Today I saw a ghost…

In 2006 Germany experienced World Cup fever. Berlin was hosting the football championships and every cafe, bar and restaurant showed the matches on giant TV screens. Round about that time, in a city already full of street art, the work of a new artist caught my eye. They were stencilling hoofprints onto the pavements. I …

Clever Hans: A Horse, a House and a Little History

Wilhelm von Osten was born into the German squirearchy in 1838 and went on to work as a maths teacher. He moved to the eastern Berlin district of Prenzlauer Berg in 1866 and purchased a house at 10 Griebenowstraße. A befitted his background, he was a keen rider and huntsman with an appreciation of horses. …

Hitler’s Missing Horses Found Hidden in Rhineland Warehouse

The German tabloid Bild just broke a story about the huge statues of horses made for Hitler by the sculptor Josef Thorak. I’d just come across Thorak’s work while looking into the symbolic role of horses under the Nazis, and seen images of his workshop, and the hefty Aryan steeds he turned out. Thorak was …

O Horse of Little Brain?

My friend Robby runs the wonderful Retrokombinat, an Etsy shop full of finds from the flotsam and jetsam of twentieth-century Berlin. For my birthday he made me a card featuring one of a series of collectable science flyers dished out by the Berliner Morgenpost newspaper in 1931. It’s all about brain size, and as you …

Icelandic Horses Gather at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin

The 2013 Icelandic Horse World Championships launched this morning at the Platz der 18 Mars, in front of the Brandenburg Gate. A parade of horses and riders from over twenty nations clopped up the Strasse des 17 Juni through the middle of the Tiergarten park in the centre of Berlin and stood in a circle …