Visit to local community leads to Web site for Berlins everywhere

(March 26, 2010) Berlin will get additional Internet exposure from a site seeking photos, videos and emails about the town. Although the site is about Berlin specifically, it is about every town in the United States named Berlin, not just the town seven miles from Ocean City.

Berlin, Md., however, was instrumental in the formation of the project.

In the summer of 2006, Patrizia Kommerell and Gabriel Shalom took a weekend trip to Rehoboth Beach, Del. The two saw a sign for Berlin, Md., and decided to pay a visit because they had been thinking about moving to Berlin, Germany.

“We were curious to see what this other Berlin was like,” Kommerell says on the first, and so far the only, episode on the video on the Internet site, www.postcards fromBerlin.com.

“As we walked down Main Street, we were fascinated,” Shalom said.

They took many photos in Berlin, some of which they show in the video. They say, however, that they felt like tourists and now they would like people in Berlins to send them postcards and to tell them what their towns are really like. They want the people’s postcards to tell a story. Then they will select the 12 most interesting stories to make an episodic feature film.

Kommerell and Shalom started the Web site from Berlin, Germany, where they moved some time after their trip to Berlin, Md. Their design and production company, KS12, produces Web sites, graphics, videos and sound and various other enterprises. They describe it as a multidisciplinary creative studio.

According to the Internet site, 32 places in the United States are named Berlin. The Web masters want people who live in any of the 32 Berlins to contribute information about their towns.

Although the site says it is a collaborative storytelling project, it was not quite ready for postcards and stories or anything else for quite some time. People signed up to be notified by e-mail of when submissions would be accepted.

The Web site, www.postcardsfrom Berlin, com officially launched Friday, March 19. The first postcard on the site was a photo of the Taylor House Museum sent by Ocean City Today on Monday.