Cultural Topographies of the New Berlin ed. by Karin Bauer and Jennifer Ruth Hosek

Abstract

Reviewed by: Cultural Topographies of the New Berlin ed. by Karin Bauer and Jennifer Ruth Hosek Lars Richter Karin Bauer and Jennifer Ruth Hosek, editors. Cultural Topographies of the New Berlin. Berghahn, 2018. 420 pp. Cloth, $120.00. "What is Berlin today?" (7) ask editors Karin Bauer and Jennifer Ruth Hosek in their introduction to this impressive volume, well aware that the answers the individual contributions provide are frequently contradictory and caught in fields of tension among marketing exploits, urban imagineering, subcultural activities, national identity, migration, race, the city's complicated past, and numerous fürther aspects that make up the cultural topography of Germany's capital in the twenty-first century. Divided into four parts dealing with gentrification, memorialization, immigration, and the city's present memoryscapes, Cultural Topographies of the New Berlin wisely chooses an interdisciplinary approach to do justice to Berlin's cultural diversity. Explicitly referencing the "New Berlin" in the volume's title aptly provides the direction for what follows—after all, the "new" comes at the expense of the "old," and the editors aim to take into account the "connection between spatial production and historical memory" (6). The volume certainly lives up to this promise, and as a consequence, the friction between "utopian desires and nostalgic longing" (30), as Katrina Sark puts it in her chapter on subcultural spaces, and the disappearance of history in favor of projecting a more future-oriented image of Berlin (Erek and Ganter) loom large in the background of many contributions. The main text the contributors are reading is of course the city itself, and the urban spaces that form the focal point of their analyses [End Page 135] range from the sites of Berlin's "creative class" in Simon Ward's chapter to the city's arguably most recognizable icon, the Brandenburg Gate, in the chapter by Sarah Pogoda and Rüdiger Traxler. In addition to the city as text, the volume does not fail to include artistic representations of urban spaces in texts. Again, the variety is remarkable, and the reader will find explorations of the depiction of Berlin in recent German comics (Lynn Marie Kutch), a fresh look at canonical films like Wim Wenders's Der Himmel über Berlin (1987; Wings of Desire) (Peter Gölz), and an overview of how Berlin's darker side is staged cinematically in contemporary international film productions (Andre Schütze). It is fürther commendable that Berlin's long and complex multicultural history forms an important part of this volume with chapters on Turkish-German relationships (Christiane Steckenbiller), Jewish life (Hadas Cohen and Dani Kranz), and an intriguing investigation of integration politics that disguise themselves as calls for assimilation in Johanna Schuster-Craig's chapter on Neukölln artists. In addition to the individual chapters' lucid analyses, one of the biggest strengths of this volume is the way the articles are brought into dialogue with each other. Without exception, each chapter references or comments on at least one if not more contributions, and the authors and editors must be lauded for executing these cross-references so remarkably well. The effect on the reader, when reading the volume as a whole, is one of carefully constructed interconnectedness that, figuratively speaking, connects many dots on the topographical map that the volume draws. The effect for those who approach this volume with the intention of reading just individual articles is similar—they will be directed into new, often surprising directions worthy of exploration. The volume is also highly suitable for implementation in the classroom. For those teaching courses on contemporary Berlin as well as for those who seek to include sections on the capital in survey courses on cultural history, architecture, literature, or film, the collection will be an indispensable source. All chapters provide sufficient background for their analyses and are accessibly written, making them appropriate for courses at all levels. In sum, Cultural Topographies of the New Berlin is an important, fresh, and invigorating addition to Berlin scholarship, and its broad interdisciplinary [End Page 136] scope makes it a highly recommended read for researchers and students with an interest in the many facets of Germany's capital. Most importantly, it more than lives up...