The deceased, who might not might not have been her maternal cousin (both of their mothers bore maiden names Funk), was a woman whose life - like that of few others - was filled with constant ups and downs.

Literally so. Käte Paulus, who passed away only three days earlier - on 26 July 1935 - was the first German female aeronaut and the third woman in this category worldwide…

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After the court astrologist, Johann Carion, prophesized that a massive flood would destroy the city, swallowing the royal palace in the process, his “employer” - Brandenburg’s Elector, Joachim I Nestor - fled to the top of the highest elevation he could find in and around the capital at the time - the Weinberg (Wine Hill).

Still the tallest natural elevation in central Berlin, the 66-metre Tempelhofer Berg or what you might now know better as the Kreuzberg was a scene of an almost royal drama…

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Through his mother, Luise Henriette of Orange, Prussian king had a valid claim to the temporarily empty throne of the Duchy of Orange. Unfortunately, the French got there first. Unsurprisingly, too: the Duchy lay in the south of France, near Avignon in today’s Department Vauclouse.

French Catholics immediately insisted on Protestants leaving the territory - which, considering that French history knew less considerate ways of getting rid of their Reformed countrymen and women (see: Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre), was a blessing in disguise.

Eventually, an agreement would be struck to allow the Protestants to travel to Brandenburg - they chose Friedrich I’s land over others, believing him to be the rightful heir to the throne of Orange.

In total some 4,000 Orangeois arrived in Brandenburg and some 10% of them settled in Berlin. For the King, they were a welcome addition to the local social landscape - just as French Huguenots who arrived in the days of the Great Elector, they brought with them plenty of know-how (gardening, tapestry, textile manufacturing, etc). And, of course, their cuisine.

“The House of Orange” set up in Berlin was a place for those among them who were impoverished or unable to work. The money for the project was collected simultaneously in Prussia and in England - Queen Anne very much supported her Prussian “colleague’s” plan to offer sanctuary to persecuted Calvinists. The English donations - over several years it was quite a sum, too - were then passed into the capable of hands of Thomas Wentworth, 3rd Baron Raby, who had been appointed English ambassador and dispatched to Berlin. Here he was appointed the head of the charity of Maison d’Orange.

With that money, plus the sum collected in Prussia, the welfare organisation could support the descendants of the Orangeois until 1914. A person applying for assistance had to prove their lineage and once accepted, could relay on free abode, free medical care, free medicines, and plenty of other small means of support.

The badly-weathered Maison d’Orange, which stood either on the corner of today’s Dorotheenstraße and Neustädtische Kirchstraße, or a bit further south on the next corner (Mittelstraße) - historians have not found a final proof of its exact location yet - had to be demolished in 1792. A new building was erected but in 1893 it was sold to a new investor - who built one of Berlin’s most popular and vanished hotels, the “Continental”.

Buy me a coffe

Meanwhile, Orangenhaus moved to Ulmenstraße in Berlin-Tiergarten, to a villa in a street that ceased to exist. Ulmenstraße vanished as the French Secondary School was built there in 1971.

However, Maison d’Orange had left it much earlier, too: the villa was purchased in 1910 by a wealthy Berlin newspaper publisher and art collector, Franz Ullstein (of Ullstein-Verlag and Ullsteinhaus). You will find the building away from the Derfflingerstraße, behind the French Gymnasium.

Maison d’Orange moved again, this time to the historic French Huguenot-colony site in Berlin-Mitte: to Hugenottenviertel. The historic Huguenot Quarter is well-hidden between Friedrichstraße 129 and today’s Claire-Waldoff-Straße.

The Orangenhaus became part of the French Hospital on the site - the latter, together with a shelter for women and children’s hospice, was completely destroyed during the Second World War.

If you want to learn more about the Hugenottenviertel and the history of Friedrichstraße north of Unter den Linden, yours truly collection of Voicemap audio-walks contains just the thing: a self-guided audio-walk, Silk, Sin and Stages: In and Out of Northern Friedrichstraße, available via VoiceMap App. You can find it in your Apple or Android app store.

“If any place deserves to be turned into a lavishly decorated plaza filled with flowers, fountains and the like, then it’s a place inhabited by people who can’t afford their own gardens. In this sense, floral decorations are not a luxury. They can be of great social significance.”

