The Heart of BerlinDiary of an unexpected Berlin trip

The Heart of Berlin - a fiction-documentary-hybrid web series
about the seem­ingly impos­si­ble quest for Berlin’s true heart.

Every metrop­o­lis has a HEART.

Every big city has that ONE cer­tain thing (square, park, hill, club, tree...) which the most people asked (inhab­i­tants and vis­i­tors) would intu­itively call the ‚HEART’ of that city. We are not speak­ing of a geo­graph­i­cal or geo­met­ri­cal or eco­nom­i­cal center, nor we mean the main trans­port hub or his­toric city core... We think of the ‚HEART’ in a much more meta­phys­i­cal sense like ‚origin of emo­tions’ instead of ‚blood pump’. Where you can grasp the essence of the area, sense a that unique vibra­tion, the spirit the city is woven from, its very soul... you get the point.

Every metrop­o­lis has a HEART. But if you ask people in Berlin:

‚What is the Heart of Berlin?’

... they all respond very dif­fer­ently. o.O

They may point out totally dif­fer­ent places, think a lot about it, shrug and look con­fused... some people name more than one heart and some people simply can’t answer the question!

Soo... Berlin seems to be pretty spe­cial! Are there really mul­ti­ple hearts of the city? Or is it even pos­si­ble that Berlin might not have a heart at all??

A Quest for the Heart of Berlin

Alexan­dra visits Berlin during her world trip. She has been in all the huge cities around the world and the ‚Heart’ is always the first thing she is asking for to get to know each city.

So she comes to Berlin and askes the people what she has asked in many cities before: ‚What is the Heart of Berlin?’ - As you might expect, the answers she gets are unsatisfying.

What would YOU answer her? » Sug­gest a heart! 

To get to the bottom of this ques­tion she decides to stay in Berlin, live and work here, ask every one she meets, become part of the city. For her it is pretty clear that she would not find the ‚heart’ in the usual tourist guides or at the most obvi­ous locations.

Unex­pected self-discovery

So she visits some of the wildest, weird­est, most won­der­ful places in Berlin, meets people in dif­fer­ent com­mu­ni­ties, attends cul­tural events... and soon dis­cov­ers her own latent tal­ents and for­got­ten dreams. Much more than she’d ever expected from one single stage of her world trip!
She real­izes that her quest for the Heart of Berlin may actu­ally become an expe­di­tion to the hidden places inside herself.

This is the begin­ning of Alexan­dra’s unex­pected Berlin trip.

Her diary of the jour­ney is our fiction-documentary-hybrid web series. We tell her fic­tive story in the real doc­u­men­tary Berlin context.

Before we start

With this project we make Alexan­dra’s jour­ney YOUR jour­ney! We need your help to hear about all the places she would have to visit to even­tu­ally find the true Heart of Berlin. See our still grow­ing list of Heart-of-Berlin can­di­dates - short: HEARTS.

What is YOUR ‚Heart of Berlin’? » Sug­gest a heart!