It wasn’t exactly love at first sight. The city was chaos, that friday night in 2001. The Love Parade was waiting and Berlin always showed its ugliest side on those occasions: during a large-scale event, with too many people dancing on too much noise on too big a pile of garbage.
In the end we became friends, the city and I. Before moving here in the summer of 2012 I visited Berlin between ten and twenty times. Everytime you scrub a layer of paint off, what isn’t that hard in run-down Berlin. Everytime you discover new spots, new subcultures. Everytime the city changed, if even oh so slightly.
You keep discovering in Berlin. Everytime the metropolis changes into another identity, a new incarnation. I consider Heimat Berlin as my personal notebook of the city, from a Dutch guy in Berlin.
Bas Timmers