Post by Institute for Advanced Study

#KöpfeundIdeen2026: Letter from Berlin by Erica Weitzman The Pillars of Society On Kurfürstendamm, corner of Schlüterstraße, about a three quarters of an hour’s walk from the Wiko, there is a little square, a triangular swath of pavement cut out of the normal perpendicular row of houses and storefronts. A bit of open space on the most luxurious stretch of Berlin’s luxury boulevard, where pedestrians can rest their legs or have a smoke on one of the surrounding splintering green-painted wood benches, or patrons of the Italian restaurant facing the square can sun themselves over Aperol spritzes and gaze out at the Cumberland House’s historic façade or the Tiffany and Balenciaga display windows on the opposite side of the street. The square is called George-Grosz-Platz, after the expressionist painter, who lived from 1928 to 1933 at Trautenaustraße 12 in Berlin-Wilmersdorf, about a twenty-minute walk from his future eponymous plaza. In the middle of the square, a small column presents a timeline, in German and English, of significant events in Grosz’s life, including such facts as Grosz’s family’s 1902 move to Stolp in what was then German Pomerania (now the Polish town of Słupsk), “where young Georg enjoys a carefree childhood,” and the philologically dubious assertion that in 1916 the twenty-three year-old Georg, né Groß, “anglicizes his name to George Grosz.” On the website for the municipality of Berlin, one learns that the groundbreaking ceremony for the square, in 1986, was presided over jointly by the CDU politician Klaus-Dieter Gröhler, then a city councilman for Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf, and Gregor Hampel, an executive for the multinational energy company Vattenfall, which donated the equivalent of 150,000 euros for the construction of the site. Read the full article here, German version also available: https://lnkd.in/e6CBPFu4