Radio Spaetkauf Berlin

Billboards have gone up encouraging people to voluntarily leave Germany. The Interior Ministry - run by the CSU's Horst Seehofer - is offering to pay up to twelve months living expenses back where you came from. The multi-lingual ads have been attacked with paintballs and 'refugees welcome' tags. Dan's take: freedom of movement is good, especially if paid for by the German state, but only if it goes in both directions. It's Christmas market season. Festive lights have gone up along Unter den Linden, paid for by Lidl. But the city's heritage protection department says they are too multi-coloured. Are only white lights allowed now in Berlin? Berlin will get a new public holiday in 2019 - May 8, also International Women's Day. It means seven of ten public holidays will occur in the first half of the year. Come to our next live recording on Sunday December 16. Check our website for location details.

Pedestrians in Berlin have had enough of being overrun by both cars and bikes. They're campaigning for better sidewalks and street crossings. We talk to a pedestrian activist who is hopping mad about being walked over: Roland Stimpel from FUSS, the Organization for Pedestrian Protection. Is Mauerpark a beloved cultural hotspot or a noisy nuisance? Authorities are threatening to seize and destroy instruments if buskers don't pipe down. We meet Karla from Save Mauerpark, who says only a handful of complainants are trying to limit the freedom of thousands of Berliners. Diesel vehicles could soon be banned from several main streets in Berlin. An environmental protection group sued the city because of the high levels of pollution that breach European Union regulations. A court found Berlin must take drastic action to lower particle emissions. But Angela Merkel's coalition is taking the side of the auto industry and trying to avoid diesel bans. The BVG's public taxi app Berlkönig is now operating 24/7 and expanding

We record live at Floating University, a temporary structure built over a hidden resevior near Hasenheide. Dan describes it as "Burning Man meets Waterworld." Gang war breaks out on the streets of Berlin. A crime boss has been shot dead at Tempelhof Park on a Sunday afternoon. Have police stirred up a hornet’s nest as they crack down on criminal clans? Have you tried the new BVG weekend shuttle service Berlkönig? The public taxi vans will pick you up and drop you off almost anywhere for as little as €4. Berlin's garden colonies are under threat as investors try to replace flowers with flats. We interview garden owner Trevor Sears from the campaign Da Wächst Was (Something's Growing Here). He tells us why Kleingarten are important for the city, and how you can get one. What should you do if an architect visits your apartment building asking to take photos? It's usually the first sign your owner wants to sell or renovate. Green Party representative Georg Kössler tells us five things you can do to halt a rent in

TV series Babylon Berlin is searching for 3000 extras, but bearded men need not apply. You must be over 1.86 meters tall and be prepared to get a 1920s haircut. Maisie is thrilled about the mass make-over of Berlin blokes. Sign up at Agentur Filmgesichter. The Berlin Wall is being rebuilt to create a totalitarian theme park in Mitte. The art project Dau will submit visitors to mild oppression and screen lengthy films. It will run from from October 12 til November 9, when the "Wall" will be demolished. Couldn't they use it to patch up the East Side Gallery? Algae is blooming in Berlin lakes post-heatwave. But don't worry, it's still safe to swim. The Berlin health authorities have tested the water and found no deadly blue-green algae. Meanwhile, Alternativ für Deutschland leader Alexander Gauland is now pushing a new and rather bleak right-wing position, acknowledging the reality of climate change but saying humans can't do anything about it. Is this the start of 'climate change realism' - to borrow from Mark

Our annual outdoor recording at the Mobile Kino Lakeside Film Festival at Klingemühle in Brandenburg. Now in its fifth year, the event many improvements - a new name, a new stage, more guests and more fun all round. Like playing card games while camping? Our guest Julia Weiss tells us what it's like to work for a card game company. Julia is the lead writer for Cards Against Humanity, as well as a cast member on the podcast The Improvised Star Trek. "If our goal is to live in a post-capitalist space future, watch Star Trek," Julia says. Caroline's review of Star Trek: "A lot of ambient music and three-dimensional board games." Berlins's garden plots are being targeted by property speculators. Investors are snapping up Kleingarten hoping the city will allow them to build apartments. One such investor is an alleged crime gang from Neukölln. Police recently seized 77 of their properties worth €9.2M, including garden plots. It's alleged the real estate was bought with the proceeds of a spectacular bank robbery. Te

