Word: berlin
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Europe is enjoying itself. O.K., in late July, it always does. The weekend I was in Paris, an estimated 500,000 kids descended on Berlin for the annual Love Parade, a carnival of techno music, dope and sex. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of families started their treks from the damp north of the Continent to their vacation homes in the warm south. But even when the sun isn't shining, Europeans seem to be throwing themselves into fun and festivity with unprecedented zeal. Each weekend, central London is one great bacchanal. Cities that for reasons of politics or religion were...
...peak of its popularity in the 1920s, the Wertheim department store on Leipziger Platz in central Berlin boasted of being the biggest in Europe, the place shoppers could find "everything under one roof," from French goat cheese to Wagner opera scores. One contemporary writer even hailed the emporium, with its statues and marble columns, as the Berlin Louvre. Like so much else in Berlin, Wertheim fell victim first to the Nazis and then to the postwar communist rulers of East Germany. Most of the Jewish Wertheim family members fled Germany or were killed at Auschwitz, and the property was nationalized...
...documents obtained by TIME show that, even as courts were trying to sort out the ownership issues, German authorities made several deals with Karstadt or firms now owned by it, handing over at least €200 million in Wertheim property and cash. Among the transactions: Berlin authorities gave a triangle of land in central Berlin next to Potsdamer Platz to the retailer for free, on the understanding that it would build a corporate headquarters on it. The company promptly sold the land for about €150 million. The federal government allowed Karstadt to keep for almost a decade about...
...suit by Principe and her nephew is not directly related to the main battle over who owns the Berlin properties; it rather focuses on the alleged 1951 fraud. But Principe does stand to gain if the Jewish Claims Conference wins, as it usually gives a percentage of any settlement to surviving relatives. This sort of legal morass was exactly what the Germans hoped to avoid after reunification. The government deliberately decoupled unresolved ownership questions from use of the property itself, which enabled large swaths of eastern Germany to be developed even as title to the real estate remained contested...
Julie S. Greenberg ’05, a Crimson editor, is an applied math concentrator in Leverett House. For three more weeks she can be found wandering the streets of Berlin, buying postcards with pre-war photographs and wondering what it will all look like in 20 years...