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Interview

How Slow Travel Berlin is building a literary legacy

Through Slow Travel Berlin, photographer and journalist Paul Sullivan is building a dedicated local literary community.

Slow Travel Berlin founder Paul Sullivan. Photo: Katrin Aichele

Slow Travel Berlin was founded in 2010 by British photographer, travel journalist and author Paul Sullivan. Since then, it has flourished as a beloved online destination for local writing about the city, with articles covering travel, culture and lifestyle, plus deep dives into local history and cultural figures of Berlin past and present; it also offers guided tours and has previously published books.

Berlin feels inexhaustible in terms of the stories it holds.

Since 2020, the project has been crowd-funded in an attempt to keep the website ad-free. As the magazine begins a drive to increase its paid subscribers and secure its future through 2025, we caught up with Sullivan to reflect on 15 years of chronicling our multifaceted, rapidly-changing city. 

What inspired you to found STB originally, and what was the goal?

I was already working as a freelance journalist and author – music, culture and travel – but had also just become a father. I wanted to do something relevant to my new role as a dad and something different from the guidebooks and articles I was already writing, as well as the burgeoning blog scene at that time, which tended towards fashion, clubbing and brunching.

I read Carl Honore’s In Praise of Slow and realised ‘slow travel’ was an ideal theme to explore my adopted city attentively. The goal was to avoid too many thematic restrictions, to create well-researched, well-written longer-read articles – very much not the standard ‘blogger’ concept, then or now – and to appeal to residents as well as visitors.

One regular theme I’ve noticed at STB is flâneurie, walking, exploring – whatever one wants to call it. Is this something you personally love, and do you think it lets someone get to know their city in a particular way?

Yes, walking is the most obvious way of slowing down and looking at things more carefully. But it was also a consequence of my being a photographer for 15 years. Dorothea Lange’s quote “The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera” became especially poignant after my equipment was stolen. I wrote a book on “walking Berlin” for National Geographic back in 2015, but it was structured like a tourist guide.

So I wrote an essay, which ran on our website in 2017, that pulled together my own perspective and literary inspirations – Walter Benjamin, Iain Sinclair, Franz Hessel, Guy Debord, Robert Walser, Will Self, Rebecca Solnit – on why walking the city is important, and that included photography as well. I also undertook more esoteric walks such as one around the Ringbahn, another around the Mauerweg, and a Benjamin-esque mission to walk every street in Berlin, unearthing urban fragments along the way. It serves as a manifesto of sorts for our approach.

I’ve long been a fan of STB’s literary coverage – you’ve done author interviews, themed book roundups, literary walks in honour of certain writers, and lovely essays like [The Berliner stage editor] Sanders Isaac Bernstein’s Walter Benjamin’s Berlin. Have you always been drawn to literature, and to knowing a place through literature?

It’s no understatement to say that books saved my life. I fled from a dysfunctional working-class home at 15 and literature helped me navigate the diverse milieus I encountered afterwards. I never stopped reading. When I moved to Berlin, I devoured local history books and fiction set here, which gave me ideas and inspiration, and provided a deeper context to the city as I explored [it]. This is still the case today. Berlin feels inexhaustible in terms of the stories it holds.

🏠 Great Berlin writers and where they lived

You co-wrote the book Berlin: A Literary Guide for Travellers with fellow local writer Marcel Krueger. Are there any Berlin authors you’d like to recommend?

Berlin has a fascinating literary history that goes back at least to the 18th-century salon culture led by the likes of Rahel Levin Varnhagen and Henriette Herz. My favourite era, though, was the early 20th century when Berlin became a focal point for the modernist avant-garde. From that era I would recommend Alfred Döblin, Walter Benjamin, Joseph Roth, Hans Fallada and Franz Hessel.

Then there are DDR writers like Anna Seghers, Christa Wolf and Annett Gröschner and their West Berlin counterparts such as Jörg Fauser, Sven Regener and Jürgen Ploog. Today we have an array of global voices, from Russian-born Wladimir Kaminer and Japanese author Yoko Tawada to Turkish writers Yadé Kara and Emine Sevgi Özdamar.

There’s also plenty of talent from the Anglosphere: the last few years have seen great Berlin-themed books from former or current residents; off the top of my head, Rory MacLean, Kirsty Bell, Musa Okwonga, plus important translators such as Katy Derbyshire.

What can our readers do to support Slow Travel Berlin?

After a few difficult years that brought about a hiatus, we restarted the site in 2020 with a crowdfunding initiative via Steady. There was an enthusiastic start, but the numbers have inevitably waned, so supporting us there (or on Instagram) for as little as €3 a month – less than a Bratwurst these days! – would really help us and ensure we can keep creating great content about Berlin into 2025 and beyond. And thanks to all who have supported us so far, it really does mean the difference between existing and not.

  • Read Sullivan’s work on the Slow Travel Berlin website or follow him here on Instagram.