arrived at Fahrrad-Krause and it was totally modernised.
Flashback to 31 December when I was sitting on the terrace of LPG at the ufaFabrik and got in a conversation with a resident from Mariendorf. For breakfast, I was eating a Pfannkuchen filled with plum, also known outside Berlin as "Berliners". She told me her father had been a baker and that those Pfannkuchen are fried in oil so that on midnight of New Year's Eve their grease counters the alcohol intake.
Flashforward to 2022. On my way back from Mariendorf, walking through the park in the rain, three women were taking off their shoes and walking with naked feet on the grass. "Fetching energy", they explained to me.
A bit further a woman was on the phone. She had beautifully balanced her coffee and brownie on a pole and nibbled on it while pacing up and down. Together with the clothes rack, it has the looks of an art installation.
PS: Has anyone seen that TV publicity about the Gropius Bau exhibition of Thea Djordjadze in the subway? The text is so empty and dull that one wonders how they could let such an occasion - to promote your exhibition in the subway! - go to waste. It seemed more like a warning not to come near.