On one of my last days in Berlin, my boss asks me to translate the word “cusp”. We are looking through the poetry collection I produced at work and, in a piece yet to be translated, which reflects on the beautifully curated children’s book Manchmal male ich ein Haus für uns: Europas vergessene Kinder (Sometimes I paint us a house: Europe’s forgotten children), I refer to someone being on the “cusp of sleep”. I ponder and eventually offer up “Grenze”, which translates as “border”.

In this new installment of the Berlin Bulletin, European columnist Sophie Clare takes us on a tour of Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf. From stadiums, to Savignyplatz, parks and palaces, and even David Bowie’s regular haunt, she covers it all in this gentle tour of just one Berlin district.

Through her insightful comparison of Fontane’s Effie Briest with Gabriele Reuter’s Aus guter Familie, German columnist Maddie Hazelden traces both the shelves of a bookshop and the history of literature in this intriguing critique of German literary practices.

In the first instalment of her column Berlin Bulletin, German columnist Sophie Clare begins to share the hidden sides of Germany’s capital. In her exhilarating account, Sophie takes us on a tour of Berlin’s history through the exciting story of Formula E at the world-famous Tempelhof air field.

In this first article of her column, Germanistik: In search of the female writer, Maddie Hazelden critically explores the inequality in gender representation in the Germanistik curriculum at the University of Bonn.