Photo: teun&el

The first time I lived in Berlin (1997-2001) I started in Friedrichshain. Nowadays you’ll find in this quarter a mixture of students, young and creative, along with some desperately lost people. The apartment I lived in was on the third Hinterhof - two blocks of houses stood before my building absorbing all the light. Because I’d just left Paris – a city that’s famous for its luminosity - autumn in Berlin was giving me some very depressing thoughts. Could I survive all the grey, the sweeping wind blowing directly from Moscow on Frankfürter Allee and those mean elderly people barking at me because a public wastebasket was supposed to be private… When the ostalgie threatened to kill me, I would flee to the brilliant glittering word of KaDeWe - the Kaufhaus des Westens: a monument to the world of capitalism.

Now on my second stay (since 2006), I don’t require the KaDeWe anymore: