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MUNICH

Wrong number: Munich image printed on Berlin phone books

In a galling mix-up for the proud residents of the German capital, Berliners will have to use a phone book for the next year that appears to belong the city's southern rival Munich.

Wrong number: Munich image printed on Berlin phone books
This is Munich calling. Photo: DPA

Some 700,000 new Berlin phone books are now available at local post offices, but the image on the cover is a young man with his laptop in front of Munich’s city hall, instead of Berlin’s famous red brick city hall, known as the Rotes Rathaus.

“Two images were switched,” TVG Verlag publishing house spokesperson Frank Wenz told Berlin daily Der Tagesspiegel on Thursday, in what he called a “very regrettable mistake.”

TVG Verlag worked together with Deutsche Telekom Medien GmbH to produce telephone books for Berlin, Munich and Hamburg. Wenz told the paper that TVG Verlag discovered their error only after the books had gone to print.

“We apologize to all Berliners who are disturbed by this,” Wenz told the paper.

The Berlin phone book comes in two volumes, but only the L-Z book bears an image from the wrong city. The A-K volume features a photo of Berlin’s main train station.

“Sometimes you can’t see the forest for the trees,” Wenz told Der Tagesspiegel.

“We concentrated so hard on preventing mistakes on the inside of the books,” he said, explaining that up to 30 percent of the information had to be updated.

“But no numbers from Bavaria slipped in there,” he joked.