deborah.cole

The past we step into

23 February 2021

Like a message in a bottle, a blog post here, by longtime Berlin correspondent Deborah Cole, reached a 97-year-old Jewish woman on the other side of the globe, in Australia. In the middle of the pandemic, they began to share their stories about keeping history alive.

Let them come to Berlin

6 November 2019

"1920s Paris, 1970s New York, 1990s Berlin. Is it always clear to people that they're living through a golden age?" writes Deborah Cole, who has been reporting from Berlin since the 1990s.

"For me at least, when I first arrived in the German capital a quarter century ago, I worried I'd already missed the party. Little did I know the band was just warming up."

The traces they leave

3 May 2018

"Arriving in Berlin in the swinging mid-1990s, I found myself drawn not only to the young people reinventing the city, but also to their grandparents who were often generous with their recollections, sometimes dark and traumatic, sometimes rousingly inspiring," writes Berlin-based correspondent Deborah Cole.

AFP / John Macdougall
AFP / John Macdougall
AFP / John Macdougall
AFP / Johannes Eisele

Where history never lets you be

1 February 2017

"I have lived and reported from the heart of peaceful, prosperous Germany for more than two decades but am still not entirely steeled to the jabs to the gut you can get walking through its public spaces," writes Berlin-based correspondent Deborah Cole.

"No one does memorials quite like the Germans, accosting you in the streets as you go about your business. Particularly in Berlin, the past is never the past, even in a city with a knack for constantly reinventing itself."

11 Days on Planet Cinema

23 February 2015

"Being a Berlin correspondent these days means a hard focus on crises like Ukraine, Greece and jihadist violence in Europe. But come each February, the spotlight shifts for me as the global cinema industry descends on the German capital for the Berlin film festival. It always means a head-spinning change of gears," writes AFP's Deborah Cole. "The Berlinale, born when West Berlin was a Cold War outpost, takes pride in balancing gritty world cinema with the big star vehicles. We journalists like to see ourselves as shrewd natural sceptics, holding up our end of the bargain with readers. So it's always a little jarring going to the press conferences with movie stars that inevitably begin with an effusive round of applause."

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Deborah Cole

The past we step into

Let them come to Berlin

The traces they leave

Where history never lets you be

11 Days on Planet Cinema

About AFP