On the 27th, Joon (a visiting friend) and I met a local woman in her borough--Neukoelln. Joon and I had the morning to ourselves and he was still recovering from jetlag, so we walked the neighborhood just north of the Landwehr Canal near Görlitzer Park. Like Friedrichshain to the east acoss the Spree, it's a colorful, energetic neighborhood. We drank coffee across from a mosque and then visited the Kreuzberg City Museum. 
I loved the exhibits--they were simple, yet very effective. I regret that I brought no camera with me. Kreuzbergers take pride in their migrant heritage. The first wave of migrants were Huguenots fleeing from religious persecution in France during the 18th century, the immediate postwar period saw an influx of Germans from Pomerania and Silesia, following the construction of the Berlin Wall there were Guest-Workers from Turkey and Vietnam as well. The most recent have been asylum-seekers from the war in Bosnia. The woman at the museum who led me around was muslim and wore a head-scarf. The temporary exhibit concerned working class resistence to the Nazis during the war. Kreuzberg was a highly industrialized working-class district in the city. In 1848 rebelling workers actually smashed steam engines in a Luddite fury. This was an important year in the history of USM because it inspired Peter Engelmann to leave illiberal Germany for a more democratic America.
Kreuzberg was the center of Werner Siemens' (inventor of the Dynamomachine und Starkstromtechnik) business activities from 1847. The borough is also known for its breweries, textiles production, Bechstein pianos, and it's many publishing companies: Mosse, Scherl, and Ullstein (pubisher of All Quiet on the Western Front). During the 1919 Spartacist uprising, the Newspaper quarter was the site of heavy fighting between revolutionaries and the government. Turks began to arrive in Kreuzberg as Guest-workers after the construction of the Berlin Wall. The first immigrants were young, professionally-oriented, secular women. Things have changed a great deal since then, and now many women wear some kind of headscarf. There is a general trend among young, born-in-the-west muslims towards greater piety (sometimes even Islamicist extremism) as well as ethnic nationalism. That is something that only really began in the 90s, and seems to reflect a widespread development throughout Western Europe. Ian Buruma analyses the causes and consequences of this second-generation “backlash” against assimiliation in his book Murder in Amsterdam, which focuses on the murder of Theo van Gogh in 2005. Only last week, a group of immigrant muslim youths attacked a Jewish dance troupe in Hannover, throwing stones and shouting epithets.
