Cultural Topographies of the New Berlin

By Karin Bauer

Since Unification and the end of the Cold War, Berlin has witnessed a series of uncommonly intense social, political, and cultural transformations. While positioning itself as a creative center populated by young and cosmopolitan global citizens, the “New Berlin” is at the same time a rich site of historical memory, defined inescapably by its past even as it articulates German and European hopes for the future. Cultural Topographies of the New Berlin presents a fascinating cross-section of life in Germany’s largest city, revealing the complex ways in which globalization, ethnicity, economics, memory, and national identity inflect how its urban spaces are inhabited and depicted.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Release date: Nov 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9781785337215

Book preview

PART I

Contesting Gentrification: Subculture to Mainstream

CHAPTER 1

Cultural History of Post-Wall Berlin

From Utopian Longing to Nostalgia for Babylon

Katrina Sark

A lot of longing is projected onto this city, which remains a city, but also becomes a projection screen for everything that the name attracts. And Berlin is filling itself again with image-campaigns that imply new economic energies and well-known promises that communicate only one message: new here, different here. That difference is still under construction. It is still sought daily and sometimes caught. Berlin accomplishes this easily because it reminds us of so much, because it was so much, and has still so much to reveal.

–Petra Sorg and Henning Brüns

As the editors of the short essay and fiction compilation Sehnsucht Berlin (Berlin Longing, 2000)¹ recognize in their preface, the changes Berlin underwent in the 1990s and 2000s were accompanied by a significant amount of projected longing and simultaneously by forward-looking urban and cultural image and identity construction. These two modes of reflection and construction define post-Wall Berlin and much of its cultural production. In this chapter I argue that contemporary Berlin is characterized by what I call nostalgia for Babylon—for the pre-gentrified Berlin voids and subcultures of the early 1990s. This nostalgia marks a shift from the established Ostalgie and Westalgie that manifested in literature, memoirs, photography, films, and exhibitions of the post-Wende years. Nostalgia for Babylon is a Berlin-specific phenomenon that hinges on utopian desires for creativity, new modes of living, and alternative social and cultural communities, unleashed in the voids of the 1990s by artists, musicians, filmmakers, and writers who began forging the subcultural scenes and cultural wealth that have transformed contemporary Berlin into a cultural capital. In this volume, Susan Ingram also refers to Berlin as the "de facto (sub)cultural capital of Europe (quoting Enis Oktay) with a cultural life beyond the mainstream, which contributed to its status as a nightlife destination and its subcultural popularity." I argue that this popularity was forged in the pre-gentrified voids and ruins of the Babylonian Berlin of the 1990s.

Nostalgia for Babylon began to manifest itself in art, literature, and films produced in Berlin after reunification, specifically after the major (re)construction was complete, and after Klaus Wowereit adopted the creative city agenda and branding campaigns upon his second reelection as mayor in 2008. Nostalgia for Babylon does not simply aim to restore (to use Svetlana Boym’s terminology) or recreate a disappearing past (as Ostalgie and Westalgie had done), but rather to reflect on the creative possibilities the spatial and economic voids made possible, as well as their effects on the new, reconstructed, and rebranded Berlin. Nostalgia for Babylon is evident in multiple memoirs, short stories, and essays that look back onto Berlin’s creative scenes of the 1990s, as well as in many post-Wall Berlin documentary films, art projects, and photography collections, such as Berlin Wonderland (2014), discussed further by Simon Ward in this volume. My goal in this chapter is to map out a cultural-historical chronology of Berlin’s transformation from a city of voids (as Andreas Huyssen calls it) in the aftermath of the Wende, to what Time magazine referred to in November 2009 as Hip Berlin: Europe’s Capital of Cool, celebrating its many subcultural scenes and its globally recognized and consumed cultural output. Understanding the ways in which this transformation came about, the various economic, political, and cultural forces at play, as well as the cultural and collective consequences of such rapid and significant change manifested through nostalgia and protest allows us to grasp not only the contemporary cultural history of Berlin but also the ways in which we reinvent cities and culture in the creative economy of late capitalism. Post-Wall nostalgia is merely one lens through which these transformations can be traced; urban branding and topographical transformations others. But we cannot really grasp the cultural history and cultural meaning of contemporary Berlin without understanding the roots and significance of its nostalgic expressions and its collective utopian longing and desires.

