Berlin Doesn’t Owe You the Tour

The tourists come thinking they’ve got it figured out. They can’t quite believe someone once ran a wall straight through the middle of the city, so they piss in the fountain outside the Jewish Museum, spit off the TV tower, and let their supposedly underground tour guide walk them to the same Oranienburger Straße bars that every other tourist ended up in last weekend. Berlin has been packaged for export. The mystique is a product now.

Which is exactly why VICE put out a new edition of their Guide to Berlin—a document that is, against all odds, actually funny and actually useful, collecting everything genuinely worth knowing about the poorest major city in Germany into one place. No lifestyle copy, no hotel recommendations. Just the city as it actually runs: cheap, chaotic, still coasting on the residual energy of a wall that came down before half its current residents were born.

I’ve lived here long enough to be annoyed by the tourists and old enough to remember when the mystique felt real. The guide won’t restore it. But it might at least steer someone away from the Oranienburger Straße tourist circuit, which would already be a service to the city.