147 Smelling Berlin: First day, landing at Volkspark Friedrichshain. The Volkspark is an island that requires you to pay visits often, like an elderly mother, and I don't hold back. Like each island of the city, this one also changes skin with the changing seasons. One smell that I have had my share of in all of Berlin in the winter is that of the coal stoves that still, incredibly, heat tens of thousands of apartments (and that Christopher Isherwood would find familiar). An intense smell, with an almost physical density that, in the colder months in the Volkspark, mingles with that of the dead leaves. Summer comes, the stage changes scenes. It is the season when I cross this island far and wide, notebook in hand, and finally finish in the core of my olfactory gland in the Duftgarten, "Garden of the essences," a small concentric maze around the monumental statue of a mother breastfeeding her son: a sort of secular sylvan divinity. Here, a column of scents rises from its collection of native and non-native plants. I collect a handful of specimens for my herbarium: ` lavender ` scented mallow ` sage ` peppermint Two free notes: Walking in these same places in May 1945, I would be breathing the acrid smell produced by the fire of the tower-bunker Flakturm Friedrichshain, and the burning of 417 masterpieces that were looking for shelter in it, and instead went up in smoke; literally, I would have my lungs full of the smoke produced by “St Matthew and the Angel” by Caravaggio , “Christ crowned in Thorns” by van Dyck and “The Conversion of St. Paul” by Rubens. Perhaps the most peculiar, and certainly one of the saddest, smells of history. If I were worried about forgetting the smell of this city, I would take Berlin in a bottle with me. Since 2009, at 13, Zimmerstraße, the shop of the alchemists Stefanie Hanssen and Cristoph Niedermeier, Frau Tonis Parfum, distills the smell of the linden trees and flowers of the city in a selection of 36 fragrances. The line is inspired by the scents of the past - those that Toni Luise, grandmother of Stefanie, so loved - ones that know Berlin as “Berlin Summer”, “Linde Berlin”, but also “Pure Violet” - the latter, a reissue of the 1920s scent preferred by Marlene Dietrich, the tutelary deity of these latitudes. These perfumes can be purchased individually or combined into custom formulas, like a collage of memories. senses and the City
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