Berlin’s scorching summer is breaking records. Earlier this week the city experienced its hottest night ever, with a minimum of 25°C. The city’s trees are suffering, and residents are being asked to go out and water them. U-Bahns are getting noisier, as there's no moisture to lubricate between the metal wheels and tracks. The drains are stinking, so the water authority is putting “drain deodorant” down the pipes. The pools are all at capacity. But Berlin has only 48 public drinking fountains to help citizens rehydrate. A Berlin man who tried to become a police officer had his application rejected because he failed a drug test. A blood sample showed he had THC in his system. Undeterred, he took the matter to court, unsurprisingly rejected his case. The S-Bahn is trialling automatic doors to improve punctuality. All doors will pop open at stations between Ostkreuz and Hauptbahnhof from 6am to 8am. Instead of 24 people pushing 24 buttons, one person pushes one button. Why haven’t they ever done this before? This

A Berlin man who has been in a coma for four months has been identified because someone recognized a photograph of his house keys. The 74-year was found unconscious in a Wilmersdorf park after apparently having an accident while jogging in March, carrying only his keys. A police operation to test all the locks in the area failed. Publishing a photo of his keys worked. It seems Berliners prefer to memorize the grooves of their keys rather than look their neighbours in the eye. The first of Berlin's many bike sharing company has gone bust. O-bike has filed for bankruptcy in its home country Singapore. In some cities, the bikes have been sold to a collection company and are being taken from the streets. But it’s not clear what will happen to the 700 bikes left in Berlin. One bicycle activist has created a website called Librebike.info calling for people to liberate the left-behind bicycles by hacking the locks. The S-Bahn wants to improve punctuality by introducing express trains that skip a couple of stops on t

Are you paying too much rent? Probably: 70% of Berlin landlords are illegally overcharging, says lawyer Daniel Halmer of WenigerMiete.de. He’s offering a no-win no-fee service to fight your landlord for a rent reduction. He’s helped people save up to €600 a month. Tricks landlords use include overstating apartment size by up to 30%. Everybody who has rented an apartment in the last three years could win a rent decrease. Berlin could soon get public electric grills – thanks to a very unexpected source of money – East Germany’s stolen millions hidden in Swiss bank accounts. The DDR leaders stashed state money abroad as the socialist state collapsed. Now it’s coming back. The Mitte district wants to use it to put coin-operated grills in Monbijou Park. Maisie thinks it could be used for better purposes. The Breitscheitplatz Christmas Market truck attack in 2016 might have been prevented if Berlin police weren’t so obsessed with trying to evict anarchist squatters. A Berlin parliamentary inquiry has heard that pol

A video of black people being kicked out of KFC at Alexanderplatz raises question. Is it illegal to call police racist? Can police delete videos from your phone? We've got the answers. Support group Reachout says the incident was clearly racist. The police say they were following KFC's request. KFC is standing by their actions. Want to get fit while cleaning the city? Try plogging, a Swedish sport that combines jogging with trash collection. A meetup group is plogging through the Grunewald forest on June 9. Why have so many kids started using the latest shared bike company Ofo? Is it because their system accidentally allows anonymous endless free rides? Perhaps they can all join in the ADFC cycle demo on June 3 through the center of the city. This episode was presented by Joel Dullroy and Daniel Stern, and brought to you by RadioEins.

What will it take to get Berliners to pickup trash - the offer of a free beer, perhaps? The Big Görlitzer Clean Up happens on July 7. Organizer Lubomila Jordanova from the group Plan A tells us how they plan to incentivise volunteer cleaners. Empty flats in Neukölln? They do exist. Unfortunately they're being kept empty on purpose. Activists squatted several buildings to protest, but were promptly evicted. In some cases, flats are left unrented by speculators who prefer to wait for prices to rise rather than rent to problematic tenants. This case involved a publicly-owned building left empty because of slow bureacracy. Dan's search for a kindergarten for his child is going badly. It's not all his fault - Berlin has a shortage of kita spots. Thousands of people protested againt the kita crisis. Dan tells us the rumours he's heard on the playground - parents offering to help kitas cheat the system to earn more from government, for example. This episode was recorded live at the Comedy Cafe Berlin on Sunday May 2