I divide the city’s cultural history into two phases: pre-1999 Berlin Babylon (as filmmaker Hubertus Siegert called it)² and post-1999 New Berlin (a name introduced by the Berlin Partner marketing agency for its urban branding campaign shortly before the government move from Bonn to Berlin). As German cultural studies scholars including Barbara Mennel have noted, 1999 marked the year in which nostalgia (in the form of Ostalgie and Westalgie) resurfaced in German culture. I take this argument further, analyzing the ways in which Berlin’s nostalgic turn emerged in response to the systematic gentrification and rebranding of the city throughout the 1990s and 2000s, the gradual disappearance of its open spaces, and the increasing impossibility of utopian dreams, desires, and longing for alternative modes of existence and creativity in a globalized and reconstructed city. The New Berlin after 1999, while heralded as open, free, and creative by the Berlin Partner, proved to be a less fertile ground for utopian dreams than East and West Berlin, or the Babylonian city of voids of the early 1990s. The examples of Berlin literature, film, and contemporary art produced during Berlin’s reconstruction that I bring together came to be regarded as the Babylonian chorus of competing opinions³ and demonstrate a vital mix of utopian and nostalgic longing that is at the core of nostalgia for Babylon. This nostalgia emerged as a reaction to Berlin’s waves of urban transformations, in which ongoing gentrification and city branding feed and sustain a perpetual sense of longing and point to the unmaterialized and unlived utopian desires that erupted after the fall of the Wall. I examine post-Wall Berlin cultural production in relation to key historical events, social and political changes, as well as urban transformations that spurred multiple nostalgic waves. In an attempt to define and describe the current phenomenon that I understand as nostalgia for Babylon, I look closely at the differences between these nostalgic waves and the collective longing that continues to fuel them. I begin with a cultural-historical overview of post-Wall Berlin, and include my cultural analysis of how these changes were represented in films, documentaries, literature, and art, and I cross-reference my analysis with other German cultural scholars who have attempted to understand post-Wall Berlin and its culture.

The Babylonian Berlin of the 1990s has been continuously mythologized—as demonstrated by the authors and photographers of Berlin Wonderland: Wild Years Revisited 1990–1996, a volume of testimonies and photographs that accompanied a photo exhibition, edited and curated by Anke Fesel and Chris Keller in 2014, and discussed further in this volume by Simon Ward in regards to Berlin’s cultural memory, its spaces of Zwischennutzung (transitional use), and the eventual displacement of its artists by the creative economy. In today’s post-reconstructed and post-gentrified city, the voids and open spaces originally occupied by the artistic communities and subcultural scenes have been largely replaced by commercial real estate. As Ward notes in his chapter in this volume, quoting David Harvey (2002), culture and oppositional movements form in transitional spaces, of which Berlin had more than plenty in the 1990s, and most of which have now been subsumed by capitalist ventures or remain dormant (as the current slumber state of Tacheles—the former artists’ community mentioned in Karin Bauer and Jennifer Hosek’s introduction). In order to unpack and understand the collective mythologizing attempts that underlie the cultural phenomenon of nostalgia for Babylon, we have to grasp how different Berlin of the early 1990s was from its contemporary reconstruction. The years 1989 to 1999 in Berlin were largely characterized by the removal of the Wall from the city’s core and the creation of vast open spaces and voids in its place, followed by extensive reconstruction projects and economic and demographic shifts in response to the Bundestag’s vote in 1991 to transfer the capital from Bonn to Berlin. This time was accompanied by debates about memory, history, and borders,⁴ as well as by urban marketing campaigns that aimed to construct a new image for the reunified city, attract tourism, and generate revenue and investments. After the creation of Berlin Partner, the marketing agency responsible for capital city marketing, and the initial series of events in 1994 around Potsdamer Platz labeled Baustellensommer (summer of construction sites), Berlin’s branding gradually evolved into the elaborate and much-cited campaign series Schaustelle Berlin (exhibition site Berlin) that spanned from 1996 to 2005.⁵ The first ten years after reunification were also characterized by massive institutional reorganizations, as the Berlin Senate merged the administration of all cultural institutions (museums, theaters, opera houses, concert halls, galleries, etc.) of the former East and West Berlin. What distinguished representations of Berlin at this time was the iconoclastic, self-ironizing symbol of its construction-crane-filled skyline. In 1994 construction at Potsdamer Platz began—the symbolic ground zero of post-Wall reconstruction—charged with contentious debates about reappropriations of this space. That same year, filmmaker Hubertus Siegert began filming the various construction sites in Mitte for his documentary film Berlin Babylon (2001), which shows Berlin as an uninhabitable city of voids and construction sites, with only one reference to its vibrant cultural scenes—the Love Parade. Also in 1994 the German federal government canceled the subsidies that made up 30 percent of the city’s budget.⁶

Figure 1.1. Palace of the Republic. Permission Katrina Sark.