According to Erwin Barth, a Lübecker who moved to Berlin in 1912 and rose to the position of Berlin’s gardener-in-chief, a park needs structure. It requires ornaments but only if served in the right measures. As a great advocate of the idea of a Volkspark - “people's park” - a place easily accessible to all city residents but especially to those particularly disadvantaged in their urban environment, Barth believed that a public park should be a bright, airy place with a calm frame of paths and greens. And serving all age groups, hence his particular attention to playgrounds and quieter nooks for the elder…

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On this day at around 7.30 AM legal practitioner and jurist from Chemnitz, Walter Linse, left his flat at Gerichstraße 12 in Berlin-Lichterfelde, only to be stopped by a man asking him for a match:

He wanted to have a smoke but had nothing to light his cigarette with. Second later half-conscious but still resisting Linse was dragged into a waiting Opel and spirited away into the East German territory.

Walter Linse was abducted by the Stasi. As one of the leading men in the West-Berlin Association of Free German Jurists, an organisation said to have focused on following and uncovering violations of human rights in the DDR, he was an enemy. But he was also an East German enemy - Linse, born in 1903 in Chemnitz, spent the Second World War and the first years after its end working in the city and only fled to the West in 1949.

In East Berlin the car carrying the abducted and his kidnappers (hired straight from an East Berlin prison) headed for the U-Boot - the notorious interrogation prison of East German Ministry for State Security (better known as the Stasi). There he spent the following half a year, before being passed into the always eager hands of the Soviet MBG (short for Министерство государственной безопасности, Soviet pendent to the Stasi and soon to be replaced by the KGB), residing in Berlin-Karlshorst.

There he was put before a military court and pronounced guilty of espionage, sabotage and generally acting in a way harmful to the state interests of the DDR and the USSR. Walter Linse’s German Association of Free German Jurists was established and financed by the CIA.

And for that there was just one sentence. Death.

The next stop for Linse was the notorious Lubyanka prison in Moscow (the HQ of Stalinist persecution). It was there that on December 15, 1953 he heard his death sentence confirmed. On the same day Walter Linse was brought to another dark Moscow prison commonly known as Butyrki and immediately executed. Linse’s body was then cremated and the ashes buried in a mass grave.

A man who became a heroic figure in the fight against the Communist regime. A man who deserved to have his name and his deeds commemorated. And so in 1961 the street where he lived and where the drama began to unfold on July 8, 1952 - Gerichtstraße - was re-named in his honour.

In 2007 the Hohenschönhausen Stasi-Gedenkstätte, now no longer a scene of horrors but a memorial site, decided to name a new award after him as well. And that’s when the Truth raised its ugly head.

Historians and researchers had already been digging into Walter Linse’s past. They had good reasons for it. Many other capable civil servants and active members of all sorts of bodies and organisations, previously considered de-Nazified and trustworthy, turned out to have thrown a shade of a much deeper hue of brown that expected.

Like Linse’s close co-activist within the Association, Horst Erdmann. Erdmann, according to the declassified CIA papers “the head of the West Berlin agents’ Center ‘Investigation Committee of Free Lawyers’1, turned out to have lied about practically every single thing about his past, including his place of birth, date of birth, education, as well as the fact that joined the NSDAP on 1 August 1937 (membership number 3,925,549), was Hitler Youth Stammführer, and a general busy-body within the complex structures of Nazi administration. Fast forward nearly two decades and he would also commit fraud and embezzle quite a sum of money.

Linse himself joined the NSDAP in 1940 but already since 1938 he worked hard at the office for „Bearbeitung von Entjudungsvorgängen“ (“Processing of Systematic De-Judaization”, responsible for - here another hateful Nazi word - “Aryanization” of Jewish estates.

In Chemnitz during the war Linse worked - fully aware of what it was that he was doing - within a system which stole Jewish property prior to its owners’ planned extermination. Stealing by putting Jews under pressure and even denouncing the unwilling to the Gestapo. He remained in his office position even after the war had ended - obviously with a different scope of work, but undeterred and not much burdened by his conscience.

The latter might have been due to the fact that he allegedly helped some Jewish people avoid the fate of their brothers and sisters. One person vouched for him in the summer of 1945, claiming he had been active in a resistance group called “Ciphero” - historians are still to find any traces of the said group and might never do so. It would not be the first or the last time one person equips another with a “Persilschein” (Persil is a popular washing powder brand famous for its cleaning power, especially for white textiles - a Schein stands for a certificate) - a phenomenon so widely spread after the war that it became part of the German language.

Another witness vouched for Linse from the US: his life was saved thanks to Linse’s intervention at the KZ Buchenwald - the notorious concentration camp just outside picturesque little city of Weimar (about which you can now read in Katja Hoyer’s excellent book called “Weimar”). Since no evidence for a similar rescue could be found, Linse even left the Liberal Party he had joined in the hope of building up a political career.

