Jan Gympel, Germany

Keynote Lecturer, “History of Mobility in Berlin”

Jan Gympel, born in 1966 and grown up in West Berlin started working as a journalist in 1983, first for the alternative Kreuzberg monthly “Südost-Express”, in 1987 as a professional freelancer for daily newspapers like “die tageszeitung (taz)”, “Der Tagesspiegel”, “Frankfurter Allgemeine” and “Die Welt”, magazines like “Zitty” and technical periodicals like “Bauwelt” (about architecture) and “Signal” (about traffic, primarily in Berlin). In 1994 he was awarded the Deutscher Preis für Denkmalschutz (German Award for the conservation of monuments and historic buildings) for an eight part article series on Berlin railway architecture and its conservation, published in “Der Tagesspiegel”. Gympel’s main focus is on traffic and Berlin history, architecture and its conservation, film and television. He is the founder of the project Berlin-Film-Katalog and curates film programmes at Brotfabrikkino and at Zeughauskino. Since 1990 he has published numerous articles in books and about twenty books, some of them about traffic in Berlin. Gympel lives in Berlin.