It's sexy to complain about Berlin, so much that it's a virtual necessity to living there. Visitors to the city might scratch the surface of its cultural life, political problems, or social atmosphere, but those who try to live in it can get a deeper understanding, especially of how difficult it is to actually survive here for many people not the beneficiaries of parental trust funds - and of how things are changing. Berlin used to be be both a saviour and a curse at the same time, a city which both compounds and alleviates precarity. But now something entirely else seems to be happening in the city.
I have lived here for 10 years, and never written about it. I'm not in love with Berlin, and I never have been - the pretentious and superficial parts always prevented me from really connecting with it. I live here in a marriage of convenience. The parts that excite me, especially the authentic radical left politics which somehow survived here in our neoliberal context, built discourse, and worked to protect so much that has been destroyed in other places, have largely disappeared or been twisted beyond recognition, even as my favourite low-key haunts have been painted over with designer paints. Now, the city looks and feels to me a lot like any other place, its rough edges smoothened out, with a shiny Big Tech gloss over every street lamp.
A street scene in Kreuzberg, Berlin. Photo from me.
Since the 90s, Berlin has been in a state of adjustment. The fall of the Berlin Wall created a period of flux that produced a lot of strange phenomena - empty buildings, especially, which were sometimes squatted before being turned into cultural spaces or social projects. These gaps were often filled by hungry investors, conglomerates who plunged money into the former East, often without any plan for how to actually deploy what they bought. Changing governments have faced problems of excessive speculation in a marketplace that no longer services any actual need, with space distributed by a roulette wheel of capital and government interest. The desire to regulate this situation meets the reality of global capitalism, sometimes creating agreements, but more often something like a permanent stasis.
The situation created gaps which people can fit into, but also fall through. In 2010, the unemployment rate here was 13% - much higher than the rest of Germany, which was about 7%. This was because of a variety of factors that created a singular type of social mix - the rent was much lower than other global cities, for example, which attracted especially those eligible for government benefits, including the elderly, the disabled, poor people, and certain categories (but not many) of migrant. A Euro in Berlin can be spun much further than in other places, and this attracted people who couldn't afford to live anywhere else. As the city has transformed and the unemployment rate has almost halved to 8%, the rents have gone up as much as 50% and a lot of the colour and flavour of the city has left. Now, the vibrant mix is replaced largely with English-speaking Big Tech workers, who banally replaced the Gastarbeitern of the 1970s, elderly, and disabled through a process of gentrification. Developers found a (often quasi-legal) way to push people out who did not "economically fit" the new image of the city, and replace them with those who did, driving up their profits and destroying the fragile social harmony in which the city existed.
There are those over the years who saw this situation unfolding and tried to, if not stop it, then at least mitigate it. Some battles were fought and won - the 2021 Berlin referendum to resocialise housing, and corporate blocks often regulated to include NGOs and other not-for-profit or social organisations. On the informal level, temporary art spaces still occasionally occupy spaces waiting to be renovated - and even if this whitewashing creates a benefit for the developers PR, there is still remnants of a handshake that historically saw the creation of many of the city's art spaces. But the COVID pandemic seems to have been der Tropfen sein, der das Fass zum Überlaufen bringt. Spit in Kreuzberg now and you will hit a tech startup, taking advantage of the image of Berlin as a cultural capital that attracts those still hung up on an aesthetic of mystique, exploitation, and individualism.
Why write about this? Well, one of the features of this story is that is seems to be a story no longer being told. As new people have arrived, old narratives have disappeared. The city is swept up in a new ideology now, a "smooth", streamlined functioning that evades criticism, and is heavily resistent to any actual change, content instead to proceed the usual path towards a banal, superficial, "lifestyle"-focused consumer existence.
On the level of theatre criticism, which this platform is about, things have changed too - or more accurately, accelerated. Where previously there was a trend towards critical writing being confused with "coverage" and seeking out "positive coverage" for performances in order to get more funding, now this push for self-branding and publicity is in overdrive. The critical voice, critical spectatorship in general, is all but dead, and the viewer or spectator is influenced in not only what to read but how they should read it, with a carefully-designed illusion of free choice and autonomy an emotional rather than practical necessity. When offered actual free choice, people become noticably uncomfortable. Performances are attended not by curious audience members, but by the clique of the artist and dependent on the reach of their hype, with the positive reception a foregone conclusion, and ready to be branded and recycled for a new context. Institutions direct their resources towards art that does not need to be made, with spectators who do not need to watch it. When we meet each other, the platform no longer has any pretense to neutrality, and is instead the violent intersection of interests, informed by a supermarket of causes that defines your identity, and kept infinitely separate by a strategic alignment of algorithms, interactions, and performances.
Where does this end? As with so much in our post-truth reality, the answer depends on your politics. To some, Berlin has finally shed its economic depression and can enter the league of the global elites, exponentially growing and following an endless trend of self-improvement and beautification. To others, this journey is approaching its inevitable use-by-date, and the further it is pushed, the more likely it is to eventually explode. But is there another option?
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