A history of Berlin: And the corpses float in the Landwehr Canal

It's not exactly the most idyllic spot in Berlin where Kirsty Bell begins her city tour.

Since 2014, the art critic has lived on the third floor of an old building on the outskirts of Kreuzberg, opposite the Landwehr Canal and not far from Potsdamer Platz.

House and water are separated by a two-lane road.

Carelessly discarded plastic bags lie in the bushes on the banks of the canal, a ten-kilometer-long branch of the Spree that was created in 1845 and was used to supply the growing city with building materials.

Pedestrians rarely pass by.

The rain does the rest when you set off on a gloomy January day to follow in the footsteps of Bell and her story.

From this gloomy, supposedly remote place of all places, she draws a captivating portrait of Berlin with "City Tides".

It ranges from the nineteenth century through the Weimar years and the end of the war to the present day and deals a great deal with the city's wounds and scars.

Starting from the view from her kitchen window and the quirks of the house, the author writes down a long stream of thoughts that never breaks, stumbles or gets lost in a dead end.

Geographically, the narrative circles in a small radius around Bell's house.

From the kitchen window, Bell looks not only at the long chimney of an old sewage pumping station, which leads her to the history of Berlin's sewerage system, but also at the Excelsior house on Askanian Platz, seven hundred meters away, a desolate block of flats from the 1960s,

From the once largest train station to the ruins

Bell sees herself as a seamstress, stapling scraps of evidence together.

The history of the Anhalter Bahnhof, inaugurated in 1841, and the Hotel Excelsior form such a snippet.

Opened in 1908, the progressive hotel, later advertised as the largest hotel on the continent, was primarily intended for business travelers who were swept by the train to Berlin.

In November 1918 the Spartakusbund was founded in the Hotel Excelsior.

Only two months later, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were mistreated and murdered by members of the Garde-Kavallerie-Schützen-Division, Luxemburg's dead body was thrown into the Landwehr Canal.

It was not the first and not the last time that a corpse was floating in the water of the canal in the course of a century and a half, Bell tells us.

Since 1928, the Hotel Excelsior has been connected via a spacious underground tunnel to the Anhalter Bahnhof opposite, of which only a ruin remains today: a "jagged piece of wall, whose four large round windows cut out of the masonry frame nothing more than empty sky".

This is the only part of the portico that remains of what was once Berlin's largest train station: "A detached remnant that only seems to emphasize the eerie absence of a building beyond.

The ruins of the Anhalter Bahnhof in my window is a cipher that tells of intertwined histories.”

Once the pride of the railway industry and a symbol of progress, many people fled from the Anhalter Bahnhof in 1933 into exile.

Between 1942 and 1945, almost ten thousand Berlin Jews were deported from there, mainly to Theresienstadt.

According to Bell, there was a "conspicuous interruption" between December 17, 1942 and January 12, 1943 - "so that the Nazis could celebrate Christmas".