Along with the mass exodus of many former East and West Berliners,⁷ as well as the increased unemployment throughout the 1990s,⁸ the city’s income tax revenues dropped, all contributing to the massive debt accumulation and eventually to Mayor Wowereit’s 2003 proclamation of Berlin as poor but sexy.⁹ In her contribution to this volume, Susan Ingram points out that this was also the title of two works on the New Berlin, by Agata Pyzik (a nonfiction volume) and Geoff Stahl (an edited collection). In 1995 Johannes Gross coined the term Berlin Republic to signal the changes that would accompany the government move to Berlin¹⁰ and promise a hopeful future based on values of democracy and freedom. Characterized by both spatial and ideological openness, as well as by immense creativity and establishment of subcultural scenes, this period was marked by utopian imaginaries that can be traced in music, art, photography, and films produced in Berlin at this time. As Dimitri Hegemann, the founder of Tresor techno club, explained in the documentary film Sub Berlin: The Story of Tresor (2009):

It was a kind of anarchy that was so favorable for subcultural movements and cultural activists because during that time, in the two years between 1990 and 92/93, the authorities had other problems than closing down illegal clubs. It was paradise!¹¹

This celebratory anarchic spirit of the early 1990s is precisely what some Berliners, including Hegemann (as can be seen in the documentary film In Berlin from 2009), have become nostalgic for in the new, gentrified Berlin.

The Babylonian practices of largely unregulated mobility, creativity, experimentation, artistic and entrepreneurial appropriation of spaces and voids began to taper off and fragment with the arrival of the New Berlin. The year 1999 marked the tenth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the completion of major construction projects such as the Reichstag, the government quarters, and Potsdamer Platz. It was the year the federal government moved from Bonn to Berlin, and thus the official start of the Berlin Republic in the new capital, made explicit by the city marketing campaign announcing its arrival (Das neue Berlin ist da!). In the same year, nostalgia resurfaced in German cultural production—first in the form of Ostalgie, as in Thomas Brussig’s short novel Am kürzeren Ende der Sonnenallee (At the Short End of Sun Alley, 1999), followed by Leander Haußmann’s filmic adaptation that same year, and subsequently by Westalgie, in works such as Florian Illies’s Generation Golf (2000) and Sven Regener’s Herr Lehmann trilogy (2001–8), the first part of which was adapted by Leander Haußmann in 2003.¹² The works draw extensively on references to lifestyles and products that marked the affluent society of West Germany and the subsidized, leisurely existence of West Berlin in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The proliferation of these popular texts point to the nostalgic undercurrents of reunified Berlin, characterized by what Linda Shortt identified as the dynamics of memory contests.¹³ Moreover, two dominant streams become apparent in the course of the two decades after reunification in Berlin culture: namely, utopian desires and nostalgic longing. Brad Prager, in an essay on the Re-emergence of Utopian Longing in German Cinema, provides a useful summary of the history of utopian desire in German culture and more recently in German film. Prager identifies utopian impulses in Tom Tykwer’s Heaven (2002) and in Yüksel Yavuz’s Kleine Freiheit (A Little Bit of Freedom, 2002) as manifested in romantic relationships rather than in landscapes of division and reunification.¹⁴ This search for utopian ideals in relationships corresponds with David Clarke’s reading of the 1990s post-reunification films, such as Tom Tykwer’s Run Lola Run (1998) and Wolfgang Becker’s Das Leben ist eine Baustelle (Life Is All You Get, 1997), which he describes as set in the Deleuzian espace quelconque or any-space-whatever of the postmodern, empty, alienating landscape of post-Wall Berlin, where the only possibility of meaning, identity, and belonging can be found in interpersonal connections and relationships.¹⁵ Furthermore, Barbara Mennel demonstrates links between the utopian aspirations of the West Berlin squatting and revolt culture, the subsequent lack of utopia in the Berlin Republic, and the nostalgic impulses of post-Wende films, such as Was tun, wenns brennt? (What to Do in Case of Fire, 2002) and Herr Lehmann (2003).¹⁶ She identifies the nostalgia for a leftist West German past in these films marked not by the revolt era of 1968 but rather by the lesser-known, anarchist, and creative alternative scene of West Berlin’s 1980s.¹⁷ This Westalgie is part of what she describes as the nostalgic turn in popular cinema,¹⁸ which in part emerged as a countermeasure to the numerous literary and cinematic manifestations of Ostalgie, as identified in Sonnenallee (1999) and Good Bye, Lenin! (2003)—both of which prescribe a union of friendship or romance as the solution to the protagonist’s respective experiences of loss. As the cultural historian Svetlana Boym asserted, [T]he twentieth century began with a futuristic utopia and ended with nostalgia,¹⁹ noting that utopian and nostalgic longing are indeed closely linked. Thus, Berlin’s nostalgic turn can be seen as having emerged in response to the systematic reconstruction and gentrification of the city, the gradual disappearance of its open spaces, and the increasing impossibility of utopian dreams, desires, and longing for alternative lifestyles in a more globalized city based on a new creative economy (as discussed by Ward and others in this volume). By the second decade after reunification, with the arrival of the New Berlin, the most common denominator among all the films of the nostalgic turn, such as Good Bye, Lenin! and even popular films such as Sommer vorm Balkon (Summer in Berlin, 2005), was an acute sense of longing, which in mainstream cinema is often resolved through interpersonal relationships. Thus, many of the post-reunification films reveal a gradual shift from collective utopian ideas, previously found in a community or ideology, to a more individual sense of utopia, found in a private union between like-minded individuals, where the idea of utopian possibilities of existence could still be kept alive.

