Lauren van Vuuren

I am a South African writer and trained historian who has lived and worked in Berlin since 2014. I innocently came to the city in 2012 on an Erasmus Mundus Fellowship to the Free University. All that was intended then was three months of research on Ulrike Meinhof and the RAF, and instead, the Hauptstadt swallowed me whole. My academic interest in post-war West German radicalism morphed into an enduring, even irrational passion for Berlin, that was radically transforming of my life, and of me.

It was in Berlin that I finally learnt to be free. That has meant being able to teach, write and work in ways I could never have imagined possible in my life before Berlin. This website is a portfolio of some of that work.