Paul Ostermann

I trained as an architect before guiding, so Böttcherstraße's compressed, strange brickwork still fascinates me more than almost anything else in Bremen. On camera I walk the narrow street end to end, pointing out how one coffee merchant funded the whole Expressionist rebuild in the 1920s against the taste of his own time. I explain the reliefs above several doorways and the bronze frieze that still draws people to look upward rather than ahead. I keep my commentary tight in a street this narrow, since there is barely room for anything but the architecture itself. Video guiding suits a street built for close looking.