I argue that 2009 marked another shift within the nostalgic turn with the emergence of nostalgia for Babylon, as the year marked the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall with an internationally broadcast celebration, titled Fest der Freiheit (Festival of Freedom), bringing together state leaders, former East and West Berliners, and a whole generation of Berliners who had come of age with no firsthand experience of pre-unified Berlin. Along with numerous exhibitions dedicated to the theme of reunification,²⁰ personal testimonies and narratives of how the fall of the Wall shaped people’s lives were collected and presented in the media.²¹ Many of the German films released that year were documentary films, including In Berlin, The Invisible Frame (2009), and the commissioned Deutschland 09—a compilation of both fiction and nonfiction short films by Germany’s leading filmmakers. Unlike the feature films that focused on interpersonal relationships, many of these documentary films featured elements of nostalgia for Babylon with a critique of the reconstruction, gentrification, and commercialization of urban space. In order to understand what this nostalgia means and how there can even be nostalgia for spatial emptiness and voids (in which multiple creative subcultures emerged in the 1990s), we first have to examine the process of transformation of Berlin’s divided Mitte, which had remained culturally uneventful, wie ein Dornröschenschloss (as sleeping beauty’s castle), until 1989, as Ulrich Gutmair observed in his memoir Die Ersten Tage von Berlin: Der Sound der Wende (The First Days of Berlin: The Sound of Reunification, 2013).²² We also have to look closely at the thwarted hopes and utopian desires of artists and entrepreneurs of the post-Wende pioneer phase in the early 1990s.

The first few years following the fall of the Wall, from 1990 to about 1994, were a time of seemingly limitless possibility, mobility, and creativity, when property ownership was unclear and public authorities didn’t yet work properly,²³ which is crucial for understanding both utopian and anarchic impulses and the subsequent nostalgic turn. In his memoir, Gutmair described this time as a turbulent transition, marked by constant demonstrations, art happenings, and parties, confirming that in the vacuum between the political systems something was emerging that was close to what the utopians of the nineteenth century called anarchy, an order that seemed to function almost without authority.²⁴ Today it may be hard to imagine what the sudden openness and freedom manifested by the fall of the Wall meant for people on either side of the Iron Curtain. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, each of the cities had fostered vibrant underground cultural scenes in music, art, film, and fashion, made subversive and avant-garde, radical and rebellious by the opportunities (and subsidies), restrictions and lack of mobility imposed by the Wall. Within the avant-garde scenes of both East and West Berlin, the emerging punk culture expressed the rebellious and anarchic sentiments during the last decades of the Cold War. Marco Wilm’s documentary film Comrade Couture: Ein Traum in Erdbeerfolie (Comrade Couture: A Dream in Strawberry Foil, 2009) captured this punkish, anarchic creativity of East Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg district of the 1980s, its underground fashion scene, as well as the protagonists’—including photographer Robert Paris, mentioned in Ingram’s contribution to this volume—subsequent nostalgic sentiments and attempts to recapture the past feelings and creativity that have been subdued in the new, gentrified Berlin. Similarly, Ulrich Gutmair, who had moved to West Berlin in October 1989, only a month before the Wall fell, remained haunted by the disappearance not of West Berlin but of the Babylonian landscape of Brachen (voids), the Love Parade, and the artists’ community at Tacheles, with the graffiti on its facade asking Berliners How long is now?—which for him summed up the spirit of Wende and the city in transition.²⁵

