Mark Twain in Berlin

Andreas Austilat is the deputy head of the Sunday magazine of the Berlin-based newspaper Der Tagesspiegel. He has been working there since 1987 and has conducted interviews with astronauts (Thomas Reiter and Ulrich Walter), actors (Jan Josef Liefers, Hannelore Elsner, and Monty Python star Michael Palin), musicians (Rosanne Cash), and scientists (Ian Kershaw, Sergej Khrushchev). He also oversees the history section, spoke with survivors of the Hindenburg disaster, and discovered the long-lost copy of the oldest existing feature film about the sinking of the Titanic from 1912. He has published three volumes of travel reports from the Berlin area as well as a book about the Berlin suburb of Zehlendorf. Austilat was born in Berlin and lives there with his wife, two children, and a dog. He also studied history in Berlin, as he originally wanted to become a teacher, but then chose a different path and switched to journalism.

Mark Twain was born in Missouri in 1835. He piloted a Mississippi steamboat before becoming America's most famous author, humorist, and travel writer. He often visited Germany and lived in Berlin during the winter of 1891-92.

Lewis H. Lapham, born in 1935, is an American author and the founder of Lapham's Quarterly. Eva Claudia Schweitzer is the founder of Berlinica, the publisher of English books from Berlin. She lives in Berlin and New York. She has authored nine books herself, as well as a board game about Berlin and a doctoral thesis on New York's Times Square. Her latest book was "Trump Party." She has worked as a journalist for 25 years, based in New York since 1998, and previously served as a local editor for Der Tagesspiegel in Berlin and taz. In 1992, she received the Theodor-Wolff Prize for an article about a murder in the Berlin construction scene.