Sick of cars parking in bike lanes? Write own parking tickets during Falschparker Aktionswoche, which starts on May 28. Illegal parkers are fined just €20 in Berlin if caught, while the EU average is €100. You can use an app called Wegeheld to report drivers to the authorities, if you don’t mind being called a Spießer. Trees in Berlin parks are being wrapped in white webs by an invasion of oak processionary moth caterpillars. Watch out for their bristles - they contain a toxin which irritates the skin and causes respiratory problems. The trees should recover in a few weeks, though. Karneval der Kulturen is on again this weekend all around Kreuzberg 61, but it might be the last year it’s held there due to rising security costs. If you don’t like crowds, try the Berlin Mural Festival, held on walls across the city. Our next live show is on 6pm, Sunday May 27. We’re back at the Comedy Cafe Berlin. This episode was presented by Joel Dullroy and Daniel Stern, and brought to you by RadioEins.

A special live recording of the fourth and (maybe) last episode. Take a tour of all four of Berlin’s under-construction, out-of-use, falling-apart and over-capacity airports. Each has had a part to play in the story of how Berlin fucked up an airport. At BER, we hear the airport company's side of the story: damn high regulations got in the way, they say. Tempelhof is closed, Tegel is operating precariously, and only socialist-built Schönefeld is muddling through. The end is in sight - October 2020. But even now Berlin is planning to double BER's floorplan and build a new government terminal. BER critic Dieter Faulenbach da Costa tells us the building is rotten to the core and should be scrapped. "I am convinced this airport can never open. They should pray for a miracle." We are joined on stage by Martin Delius, the former Pirate Pary politician who led the Berlin parliamentary investigation into BER. Who was responsible for BER? All Berliners, he says. We ignored warning signs and re-elected incompetent poli

Chris Dercon has resigned from the Volksbuehne Theater, just six months into the job, and following a lot of fuss over his appointment. It seems he had failed to secure enough sponsorship money to pay the bills. Joel says he wasn't given a fair chance. Konrad says he was always wrong for the job. The AFD tried to shut down Berghain, complaining about the strange hours, sex and drugs, bad music and exclusive door policy. The AFD representative Sybille Schmidt used to run a punk club. The party later backed down from the proposal. The U-Bahn network has a special alarm system in the case of a flash flood in the tunnels. It could have to be activated if a skyscraper being built on Alexanderplatz breaks the water table and floods 17 stations on the U2, U5 and U8 lines. Züruck schwimmen, bitte. It's garden season, but if you want a kleingarten plot on the edge of town you'll have to wait three years. There are already 12,000 people on a waiting list for one of 70,000 gardens. Come to our live recording of the next

Two men who killed a goat in the Hasenheide petting zoo have been sentenced to 10 months in jail. Their lawyer said they were hungry, and argued for leniency as they only took one leg. Also, all meat eaters are animal killers, he said. Another Berlin ban has been overturned by a court. Horses and carriages will be allowed back in front of the Brandenburger Tor, despite the city government's attempt to forbid them. The city's prohibitions on AirBnB, Uber and beer bikes have all been watered down through legal action. Spreepark at Plänterwald is now open for tours. But high levels of arsenic contamination have been found at the formerly abandoned theme park. Still want to jump the fence? As Berlin's unemployment rate falls to half of its 2005 level, Mayor Michael Müller has proposed introducing a "solidarity basic income." Unlike a real basic income, it would oblige recipients to do municipal or social work. Would creative projects like podcasts count? If you want to protest against rising rents, join the Miete

How much do Berlin’s bottle collectors earn? Our guest Wouter Bernhardt has done the math - it's a measly €150 a month. He thinks it amounts to a form of socially accepted poverty. Wouter is host of the Berlinology podcast. Listen to the full episode of 'The Bottle Collector' here: http://viertausendhertz.de/bln02/ The Berlin Senate has changed the AirBnB law to allow people to rent out their flats as holiday apartments for up to 60 days per year. Starting on May 1, you can obtain a registration number from the Bürgeramt, which must be displayed online. But you still risk getting evicted by your landlord for using your flat for commercial purposes. We talk to Jana Burbach and Niko Schulz-Dornburg, the writers of a new TV series about flat sharing in Berlin. The show is called Just Push Abuba, and it's the first English-language show produced by ZDF. Watch it online at: https://www.zdf.de/serien/just-push-abuba In February, Berlin passed a milestone: the Berlin wall has now been down for longer than it was up