In his memoir, Gutmair laments the disappearance of the Babylonian city that created the art scene and the excessive party culture (which Susan Ingram discusses further in this volume as subcultural hedonism), the fact that the former anarchy has become a marketing ploy to lure tourists, investors, and entrepreneurs, and that the early nineties seem like a dream, reflected in the sound of reunification comprised of breakbeats, house and techno, but also of construction noise.²⁶ These sentiments of loss of a particular subcultural creative freedom that erupted in the empty and abandoned spaces of Berlin’s pre-reconstructed Mitte can be found in numerous memoirs, novels, short fiction, art, and documentary films produced after 2009.

After the initial euphoria of unity subsided, Berlin was not yet a very safe place to be, with high unemployment, population mobility, and urban ruins (akin to that in Detroit over the last two decades, which Peter Gölz discusses in relation to the ruinification of Berlin after reunification in this volume)²⁷; violent outbursts against foreigners in the former East; Eastern European mafia mobility; and the drug scene forming around Berlin’s vibrant nightlife (detailed in Ingram’s interpretation of the techno and punk memoirs). This often gloomy and unsafe atmosphere influenced the mood of many films set in post-Wall Berlin, such as Ostkreuz (1991), Das Leben ist eine Baustelle (Life is All You Get), Nachtgestalten (Nightshapes; 1999), and later Knallhart (Tough Enough; 2006) and We Are the Night (Wir sind die Nacht, 2010)—discussed in Gölz’s contribution to this volume. The West Berlin city officials in charge of reunited Berlin sought to cover and fill the empty spaces and abandoned buildings as quickly as possible, creating subsidies for corporate investors and interim-use leases for buildings whose future had not yet been determined. Federal officials in charge were busy establishing institutions such as the Treuhand, responsible for appropriating and selling former GDR industry and manufacturing businesses, while the Berlin Senate was subsidizing investors and selling off real estate in the city center to Daimler, Sony, and other multinational corporations. In this turbulent period, subcultural creative communities also began to emerge, fueled precisely by the temporary lag in regulations of property ownership laws for the empty industrial buildings in the formerly East districts of Mitte, Prenzlauer Berg, Friedrichshain, and along the Spree River. (Stefanie Eisenhuth and Scott H. Krause’s chapter examines developments at what is now called the Mediaspree.) In addition to topographical transformations, vibrant nightlife, and avant-garde creativity, the Babylonian Berlin of the 1990s was also marked by migrant cultures, multiculturalism, and linguistic transitions. The Russian-born author Wladimir Kaminer described the first few years after the dismantling of the Wall as the gold rush years in his autobiographical collection of short stories, Russendisko (2000; Russian Disco), vividly restaged by director Oliver Ziegenbalg in collaboration with Kaminer for the film adaptation in 2012.²⁸ Since relocating from Moscow in 1990, Kaminer has been writing about the transformations in post-Wall Berlin and contributing to its diverse music scene with his Russendisko events, having established himself as a Russian DJ before becoming a Berlin author. The social mobility spurred by the fall of the Wall brought not only Russians and Eastern Europeans to Berlin but also West Germans and Western Europeans who contributed to the transformation of reunified Berlin into the techno capital of the world.

Figure 1.2. Tacheles: How Long Is Now? Permission Katrina Sark.

