East Berliner

East Berliner Sebastian Szary, of electronic music duo Modeselektor, recalls how budding young DJs and party people like himself at the time took full advantage.

Since then, every anniversary, I imagine the student from Düsseldorf, years later, telling his children about that strange east Berliner with the battered thumb, that torture victim of the rogue East German state.

That was my first encounter with an East Berliner, and with her words she tore away something inside me that continues to define my life today.

Von Boroviczeny herself is no nostalgic east Berliner harking back to the days of the GDR, hailing instead from Zehlendorf in the city’s affluent west.

But in the spring I met the former East Berliner who would become my wife, and I began to establish roots in the city.