The latter is not to say that Walter Linse’s tragic fate should not be looked at with grief or empathy. But it is crucial to remember that most heroes are artificial constructs built of legends, persistent repetition of preferred interpretation, of manipulating facts to soften the spotlight and of willing suspension of disbelief.

Looking closer, we might suddenly find ourselves facing a dark, disturbing image. It takes courage, too, to admit it is there.

Hohenschönhausen Stasi-Gedenkstätte decided to abandon the idea of naming an award after Linse. The street, the old Gerichtstraße in Berlin-Lichterfelde, still bears his name.

For more declassified CIA material on Linse incident go to CIA’s archive page (the “sanitized” text might be of special interest).

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According to Casanova’s own diary entries: "There was nothing further to attract me at Brunswick, and I thought of spending the summer at Berlin, which I concluded would be more amusing than a small provincial town." The tone would have suggested a leisure trip. A journey undertaken on a whim for nothing else but pleasure and self-gratification. It was everything but…

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Many passers-by walking down the middle-strip of Unter den Linden where it meets Pariser Platz in the small hours of July 7, came to a sudden halt. Where, normally, their view of Brandenburger Tor would have been quite unobscured, a pair of oversized round buttocks and shapely legs stood between them and city’s best-known landmark…

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Krolloper’s management did not choose to close the curtain forever - Otto Klemperer, who ran the house from 1927, was forced to do so. Officially, the city - at that point in time blessed with not one but three opera houses - had to reduce the offer. With the world in the thrall of a soul-drenching financial crisis, maintaining three such establishments was simply not viable.

Unofficially, a conflict between Krolls’ management and several other chief players who never made any secret for their dislike for the modern and progressive style of the Tiergarten house, had the latter pull some important strings.

All attempts to save the stage were in vain. The alleged Kulturbolschwismus practiced by the bold and progressive opera house management served as a perfect excuse to nail their coffin. Once again, being progressive and venturing into new exciting territories would turn against Berlin’s art world. Despite the promising start and in spite of the fact that Otto Klemperer managed to established one of the most harmonious opera ensembles in Europe and perhaps even worldwide. An ensemble which performed on stage within Bauhaus-designed scenography: Bauhaus artists regularly co-operated with Klemperer’s opera house.

This would not be the first time that this historic building would be facing the end.

Berlin’s Staatsoper am Königplatz (since 1926 "am Platz der Republik") opened in what once used to be the city’s most popular entertainment venue - the 1844 Krolls Etablissement. Less than a decade later, in February 1951, the favoured location would burn down completely, leaving especially wealthy Berliners in mourning.

Seven months later it re-opened again.

After decades of constant ups and downs, including problems with leasing the space, Kaiser Wilhelm II spoke the final word: Krolloper was to be torn down. The emperor wished a new opera house for Berlin, so both Krolls and the eighteenth-century Staatsoper Unter den Linden would have had to go. Ironically, both would be saved by the same Kaiser, albeit indirectly.

Wilhelm’s political carelessness and arrogance would pull Germany into the void of the First World War, forcing his attention to shift to other matters instead.

However, by July 1931 the final verdict stood. Krolls would no longer operate as a temple of opera music.

Otto Klemperer - brilliant German composer and conductor who would soon leave Germany to escape Nazi persecution and go to lead renown US orchestras in Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco - was in charge of the house at the time. And he would absolutely refuse to take that verdict without making big noise.

Klemperer sued against the government's decision but lost. The argument that Krolloper "cost too much" won.

In 1933 new masters would move into the building: after the Reichstag burnt in February 1933, the old Krollsoper would become the main seat of the Third Reich “Parliament”. From that moment everyone would be dancing to a completely different tune.

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Today, Berlin has some 400 church buildings, albeit not all of them are still used as religious centres.

One of the best-known still-active temples is the Sophienkirche, consecrated on this day in 1713. Berlin’s oldest still existing Baroque church opened in the historic district of Spandauer Vorstadt (fun fact: actually Spandower Vorstadt as until 1878 Spandau, like Pankow, was officially spelled “Spandow”).

Its first name “Spandauische Kirche” was correct as far geography went - it was built to serve the growing number of Spandauer Vorstadt’s residents. However, there was another, far less benevolent reason, for that first official label. A family feud as old as the hills.

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It did not leave anyone out, rich or poor: including Austrian emperor, king of Spain, Russian tsar, Swedish queen and a French monarch. At best it left its victims scarred for life (like Stalin, who contracted smallpox at the age of 7), or blind and/or deaf: Beethoven’s deafness is contributed to his contact with the disease.

Johannes Kepler’s vision was quite limited after at the age of four he suffered bout of smallpox himself - later he would lose his wife and one of three children to the disease.

For at its worst, the disease killed its victims after many days of vile suffering.