The Love Parade, perhaps more than any other cultural movement of the 1990s, symbolized utopian dreams in the reunified Berlin Babylon. In her autobiography The Beauty of Transgression: A Berlin Memoir (2011), artist, musician, fashion designer, and author Danielle de Picciotto, who was a co-founder of the Love Parade, described the gradual transformation of the gloomy, melancholy, and rebellious West Berlin into the post-reunification party metropolis during the techno revolution. De Picciotto and her then-partner DJ Motte (Matthias Roeingh), owner and DJ at the well-known club Turbine Rosenheim, traveled to London in 1988 to visit a rave club and came back to Berlin to stage the first Love Parade on Kurfürstendamm in West Berlin in the summer of 1989, only a few months before the Wall fell. In the next few years, the techno wave and the Love Parade expanded and captured not only national but global imaginations, and gradually replaced the anarchic punk culture of the 1980s with a colorful and playful style of techno and electro music and fashion culture in the 1990s. De Picciotto described the first Love Parade as true anarchy that consisted of a small truck, a record player, and crowds of policemen which had managed to traumatize the whole city.²⁹ She contends that this techno utopia allowed the city to earn millions thanks to the Love Parade, finally having something to attract thousands of fun-loving tourists, spending much more money in clubs, bars, hotels, and stores than those who went to see the somber historic landmarks and also functioned as a cultural platform, allowing artists, DJs, and musicians to originate projects within the event, promoting the idea that art and music can have a social influence.³⁰ But much like the new reconstructed Berlin, the Love Parade, which was originally registered as a political demonstration, soon became commercialized and stripped of its original anarchic spirit of celebrating individuality and freedom. De Picciotto and Motte have moved on to other artistic endeavors. Significantly, de Picciotto was featured as one of the protagonists of the documentaries In Berlin and Sub Berlin, while both Kaminer and Motte appear in Mauerpark (2011), speaking out against the systematic gentrification and urban transformation of the city, which Ward discusses in this volume to be the consequence of capital’s need to destroy a location’s uniqueness. As representatives of the Babylonian Berlin, they all comment on the gradual disappearance of Berlin’s voids and the ultimate threat to creative subcultures and artistic communities.

Svetlana Boym identified Berlin between 1989 and 1999 as characterized by both the euphoria and anxiety of transition, noting that at that time, East German police no longer had power over the city and West German police had not yet taken control, so Berlin’s abandoned center became a kind of utopian commonwealth of alternative culture with Oranienburger Straße at its core.³¹ It was in this mixed atmosphere of endings and beginnings, transitions and dismantling, openness and yet unforeseen future structures that the techno movement and its many artistic and entrepreneurial ventures erupted in the voids, and continue to echo to this day.³² During her visit to Berlin in 1998, Boym noted that the participants of the parade crisscrossed the former territory of the Wall with happy indifference, as if walking in a weightless cosmic zone, shaking to a subdued Techno beat.³³ It is precisely this weightless cosmic zone temporarily occupied and reinvented by the techno movement that later became the object of nostalgia for Babylon. De Picciotto’s account of Berlin’s Babylonian state of life in the early 1990s that was about nonconformity and breaking down boundaries, building new bridges, discovering something untouched, unnamed, unpredictable, carried out by a group of ever-changing, multilingual pioneers, is inextricably linked with the creative scene of West Berlin and is not without hints of Westalgie for the feelings of community that existed among the members of the art and music scenes established in the 1980s.³⁴ Throughout the second half of her book, de Picciotto expressed her difficulties adjusting to the increasingly fragmented and commercialized life in the New Berlin and identified the initial closure of the White Trash Fast Food restaurant and the Tresor nightclub in 2005 and 2006, as well as the subsequent repopulation of Berlin by hipsters, as an end of an era.³⁵ Despite her sense of increasing displacement and the fear of losing the very values of liberty of the mind and artistic expression that have been forged in the experimental years of the early 1990s, she found hope in the uncompromising music of Einstürzende Neubauten (and in her romantic union with band member Alexander Hacke, also a protagonist of In Berlin), which, for her, kept the utopian dream of nonconformity alive in the New Berlin. At the end of the book, she concludes,

Figure 1.3. Kastanienallee Squat. Permission Katrina Sark.

I had been watching the surface of the city changing and not understood that the truth lies beyond the facade. As long as I stayed close to this character trait, maintaining my sense of integrity and inquisitiveness, the city I had known when I first arrived in the 1980s would continue existing as a metaphor, and I could find happiness anywhere. I finally understood that happiness did not require living in a certain city but having a certain state of mind.³⁶

In her attempt to come to terms with the New Berlin, de Picciotto constructed a metaphor of a Berlin state of mind to encapsulate her utopian dreams. She described her transference of utopian ideals from a geographical and temporal location to a metaphorical state of mind, which she linked with nonconformity and individuality. This transference from collective to individual utopian possibilities became especially acute after the completion of the major construction projects at Potsdamer Platz (1998) and the government quarters (1999), the arrival of the New Berlin, and following the years of the financial scandal and crisis that lead to the election of Mayor Klaus Wowereit (SPD) in 2001.³⁷ Just as Gutmair, Hegemann, Motte, and other members of the techno movement (and several other protagonists of In Berlin), de Picciotto presents the Babylonian Berlin that has disappeared in the New Berlin with a sense of longing and nostalgia to which most creative people who came to reunified Berlin in the early 1990s can relate. This disappearance and nostalgia are strongly tied to the urban spaces in Mitte that have been utterly transformed and gentrified, as well as to the gradual fragmentation and displacement of artistic communities and scenes out of the new, gentrified neighborhoods.

