Oxfam Schöneberg – International books for charity

Schöneberg’s Hauptstraße’s history could be traced back to the Middle Age, and still today it is the Main Street of this part of the city of Berlin, as its name signifies. However, its Oxfam Buchshop Berlin-Schöneberg is somewhat new: it was opened in 2019. Located between two bio-supermarkets, this Oxfam bookstore has not only a regularly changed and thematic window showcases of some of its most beautiful books, it is spacious and warm-welcoming. Although its showcased collection is relatively smaller than the secondhand and antiquarian bookstores around, Oxfam Schöneberg offers a surprisingly interesting variety of international books. I found some very useful books in Chinese, Japanese and Russian for the first time when I visited this new branch in West Berlin. To name two most pertinent examples, I bought an English-Japanese bilingual reader with texts by Japanese author Ryōtarō Shiba (1923-1996) and an early printed-in-Taiwan English book to learn Chinese idiomatic expressions, for a very reasonable price.