The Arcades Review is a new quarterly English-language print journal focused on arts and culture being made or exhibited in Berlin.

There is also an online component, Arcades Daily, a guide to cultural goings on in the city.

The name is inspired by Walter Benjamin's monumental "Arcades Project" ("Das Passagen-Werk"), unfinished at the time of the author's 1940 suicide.
Benjamin is one of Berlin's most illustrious native sons and his uniquely perceptive blend of literary criticism, historical inquiry and cultural investigation inspires our own writing about the arts and their role in society.
Benjamin called "The Arcades Project," "the theater of all my struggles and ideas." We hope to create a unique and opinionated record of art - defined in the broadest possible sense - in contemporary Berlin. Like Benjamin's fragmentary opus, Berlin is incomplete, a city "condemned to always become and never to be," in Karl Scheffler's memorable phrase. Scheffler wrote those words in 1910, but they still cling to Berlin over a century later.

Berlin speaks in present progressive. It is constantly revealing itself in surprising and provocative ways. Berlin's energy, unique today among the major European cities, has made it a magnet for creative minds the world over. Despite recent debates about gentrification, corporate development and rampant commodification, Berlin remains singularly refreshing for culture that is understood as something vital and heterogeneous.

I'm not merely talking about the most visible of Berlin's cultural exports, from the electronic dance scene to the Hochkultur imprimatur of the Berliner Philharmoniker.

Berlin has long been a city of paroxysms and paradoxes. At every turn, it reveals an ethos of experimentation, curiosity and a belief in cultural necessity that allows art to flourish everywhere from a private gallery in someone's fourth story walk up to the any one of the city's lavishly subsidized cultural institutions.

We look forward to providing you with serious cultural writing about Berlin. Happy reading!

A.J. Goldmann
Founder & Editor-in-chief