#219: what's next for Görli?

I finally made it to Buck & Breck, a cocktail bar on plenty of best-of lists, and I can recommend it. They have speakeasy vibes, only take cash and the invoice was... interesting. Worth checking out, but they allow smoking.

Atlas Above is a very mesmerising page of city maps which started with Berlin. Try toggling the map style. The author says that it's not AI drawn. If that is really so, I'd add some images of the actual sketches.

What a process! The negotiation between Linke, Greens and SPD for the new coalition agreement is only expected to be finished in early January. One of the reasons is that more than 300 people are negotiating in 14 working groups (Germans just love a good working group, commission or a committee!). I will do a deep dive into the agreement after we get our hands on it. RBB prepared this A-Z briefing on the process. Worth having a look. Related, Linke MP Vanessa Emde's position remains unresolved: Linke's parliamentary leadership says it sees no basis for working with her due to her stance on Israel, but they haven’t excluded her yet.

I was always a big fan of lessons learned and self-reflection so I am happy to see that BVG was also looking into how to improve their performance this winter. They will fit trams with brass-edged strips to scrape ice off overhead wires from December onwards. A special train will also be clearing the power rails on the U1–U3. Let's see how it works.

Positive news from the federal government: Justice Minister Stefanie Hubig wants to introduce an affirmative consent standard in German sexual offence law, ten years after the ‘no means no’ reform. Her argument: people can freeze during an assault and be unable to express opposition, which means that silence isn't consent. The coalition already agrees on ‘only yes means yes’ for minors, and wants the same rule for adults. The Bundestag also voted to raise the minimum sentence to five years (from 3) for sexual assaults and robberies involving knockout drops.

DIW Berlin has published a scenario calculator related to socialising Berlin's housing companies. You can change several parameters (compensation, rents and borrowing costs) which you can then use in your future informed discussions with your peers and political opponents.

Imagine if the Ordnungsamt controllers could do something better than checking resident parking stickers? In another universe, Berlin already has camera-equipped cars scanning number plates to check parking permissions as they drive past. But in this one, not yet, because funding for the digital permit system hasn't been agreed and the districts are too broke to buy the cars. The technical concept is ready, but the permit system hasn't even been commissioned. Allow me to smartass: there is no money to automate this, so we keep paying controllers to do it manually. So we end up with less money. Not to even mention the joke pricing of the resident parking.

Maybe this is an opportunity? One in ten jobs at Berlin's youth welfare offices is vacant: 421 of 4,180 full-time positions were unfilled at the end of last year. Staff is overworked (176 overload notices in the first nine months of 2026, last year: 154 in total). The reason for the vacancies is probably also education and experience requirements: here are two job descriptions, one in Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg and the other in Lichtenberg. Both are full-time, 40h positions on TV-L S14, with base pay of €4.0–5.6k gross/month, depending on pay step.

Ryanair is shrinking, but Lufthansa's Eurowings is expanding its routes from BER, now with four weekly flights to Rome and three to Bologna. Daily Dubai flights start in November. They offer 38 winter destinations from Berlin. Full list.

Solaris (Berlin, fintech) will remain under BaFin's special supervision [more].

Peek & Cloppenburg (Düsseldorf, fashion retail) must vacate three flagship stores as the Cloppenburg family rents them to a competitor Inditex (known for Zara, Berschka and Massimo Dutti) [more].

Elli (Berlin, EV charging), Volkswagen's energy and charging unit, is restructuring its business to reach profitability. This could also mean job cuts [more].

Hivebuy (Berlin, procurement software) is being acquired by Conrad Electronic.

Cohere (Toronto and Berlin, AI) completed its merger with Heidelberg's Aleph Alpha and raised almost €5B, led by Schwarz Gruppe (Lidl, Kaufland). It wants to win government contracts on both sides of the Atlantic.

Tesla (US, autos) opened a new engineering centre in Köpenick, Berlin. For now for 250 employees.