Bike thefts are down 11% in Berlin. Just over 30,000 bikes were reported stolen in the past year, 4000 less than the year before. Has the flood of shared bikes helped? There’s been a cherry tree massacre at the Garten der Welt in Marzahn. Seventeen cherry trees were chopped down on Sunday. The kirchbäume were the garden's biggest drawcard each spring during the cherry blossom season. The gardens have been targeted by protests over a plan to have sheep and cattle graze on nearby paddocks. Don’t be confused if soon see U3 trains running on the U1 line. The BVG is extending the U3 all the way to Warschauer Straße to increase service frequency. In the past 10 years, passenger numbers have increased by 17%, but there are about 5% less carriages. The Berlin Feminist Film Week is on now with a programme of movies made by women, transgender and queer film-makers. It runs until Wednesday March 14. This episode is brought to you by RadioEins, and presented by Maisie Hitchcock and Joel Dullroy.

Film director Karim Ainouz tells us what life was really like for refugees living in Tempelhof airport. His documentary "Zentralflughafen THF" was filmed in the camp, which recently closed. Could public transport in Germany soon be free? The federal government suggested this as a way of reducing air pollution from diesel cars. What would Berlin be like if dirty cars are banned? Should car manufacturers be made to pay for cheating and lying? Maisie says Berlin's U-Bahns are filling up with more passengers. That might be because the BVG has cut costs and failed to order enough trains. They're now allowing graffiti-tagged carriages to stay on the tracks. This episode was recorded live at the Comedy Cafe Berlin on Sunday February 25, 2018. Hosts: Maisie Hitchcock, Joel Dullroy and Daniel Stern.

BER has been built twice - the first time incorrectly, the second time incompletely. We hear from Marco, an engineer who worked on site. Employees were busy stealing copper instead of fixing the fire system. Some managers got rich taking bribes. Informers had their coffee poisoned. Joel and Jöran drive out to the unfinished BER terminal to inspect the too-short escalators that end with stairs. They were just one of 150,000 mistakes discovered in an audit after the 2012 cancellation. Cables were stuffed together in overloaded enclosures - a fire risk. The sprinkler pipes too small to carry the required water. More than 600 fire walls had to be reconstructed. And the builders forgot to install lightning rods. Even when it's fixed, BER will need another overhaul: "As soon as they open it they have to modernize it," Marco says. "The technology is old standards. New airports are already building in a different way. This is going to be from the beginning an old airport." But finally, heads are starting to roll... t

Days away from the planned 2012 opening party, nothing seemed amiss at BER. What was really going on? On this episode, we look at how the airport managers and politicians were messing with the plans, even as construction was underway. They demanded a 70% increase in terminal space to add hundreds of extra shops, and requested special double story boarding gates for the supersized Airbus A380, even though no airline requested it. Instead of a working fire safety system, they planned to hire up to 800 people to act as human fire alarms. Despite multiple warnings, the airport board pushed ahead with opening party plans right up until May 8, 2012, when the first major delay was announced. We meet the man who put a stop to it all - Stephan Loge, the administrator of the Brandenburg building department. Also on this episode, Joel and Jöran visit the Schönefeld S-Bahn station in search of the empty train that runs nightly to the unfinished airport to keep air moving through the tunnels. How To F#€k Up An Airport is

Germans throw out one truck's worth of good food each minute. SirPlus is a supermarket that sells groceries that are past their best-before date but are still edible. Founder Raphael Fellmer joins us with a basket of typical products from his shelves. You can visit the shop at Wilmersdorfer Staße 59. Or you can order a home delivery box at: http://www.sirplus.de Konrad Werner explains why Germans are terrified of fresh elections. The country still doesn't have a governing coalition and might need to go back to the polls. Joel suggests a policy to add to coalition negations: abolishing the racist term "Schwarzer Peter" (Black Peter) to refer to a trouble-maker. The term has often been used referring to the FDP, which walked out of coalition negotiations. Listen to Konrad's podcast here: http://bit.ly/2zsamzo You might have heard of Berlin's top league football team Hertha BSC. But the city is also home to numerous neighbourhood clubs across seven different football leagues. Bloody Hell Magazine is an English-l