Another key element of the Babylonian Berlin was its active protest culture; its treatment in sociological and urban studies,³⁸ as well as film and literature, also suggest links between utopian and nostalgic longings. While German feature films of the 1990s and early 2000s envision the possibilities of utopian impulses and escapes through romantic relationships, documentary films, such as Hito Steyerl’s Die leere Mitte (The Empty Middle, 1998), and short fiction, for example Inka Bach’s Besetzer (Squatters, 1997), recorded the ephemeral and short-lived protests of the young squatters at Potsdamer Platz in June 1990, actively opposing Daimler-Benz’s acquisition and reconstruction of the former death strip. Both Steyerl and Bach were interested in borders, physical and symbolic, as well as in the border crossers from Eastern Europe who made their living at the unlicensed bazaars and souvenir stands in the voids.³⁹ Steyerl’s film shows the protests of unemployed German construction workers, who demonstrated (not always peacefully) against Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s employment of low-wage foreign laborers, even in projects as symbolically and economically significant as the reconstruction of the Reichstag. Her film documents the transformation of Potsdamer Platz from marginality to centrality,⁴⁰ and the contested claims to these spaces now divided by the less visible walls of class boundaries and the metal fences of capital. In the final segment of Steyerl’s film, entitled Utopie, the female voiceover narrator informs us that in June 1990, the squatters announced the founding of a Socialist Republic in the death strip. Afterwards their traces are lost. The squatters’ utopian vision of a Free Socialist Republic at Potsdamer Platz, where people who are expats of both East and West Berlin can come together and live an alternative lifestyle, is juxtaposed and visually superimposed with images of construction of the Infobox (a documentation center for the future design of Potsdamer Platz erected in 1995) at Leipziger Platz. This superimposition signals that the 1990s and early 2000s marked the gradual eradication of the West Berlin squatting culture, which has largely been replaced by the branding culture and the creative economy of the New Berlin. The film presents a rather bleak portrait of the Berlin Republic under construction yet ends on a hopeful, perhaps even utopian note, referencing Siegfried Kracauer’s quote narrated over images of holes in the chipped Berlin Wall: There are always holes in the wall we can slip through and the unexpected can sneak in. Thus, the film ends with the hope that possibilities of escape and change exist in the cracks of established systems of domination. The Wall, itself a former symbol of oppression, is reappropriated by Steyerl as a projection screen of utopian possibilities of freedom and escape. As Brad Prager reminds us, utopian impulses tell us more about the present than about the future,⁴¹ and Steyer’s film, Bach’s short fiction, and the techno memoirs remind us to look for the seeds of these unfulfilled desires and collective longing not only in the Babylonian Berlin of the 1990s but also in the post-gentrified New Berlin, where the unlived utopian ideas began to be transformed into nostalgia.

Figure 1.4. LinienStraße Squat. Permission Katrina Sark.

Gentrification became a key factor in the transformation of Berlin Babylon into the New Berlin. In the conclusion of her discussion of Was tun, wenns brennt?, Barbara Mennel refers to the post-Wende social mobility of squatters from the formerly West Berlin neighborhood of Kreuzberg to East Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg:

At the happy end, the characters find themselves at the new center of Berlin, having left behind Kreuzberg. This move reflects part, but not all, of the real story of the generation of squatters from the 1980s. … A great many of those involved in the alternative movement in Berlin left Kreuzberg after unification and moved to Prenzlauer Berg in the former East. By bypassing the 1990s, the film avoids confronting the role played by the former squatters, who displaced East Berlin working-class residents of Prenzlauer Berg and, through their departure, turned Kreuzberg into a neighborhood of primarily Turkish-Germans, branded by the media and politicians as a Turkish ghetto.⁴²