Delivery Hero (Berlin, food delivery) passed 1B quarterly orders for the first time, up 11.5%, with revenue up 22% to €4.3B, and raised its 2026 EBITDA outlook to €980M-1.02B.

GetYourGuide (Berlin, travel experiences) posted Q3 2026 results: global GMV up 25% YoY on 12M+ experiences booked, with North America GMV up 34% YoY.

Blocks (Berlin, cloud cost management) hit €25M in annualised revenue seven months after launching.

Langdock (Berlin, AI software) reported €60M in annual recurring revenue.

Berlin Senate dropped potential wind-power sites, including Jungfernheide, from its plans [more].

The old tunnel beneath Unter den Linden is being filled in, with all traffic between Charlottenstraße and Schlossbrücke diverted from 11 November [more].

Heise: Germany's digital driving licence is coming at the end of November [more].

Charité doctors will receive more pay under a new collective agreement, while nurses voted for an indefinite strike. Negotiations will continue this week [more].

Berlin is set to get two big New Year's Eve parties again: free entry, fireworks and DJs at the Brandenburg Gate, plus a planned event at Großer Stern, registered with police as a rally for 5k people under a title referencing the UN's World Peace Day. Can’t imagine a worse place to spend the evening.

Any handball fans reading this? Berlin will host matches at the 2029 Handball World Championship [more].

An MP asked how long Berlin universities take to issue graduation certificates: average processing times aren't recorded and there are no plans to start, but the 23 October reply lists about 600 students awaiting documents at TU and about 534 at HTW, which estimates 100 are past the statutory deadline [more].

An MP asked what is planned for the former Coca-Cola site in Hohenschönhausen: a logistics centre with three new warehouse halls alongside the existing storage operation, but no building permit or construction timetable was in place as of 23 October, and the application's estimate of about 500 jobs remained uncertain because future tenants were unknown [more].

An MP asked about shortages in care placements for children and young people: Berlin had 8.81k residential places on 15 October, up 7.3% since the end of 2021, but the Senate still reports gaps in foster care and provision for complex needs, without recording how many children are waiting or for how long [more].

MAGA is dead and this was probably the best news of the week also because the best is still to come for Europe. Because I liked a couple of videos, the algo was of course feeding me all the same stuff from that point on and I am seriously impressed by El-Sayed and his amazing argumentation skills. Millennials are rising in the US, when does it happen here in Europe? In two years! Derek Thompson says that The Trump Decade is Over.

Speaking of algo, it's also clear that it's incredibly dumb. I wish tech companies knew more about me by Rakhim. I am sure you noticed the same things yourself. "No, I am not a high-earning expat in Germany interested in buying and apartment for tax benefits, I just checked one dude and his profile to see what type of people are doing these consulting services and now you are showing me all these dudes, I didn't know there are so many dudes with the same business ffs."

It's the first time in history that we are chatting with Big Tech instead of chatting with others on the channels provided by Big Tech. So be careful when talking to your AI bots about things you don't want others to know about, because "ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini & Co. share user data with third parties – sometimes even granting access to chats and sensitive info." Did you notice those images in ChatGPT that started to appear recently? It's to prepare you for ads.

Instagram: Again Baron Ryan talking common sense about film production. Why are some things so stupid and badly run?

Reddit: After they closed their location in Graefekiez, the discussion about LAP Coffee returned to Reddit. The amount of bad takes is immense. I am also still waiting on when they go bankrupt as predicted by my fellow newsletterist at the height of the debate last year. (My take: not going to happen.)

YouTube: For those who don't know it, Das ist Berlin Bitch is an Instagram channel with weird clips from the town. It's also a YouTube channel where you can see the best of compilations. Remember kids, this is the city of opportunity.

Refine: Refine is an offline AI grammar checker I've been using for a couple of weeks. I can recommend it to all Mac users. It runs on a local model, so your text doesn't go to the cloud.