Berlin: Travel with a Writer (Travel with a Writer)

Spend a weekend in Berlin with Norman Ohler, the internationally bestselling author of Blitzed.

From Friday night to Monday evening, Norman Ohler moves through Berlin’s nightlife, immigration, gentrification, and reunification. Four nights of Wagner, or at least the attempt, give way to techno and jazz. A motorboat journey through the city passes imperial monuments, immigrant neighborhoods, waterside dance parties, remnants of the Wall, and places where beauty and pleasure coexist with some of Germany’s darkest history.

Ohler’s fascination with Berlin’s past and possibility began when witnessing the fall of the Wall. Here he describes how in the decades that followed, the city became a refuge for artists, immigrants, dissidents, musicians, queer communities, and anyone seeking the freedom to live differently. Banks became techno clubs. Abandoned industrial buildings became cultural spaces. Squats, theaters, bars, galleries, and immigrant neighborhoods built a culture that could not have existed anywhere else in Germany.

But the city that made room for alternative lives is becoming harder to inhabit. Rents rise, independent cultural spaces disappear, nightlife becomes more commercial, and bureaucracy frustrates the immigrants whose labor Berlin urgently needs.

Ohler encounters these contradictions alongside Bihter, a young queer Turkish doctor from Ankara preparing for the language examination that will determine whether she may practice medicine in Germany. She has found freedoms in Berlin that were unavailable to her at home, while confronting a system that continues to treat her as an outsider.

Provocative, funny, and searching, Berlin: Travel with a Writer moves between high culture and underground nightlife while asking what remains of Berlin’s promise of possibility. Ohler invites readers to experience the city now, before it loses another version of itself.

About TRAVEL WITH A WRITER

Travel with a Writer begins with a simple idea: places become more interesting in the company of someone who knows them well.

The series brings readers together with bestselling, award-winning, and acclaimed writers in places they know intimately. Some will already be familiar to English-language readers. Others are major literary voices in their own countries and regions whom we are delighted to introduce in English.

At a time when information about where to go has never been easier to find, these books offer something harder to access: somebody else’s way of seeing a city. They invite readers to experience it like a local by entering it through the memories, observations, and imagination of a writer who has called it home. Literature has always allowed us to spend time inside another life. Travel with a Writer brings that literary intimacy to place.

We give every writer the same invitation: write a short narrative about a place you have called home, for the would-be traveler. We choose writers whose work we admire and trust their instincts about how best to bring a place to life. What each writer makes of the invitation is entirely their own.

Original writing is accompanied by curated walks, maps, infographics, and cultural recommendations, allowing readers who do travel to follow the writer’s perspective off the page and into the place itself. 

Read a book before a trip, carry it through a city, return to it after coming home, or travel entirely from home.

Author by author, place by place, a global literary atlas takes shape. 

In 2027 and beyond, the series will continue to expand with acclaimed writers taking readers inside cities around the world, with forthcoming and developing titles including Chicago with Rebecca Makkai, Bogota with Santiago Gamboa, Berlin with Norman Ohler, Athens with Amanda Michalopoulou, Lisbon with Gonçalo Tavares, Buenos Aires with Martín Caparrós, Vancouver with Ian Williams, Hanoi with Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai, and Taipei with Michelle Kuo.

About THE WALKING TREE

Founded in French in March 2025 as L’arbre qui marche by former journalists and editors Nadia Krovnikoff and François Saugier, The Walking Tree is an independent publishing house devoted to new ways of writing about place. Travel with a Writer has expanded internationally, with editions now available in French, Italian, and Spanish.

Its U.S. and UK publishing program, The Walking Tree, is led by Kristina Kearns, former executive and editorial director of McSweeney’s and operations director of Fitzcarraldo Editions, with Daniel Levin Becker, former literary and features editor of The Believer.