This Week on the Daily

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Davoser Café, 1928

On the twenty-fifth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Jenny Erpenbeck remembers her childhood in East Berlin: “My parents would bring me to the end of Leipziger Strasse, to the area right in front of the Wall … This was where the world came to an end. For a child, what could be better than growing up at the end of the world?”

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And Brenna Hughes Neghaiwi visits East Berlin’s famous Karl-Marx-Allee, where the Stalinist architecture still reminds of the dreams of another era.

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“At the Well”: four new paintings by East Germany’s Neo Rauch.

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Sam Stephenson on the insightful, unconventional approach to biography on display in Tennessee Williams: Notebooks.

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Why is a penny called a penny? Damion Searls looks at the etymology of our coins.

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Plus, Sadie Stein looks back at the dark days of her creative-writing workshop and Black Bart the Outlaw Poet strikes again. (“I’ve labored long and hard for bread,/ For honor, and for riches,/ But on my corns too long you’ve tread,/ You fine-haired sons of bitches.”)