Working on the Myth: City Neighborhood Culture as Global
Culture
Does social
proximity produce nothing but homogeny in culture and fashion? Ulf
Poschardt on the miracle cure of Berlin Mitte, small-scale big cities, and
the tranquility of global Bohemian ghettos.
They made it. In the
summer of 2001, the WMF Club in
Berlin provided the arena for a memorable concert of the New York
electro-pop band Fischerspooner
. The Manhattan-based band was widely celebrated because their sound had
become the sound of the German capital, or, to be more precise, its
neo-liberal Bohemian quarter. Fischerspooner was the band in Mitte
- the district between
Alexanderplatz, the Hackesche
Höfe, and Invaliden Strasse. Following German reunification, the
area, part of former East Berlin, was restored in record time as the
choice cut of real estate agents and homespun experts alike. Throughout
the early nineties, restoring Berlin to its former identity as a modern
cosmopolitan city seemed to be less the task of the large opera houses,
theaters, and film studios than that of a tirelessly toiling German, or
more specifically Berlin, youth.
It was primarily a young middle
class that moved in, one that had been longing to finally realize their
dream of living in a cool German city of real cosmopolitan caliber; in the
process, they helped boost the value of what was once the city's center.
The mission was accomplished with astonishing speed. Since the
mid-nineties, the area has become - with increasing urgency - the epitome
of a new German hip, an elegant avant-garde. A group of people largely
below the age of forty settled in, a self-styled "info elite" supported
both by the Kunst-Werke, run
by the Mitte pioneer and social engineer Klaus Biesenbach, and the many
galleries that opened on and around August Strasse.
Michael Bach: Ohne Titel, o. J.,Deutsche Bank Collection. Courtesy Galerie
Heinz-Martin Weigand.
In terms of
Fischerspooner, Berlin was the first place to decipher the trendiest
codes of urban Manhattan culture in all its facets, a seemingly miracle
remedy that cured the peculiarly German trauma of congenital uncoolness.
For Berlin, this marked the end of a time of rebuilding and formation that
began with the fall of the Berlin Wall and that took on increasingly
restorative features towards the late nineties. Electronic dancing music
became the motor of all invention, carrying on what's commonly considered
to be the typically German coldness of bands such as
Kraftwerk and Neu (read NYT article
here). At the same time, cultural products continued mushrooming in the
shadow of that peculiar aesthetic comprised of West Berlin depression and
severity and celebrated in the films of
Wim Wenders or
Robert van Ackeren, the stage productions of
Einstürzende Neubauten, or the theater of the
Schaubühne.
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Yet in contrast to these cultural phenomena, dance music
had what it takes to turn millions of people on, and that's exactly what
it did in the mid-nineties - with the
Love Parade , techno came close to becoming mainstream culture all
around Germany.
Sabine Hornig: Ohne Titel (Karl-Marx-Allee), 2002,
Deutsche Bank Collection
Although other regional
centers such as Frankfurt or Munich had their own techno scenes, the two
icons of techno and dancefloor culture were born in the cellars around
Potsdamer Platz, Berlin's destroyed city center: the WMF Club and
Tresor. The fact that these cellars were products of the Second World
War and Germany's later division tickled the cozy feeling of horror
already reflected in the ravers' camouflage and combat look, a kind of
superficial contemplation on a historical, martial, and political legacy.
The perfect anti-idyll had apparently been found. Borrowing on the feeling
of exile that David Bowie,
Iggy Pop, or Depeche Mode
had found in Berlin of the seventies and early eighties, the grey misery
and leaden severity of the reunified city was considered to be "inspiring"
and "up to date." Whether in the pop songs of Norwegian bands such as
Briskeby or the novels of
Norman Ohler, Berlin - and especially the cheerily post-modern East Berlin
- was turning up everywhere as a location steeped in aura. Due to a
dialectic twist of the zeitgeist, the anti-idyll had become the new idyll.
The zeitgeist of the late nineties and the new millennium had found its
place.
David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Lou Reed
While Berlin
conquered its status as cosmopolitan city, the territories outside Berlin
were deemed provincial. This redefinition already sounded reactionary and
demonic back in 1923, when
Oswald Spengler was busy producing his myths of decline: "Instead of a
world, a city, a point at which the entire life of whole countries
collects while the rest dries out; instead of a mature people at one with
the earth, there is a new nomad, a parasite, the big city dweller, the
pure man of deeds lacking in tradition and emerging in a formlessly
fluctuating mass, irreligious, intelligent, infertile, with a deep
aversion to farming folk (…) and thus a tremendous step towards the
inorganic, towards the end."
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