Wladimir Kaminer came to Berlin from Moscow in the early 90s – and stayed. In Prenzlauer Berg, between vodka, prefabricated buildings, and party culture, he not only found a new home, but also inexhaustible material for his stories. His texts are insightful, humorous, melancholic – and always deeply human.

Hardly anyone has shaped the attitude to life in post-reunification Berlin as much as he has – with his debut “Russendisko,” Kaminer wrote a literary declaration of love to the capital at the beginning of the 2000s, which still enjoys cult status today.

A prolific writer, his latest book “Das geheime Leben der Deutschen” (NEW: “The Secret Life of Germans” by Wladimir Kaminer – Book – 2025 ) describes what fascinates him about everyday life in Germany.

In this podcast, we talk about his first years in Berlin after the fall of the Wall, how the city has changed since then, what role humor and literature play in this, and how Berlin is (still) a kind of playground for adults.

🎧 Podigee: https://londonberlindemocracy.podigee.io/6-neue-episode
🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/4e8YecX4LPzSoKnBrbNeKv?si=59c565becf534ac3

or at Podigee: https://londonberlindemocracy.podigee.io/episodes
and everywhere podcasts are available!

In front of the camera, Dr. Robert Richter from TU Berlin, who developed the Escape Room, shows what awaits visitors on site: an interactive world of experience that playfully encourages them to engage with the opportunities and challenges of digitalization in tourism.
Whether puzzles, storytelling or surprising technologies – knowledge comes alive here.

The goal: To make the latest technologies tangible with the Escape Room and to stimulate the desire for digital transformation.

You can find more about the Escape Challenge Tourismus here:
digitalzentrum-tourismus.de/escape-challenge-tourismus

Camera: Sascha Lasarzewski
Editorial team: Katja Anclam and Sina Heider
Editing: Gulliver Theis

In the new episode of the difgl podcast LondonBerlinDemocracy, filmmaker Sabine Pusch and Public Policy Expert Robert Keeling take a critical look at citizens’ assemblies in Berlin and London. How much influence do they really have? Are they an effective means for social change – and why are such democratic elements more important than ever?

In this episode, you’ll hear from:

• Sabine Pusch, Filmmaker
• Dr. Robert Keeling, Public Policy Expert
• Dr. Kerstin Lücker, Head of Technology and Participation, Department Work and Technology, TU Berlin
• Dr. Timothy Hall, Academic in Residence & Organiser with Citizens UK

Together they discuss the following questions:

• Do citizens’ assemblies really work?
• What are the political hurdles and what are the opportunities?
• What can they contribute to the future of democracy?

Listen now and join the discussion: https://londonberlindemocracy.podigee.io/episodes

Your work often seems to operate at the intersection of physicality, materiality, and technology. How does the idea for a performance come about – does it begin with an idea of movement, a particular material, or a technical experiment?
It varies greatly: In Women at the Stove, kitchen utensils made of metal, magnets on costumes and kitchen walls were at the beginning – so the material. In addition, there were electromagnets in the platform soles of the shoes, which can, for example, magnetize brooms and pots and release them again – so a technical experiment. In the performance Latex, on the other hand, the idea of movement gave the first impulse: When watching a classical ballet, I had the idea of making the immense power with which dancers jump visible. For this, I attached the hem of a highly stretchable latex dress to the floor: The force of the jump is thus braked. When the dancer figure jumps, the dress visually stretches far in length, while the latex fabric simultaneously slaps audibly against the legs.

You often expose your body to extreme physical stress in your work. What role does this boundary experience play in the statement of your performances? And how do you reflect on the expectations of female bodies in the process?
In the performance Ytong, I dance flamenco on a Ytong stone, with thick spikes under my dancing shoes – until the stone is broken down into rubble and dust. Through an act of destruction, I reach my physical limits by dismantling the base, the pedestal on which I dance. It becomes increasingly fragile until I fall down. Here, the sculpture is not created in a conventional artistic creation process, but through its reversal, the destruction. At the same time, I am dismantling the image of the dancer: From the initially “classical” flamenco – in pumps, with castanets – the destruction of the base turns into a swaying balancing act. The flamenco increasingly gets out of time, my movements become arrhythmic, rowing, until I fall.

