The KINO INTERNATIONAL lamp!!

In an earlier post I was referring to those difficult years, the 60s. The media give us today a golden vision (very much an American one) but those years were not so sorgenlos…neither in Italy and nor in Berlin.

Our WestBerlin 60s flat had to contain some reference to the Divided City that Berlin began to be in those years. So, DDR design. And possibly the best one.

I found this lamp. The shape is classic, a standing metal part with a white cylinder-shaped textured lampshade. But what a texture! The material used for the cylinder must some sort of Ost-polymer, and as soon as I saw it, it remembered to me the external wall of the KINO INTERNATIONAL on Karl-Marx-Allee. The Eastern Bloc idea of what the sorgenlos 60s had to be…

If I will be lucky, also the next lamp will be, for the materials used, an architectural quote of an OstBerlin landmark. Fingers crossed…

PS

This wall was reproduced on a Berlin compilation of 2003 I quite like, F.U.N., featuring the wunderbar Tiefschwarz & Eric D’Clark “Blow”…

pink tea in Berlin

June in Berlin and spring is in full bloom…orange blossoms, peonies, colors fill the streets, the balconies and even the store window displays. Stunning color combinations at my favourite flower store in Bayerischer Platz – crimson red peonies and yellow daisies! daring! – but beautiful peonies are a temptation also in the not alluring light at Nolle’s U-bahn station…you simply can’t resist them!

Another thing I cannot avoid is my local flea market, so this time the temptation to dive in the green-pink mood was too strong, and the DDR 1960’s cups were simply too cute to be left there on the stalls!

I know, I know. This isn’t either very prussian or bauhaus. But hey, it’s spring…I would NEVER have a flowerly Laura Ashley-esque wallpaper, but I’m all for ephemeral  splashes of color, especially in the bedroom! Some flowers, a cushion. Just to remember what season we’re in.

So this time I wanted to take inspiration from Li Edelkoort’s matches of flowers & objects, and, even if a little predictable, I did like playing around with tea and peonies…and a little pink, the color of balconies this spring in Schöneberg.

Now we can go back to rigorous and linear bauhaus things…in the living room.

Germany postpones privatisation of property firm TLG

from The Guardian Online….

BERLIN, Nov 6 (Reuters) – Germany has postponed the planned privatisation of state-owned property company TLG Immobilien GmbH due to difficult market conditions, the Finance Ministry said in a statement on Thursday.

The delay follows last month’s postponement of the multi-billion euro initial public offering (IPO) of rail operator Deutsche Bahn due to market turbulence.

TLG Immobilien, which was originally created in 1991 to handle the sale of real estate belonging to the former communist state of East Germany, was due to be privatised later this year.

The firm, which has been active as a buyer on the market since 2000, had property assets worth more than 1.4 billion euros ($1.8 billion) as of the end of 2007. It is one of the largest real estate companies in eastern Germany.

“Due to difficult conditions in the international financial markets, there are currently no expectations for a successful privatisation,” the Finance Ministry said. “The company will thus remain in government hands for the time being.

“But the in the medium-term the privatisation remains on the agenda,” it added.

Just days ago the ministry said preparations for the privatisation were heading toward their final stages.

According to media reports, potential buyers of TLG included U.S. investment companies Lone Star and Oaktree.

In 2007, TLG made a net profit of 52.4 million euros, according to figures on the company’s website. (Reporting by Gernot Heller and Dave Graham, editing by Will Waterman)

OstBerlin Mystique…

Trabi

Reasons for being fascinated by OstBerlin:

1) corresponding with my DDR penpals for twelve years, until the Mauerfall…(I remember Michael driving his Trabant on west-german Autobahns to engine meltdown and eventually reaching by bus his friend “in the West”, where he would buy his fourth-hand Golf and drive back to Karl-Marx-Stadt in triumph…poor Trabi…! it would be worth a fortune today!)

2) the great Daniel Bruhl in “Goodbye Lenin”

3) the ubergreat “The life of others”…

4) countless cold war movies, hard-boiled spy-stories…