All the Notes Berlin Left

Berlin leaves notes. Handwritten, photocopied, stapled to poles, taped to windows—the city runs on paper-based passive aggression, collective absurdism, and the occasional genuine plea. Someone reminding their upstairs neighbors that it is, in fact, possible to walk more quietly. Someone else declaring in marker that the specific person who keeps stealing their bike saddle is on notice. The full register of urban life, compressed into A5 and glued to a wall.

Notes of Berlin has been collecting these for years—photographing them, posting them, letting them accumulate into a portrait of the city that no guidebook or documentary would ever assemble. It’s one of those blogs that earns its existence not through formal ambition but through consistency and an eye for the right detail. You don’t have to live in Berlin to read it. You just have to have lived anywhere crowded and full of people communicating at each other sideways.

For 2018 the project became a tear-off calendar: 365 notes, one per day, curated from the archive by Joab, who runs the site. From all the blog submissions we again selected 365 of the most entertaining and strangest notes—one for each day, he says. The format suits the material. A daily dose of Berlin’s unfiltered id, peeled off and discarded, replaced each morning by something equally strange. I can think of worse ways to move through a year.