That’s why after in 1801 nearly 1,700 people died of Blattern (German name for Smallpox) in Berlin, on 7 June 1802, successful trial smallpox inoculations (carried out mostly on Berlin orphans) began…

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No other era in the city’s history was as tragic, yet as bright. The latter not only because of the incredible rise of commercial illumination (neon lights) and the abundance of entertainment.

Its brightness lay also in the pace at which social projects were voted for and actually realised. It was the time of new modern residential estates, of unheard of levels of investment in affordable housing, of new schools, new hospitals and new sports venues. It was also the time when some Berlin’s favourite public parks were created.

One of them, Volkspark Jungfernheide, opened on this day in 1923 - the year of the hyperinflation nadir.

Designed by the unsurpassed, ingenious garden architect and park designer, Erwin Barth, it was created within the old royal hunting grounds in the Jungfernheide woods. Today, at nearly 150 ha it is the second largest designed park in Berlin.

For us, living over a century later, it might be hard to imagine what wonders it offered to grown-ups and, first and foremost, children who lived in its vicinity. The park, stretching along a straight East-West axis, had not only green meadows and comfy benches in the shade of ancient trees (Barth’s design incorporated the already existing Jungfernheide woods).

Following the main principle of Gestaltung in the 1920s German social and public architecture - Licht, Luft und Sonne (Light, Fresh Air and Sunshine) - it also had several sports fields, playgrounds, an open-air “nature theatre” where the stage was a circular piece of lawn surrounded by seats and a tall lush hedge separating it form the comings and goings around it. You could circumvent the park following a four-kilometre-long circular path (next to dozens of smaller ones).

But first and foremost, it had a lido. The Jungfernheide Lido with a gorgeous sandy beach, marked bathing areas for the small and the older guests, with changing rooms, hygiene facilities and a restaurant.

A place which exists until today and can be easily reached from the city centre - with the U-Bahn.

Take any train on the line U7 (direction: Rathaus Spandau), leave the train at the station “Siemensdamm”, turn into Jungfernheideweg, walk past one of the most impressive 1920s Berlin residential estates, Siemensstadt, and you are there.

If you walk along the main axis of the park, at the other end of the small lake where the lido is located, you will find another, wild bathing spot (which is also free of charge).

On top of that today’s Jungfernheide offers a climbing park within the park, a beer garden, a café at the foot of the graceful 38-metre-tall water tower, and a petting zoo.

Berlin is full of enchanted places but its public parks must be its greatest treasure. Here is definitely one. And Erwin Barth, who - blind at the age of 53 - tragically, took his own life in July 1933, would have rejoiced knowing how popular and how frequented they still are in 2026.

By the way, if you ever wondered, why Jungfernheide is called “Maidens’ or Nuns’ Heath” (the heaths interspersed the spreading woods): this 1835 map of Jungfernheide with Nonnen Damm (now Nonnendamm) and Nonnen Wiesen - Nun Causeway and Nun Meadows - shows places whose names referred to the Benedictine convent from Spandow (original spelling of Spandau) and nuns who owned that land. Nonnendamm was a road from the said Spandow to Berlin-Cölln built with convent's money.

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What do you need most once the cannons go silent and life as it was can begin to recommence? Next to the obvious staples? Information. News about what is happening, whom to contact and what is even there. That is why in 1945 one of the paramount tasks of the new Berlin administration was to launch newspapers again. Their less overt aim? To spread new ideology: this time Communism.

On this day in 1945 Berliners, who had just emerged from the hell of the last battle for the city, could buy the first edition of a soon-to-be popular daily published in Berlin after the end of the Second World War…

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On May 13, 1927 Berlin Stock Exchange saw the value of its shares and stocks plummet from 204 to 136 points - a drop of 31.9%. The crash which happened on, nomen is omen, Friday the 13th, went down in history as Black Friday…

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Von Stephan’s name might not ring many bells today, but the man was a household brand in the second half of the nineteenth century. And not without a reason…

He was actively involved in the development of pneumatic post, almost singlehandedly pioneered the introduction of the postcard (he is often called its inventor but one should always remember that no invention has just one father/morher); he was the main power behind the establishing of Berlin’s first telephone network as well as the standardisation of postage prices, also worldwide.

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On top of everything else (meaning the city in ruins, the Red Army practically ante portas and the Nazi-in-Chief, Adolf Hitler, hiding in his bunker since January that year together with many of his closest helpers and supporters), Berlin was witnessing recurring bouts of both foot and mouth disease among its remaining cattle, hog cholera among its pigs and various unpleasant viral infections of its remaining horses.

The frightening prospect of famine could no longer be ignored…

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