How do you choose your materials, and what do they reveal about the narratives you want to tell?
I check the materials for their choreographic usability: How do they break, fall, shatter, stretch, sound, swing? Are the material processes and resulting sounds interesting? Are the materials and their installative arrangement coherent, do narratives arise that I sometimes, but not always, control. In the performance Spare Tires, I dealt with the racing driver Clärenore Stinnes; for me, her story was a kind of underground on which I worked. Often, however, the images and stories arise in the minds of viewers and art critics: In Muddclubsolo, I wear a red outdoor tent as a dress and hang on my hair, which is braided into a braid, which reminded many of the figure of Olympia from the stories of E.T.A. Hoffmann.

The theme of femininity runs like a red thread through your work. How do you define modern femininity in an artistic context – especially in the field of tension between autonomy, technology, and body?
It is very often about images of women and women’s roles. When I started my studies at the Art Academy in Munich, there was a shelf “Women” in the library. It was that simple: The few performance artists that existed at that time were simply sorted into a corner. That was striking! Specifically, I ask different questions in my performances. An example: For millennia, women in almost all parts of the world have been reduced to the kitchen and the stove. They were confined and restricted in the smallest space, in their freedom of movement, in their actions, in short: in their dignity as individual personalities with all their possibilities. And although this has changed a lot in our society, much of what women can do and do is still ranked rather low on the scale of values. With Women at the Stove, I return to the place where women were deprived of their dignity: It is a heavy metal art performance with household appliances. Emancipated, self-confident, with a lot of energy. The kitchen becomes a percussive-scenic sound space, the woman at the stove becomes an artist who is all that women have long been forbidden to be: visible, loud (also quiet), unique.

Your performances often work even without your physical presence, such as in installations or retrospectives. What does this independence of your works mean for your role as a performer and artist?
Actually, it only means that I don’t always have to be physically present.
I once tried to perform with an installation running independently of me, the Walking Machine. That was a machine that had seven pairs of dancing shoes running at the same time. These shoes were prepared by me with different materials, so that they produced different sounds. In the process, I realized that it is uninteresting to perform with a stoically running machine. Ultimately, the Walking Machine became an exhibit.
Unlike my performances, my installations are performative in that they move, but they are self-contained, mostly repetitive performances.

The difgl deals with questions of the good life and social transformation. In your opinion, what impulses can art – especially performative installation art – give to think about alternative ways of life and technologies?
Art is always creative and innovative, so there is hardly any area that provides more impulses for social transformation. That is a truism. Whether performance and installation can do this better than other art forms, I do not know. But certainly installations fit into our time of machines, and performance has emerged as a liberation from the constraints of conventional art settings, so both carry highly topical impulses: The installation the mechanical, the performance the great challenge that absolute freedom brings with it: Here it is a matter of casting an anchor again and again in the vast ocean of possibilities.

Depicting, communicating, and presenting the good life: difgl is filming on location for the latest report for the Mittelstand-Digitalzentrum Tourismus. Sina Heider and Fabienne Sand are providing the editorial preparation together to realize a new video report for the Mittelstand Digital Zentrum Tourismus with cameraman Gulliver Theis.

What does the Mittelstand Digital Zentrum Tourismus offer? How can SMEs be supported in digitization and how can we bring clarity to the impenetrable jungle of offers and information? We translate these questions into digital answers and are pleased with the high-quality and coherent result.

difgl produces your audiovisual project.

The core competencies of difgl; development, planning, implementation, finalization can be applied to very different projects. We look forward to upcoming exciting challenges and are happy to advise you on your project idea!

Contact: contact@difgl.de

It is composed of the

• Technische Universität Berlin (TU Berlin) Office & Project Management

• Der Mittelstand.BVMW e.V

• RWTH Aachen University

• Fraunhofer Society, Fraunhofer Institute for Building Physics

The Digitalzentrum connects business and digital solution providers and focuses on technology and future topics that are particularly relevant to the industry. Through targeted information offerings, events, workshops and mentoring programs, it enables companies in the tourism industry to make their business models resilient and, in the best case, sustainable and regenerative.

Difgl is pleased to develop and implement exciting communication concepts for the Mittelstandsdigitalzentrum. In the course of this, a beautiful image film has already been created, which can be admired on the MDZT website. DIFGL employee Sina Heider is responsible for video reports as well as trend reporting and monitoring at MDZT.

The difgl cordially invites you to the next project meeting of the consortium partners from October 21st to October 23rd in Berlin.

The project addresses a fundamental European problem: despite the close ties of the European Union, citizens lack easy access to the discourses and debates of other EU countries. As a Streaming Platform SPLEE aims to address this challenge and make EU-wide discourses visible. The platform will bundle content from leading quality media in such a way that it can be consumed and renegotiated across language barriers and national borders. The latest AI innovations and data visualization techniques will ensure simplified access and compressed information transfer.