Don’t Argue With Malte and Other Essential Berlin Travel Advice

Someone built a Berlin subway map where every station is a drug dealer. Which—honestly, yes. It follows logically from the burger-map trend, the coffee-map trend, the artisanal-pickle-map trend. Someone takes the transit grid and overlays a taxonomy of desires. This one is just more honest about what the desires actually are.

The map comes from Schlecky Silberstein, a German entertainment site with a self-consciously highbrow following, and it covers the full spectrum—cocaine, MDMA, and, for the nostalgic, chopped-up dried Mickey Mouse comics from the nineties. Whatever you need. The city provides.

What makes it better than a simple directory is the character notes. You find out that Udo is a massive flake. That Dolli’s elevator is broken, which matters if you’re carrying anything. That you should absolutely not get into a debate with Malte, for reasons the map wisely doesn’t explain but which I can imagine vividly. These details feel more real than any guidebook description of Berlin—the city as a network of personalities with specific operational quirks, each requiring its own approach.

Print it out. Take it with you. Or don’t, and just accept that you’ll end up with Udo, spending forty minutes waiting on a corner in the cold while he figures himself out.