“We old-timers are used to it. But a visitor might find this abundance of Russian shops, cafes, restaurants, and cabarets almost strange… Walk through the KaDeWe area and your eyes will be dazzled by the multitude of signs, shop windows, posters, and advertisements: ‘They speak Russian here.’ The Rodina bookstore, the Medved restaurant, the Moskva café… The newsstands also drone on with the headlines of newspapers and magazines: ‘Dni,’ ‘Nakanune,’ ‘Rul,’ ‘Spolokhi,’ ‘Zhar-ptitsa’… But the Germans—they’re all right, they’ve gotten used to it,” wrote a Viennese newspaper correspondent about Berlin in 1923. The short but intense period of Russian emigration in Berlin in the 1920s is a unique phenomenon, emerging at the turning point of eras and the collapse of empires.
After several revolutions, the formation of the Soviet Republic, and its recognition by Germany, 360,000 Russian émigrés found themselves here. A diverse group of people: Reds and Whites, Socialist Revolutionaries and monarchists, those convinced and those undecided, those who decided to wait it out and choose their path forward.
Then, the locals changed Charlottenburg, a district of Berlin, to Charlottengrad, and the Russian public called Kurfürstendamm Boulevard Nevsky, or NEP Avenue. On this Berlin Nevsky Prospekt, Vladimir Nabokov, Andrei Bely, Alexei Remizov, Vladimir Khodasevich, Alexei Tolstoy, Marina Tsvetaeva, Maxim Gorky, Ilya Ehrenburg, Viktor Shklovsky, Boris Pasternak, Sergei Yesenin, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and many other significant works of Russian literature of the first third of the 20th century were written and first published in Berlin. Our walking tour features the Berlin addresses of Russian writers and excerpts from their works. The intertwined fates and personal tragedies. Their irreconcilable creative and political contradictions. This is a conversation about the amazingly convergent place and time of which they became a part.
3 hours