Of course, today Kreuzberg is no longer a Turkish ghetto, and Prenzlauer Berg no longer houses West Berlin squatters. In the process of the city’s transformation into a reunified capital, the population of Prenzlauer Berg, Mitte, and Friedrichshain by West Berlin squatters, which is also explored in Peter Schneider’s novel Eduards Heimkehr (Eduard’s Homecoming, 1999), became a short-lived phenomenon, as they were replaced by West German and Western European young urban professionals a decade later. As Sebastian Lehmann, the editor of Lost in Gentrification (2012), a collection of short fiction about the New Berlin, noted, gentrification devours her own children⁴³ by displacing them when the rents become unaffordable. Many contributors to this anthology identify different waves of gentrification in Berlin and simultaneously attempt to mythologize their own role in the history of Berlin’s transformation into a cultural capital with titles such as, We Built This City, We Built This City on Rock’n’roll. In fact, these authors are several generations of gentrification waves away from the initial, creative pioneer phase that endowed the city with its cultural capital⁴⁴ and its vibrant subcultural scenes. On the one hand, their critique that a city has also to provide for those who contribute less to the gross national income: unemployed, immigrants, retired and low-income earners, and many others. A city cannot act as a profit-oriented corporation or an investment fund⁴⁵ articulates what is a general discontent of both old and new Berliners with the governance practices of the New Berlin. On the other hand, the stories collected in Lehmann’s book reveal that the young generation of new Berliners seems to be less concerned with the welfare of minorities and marginal groups than they are with their own comforts and stability. They are part of what de Picciotto referred to as the hipsters whose arrival in the New Berlin marked the end of an era for her and the previous generations of creative Berliners. Maik Martschinkowsky’s short story Gentrivacations, as well as other works in this collection, present the New Berlin’s systematic gentrification with humor and irony, poking fun both at the leisure-seeking new Berliners and the city marketing discourse that has entered the vernacular communication of Berliners, evoked by the construction worker who orders the occupying leisure-seeking Berliners blocking him from doing his job to go and be Berlin! somewhere else.⁴⁶

Post-Wall Berlin authors can be divided between those who moved to Berlin before 1999 and identify themselves as the creative pioneers and those who moved there after 1999, often not by choice but due to corporate relocation to the new capital, seeing their aim to civilize⁴⁷ and repopulate Berlin’s new and reconstructed Mitte. Increasingly, the members of the latter group produce works that satirize their experiences in the new but still barbaric Berlin; for example, the authors of the two volumes edited by Claudius Seidl, the former culture editor of Spiegel who relocated to Berlin in 2001, titled Hier spricht Berlin: Geschichten aus einer barbarischen Stadt (This Is Berlin Speaking: Stories from a Barbaric City, 2003) and Schaut auf diese Stadt: Neue Geschichten aus dem barbarischen Berlin (Look at this City: New Stories from the Barbaric Berlin, 2007). The short texts in these volumes are often written in the first person, primarily by West Germans with full-time corporate jobs and company cars, who often complain about everything that is wrong with Berlin in comparison to Hamburg or Munich.⁴⁸ They find Berlin uninhabitable,⁴⁹ full of construction and renovation sites, too noisy, with too many unemployed people who have no money but too much time,⁵⁰ and who don’t seem to understand why they—the working professionals—are always in a hurry and expect better service. As Seidl’s volumes and other works set in the New Berlin attest, utopian aspirations have either been replaced by satire (Kaminer, Brussig) or by nostalgias (Ostalgie, Westalgie, and nostalgia for Babylon).

Along with literature and film, contemporary art from this time also demonstrates a mix of utopian and nostalgic longing. In time for the commemorations of the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 2009, the Berlinische Galerie put on an exhibition titled Berlin 89/09: Art Between Traces of the Past and Utopian Futures (2009–10), which featured numerous works of art depicting Berlin’s spatial transformations, utopian ideas, and nostalgic longing. Perhaps the most utopian conceptual work in the exhibition, titled Baut Tatlin (Build Tatlin, 1993), was by Norbert Kottmann, who set up and photographed a sign in the empty voids of Potsdamer Platz, advocating the construction of the unbuilt tower proposed by the Russian avant-garde architect Vladimir Tatlin in 1919 for a Monument to the Third International that symbolized a breakthrough into a new age—albeit a failed breakthrough.⁵¹ Kottmann’s sign proposed the tower to be used as the Parliament Building for the United Nations of Euroasia, thus transforming the voids of Potsdamer Platz into a site for architectural and social utopias and simultaneously capturing something of the sense of social optimism that was generated and became widespread with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the reunification of Germany, and the accompanying end of the Cold War.⁵² Kottmann’s art project demonstrated a great deal of irony, not only proposing to build a monumental structure associated with Soviet communism amid the future headquarters of Western capitalist corporations, albeit repurposing it from celebrating communist ideology to housing the UN parliament, but also juxtaposing a tower that was never built with both the temporary emptiness of the site and the corporate towers to be erected there in the next years. Interestingly, I. M. Pei’s annex to the Deutsches Historisches Museum at Under den Linden includes a glass stairwell structure that resembles Tatlin’s utopian tower, thus a version of Tatlin’s design made it into Berlin’s gentrified