Money, Mobility, and Commodified Bodies: The Politics of Gentrification in German City Films of the Late 1990s

Abstract

In the late 1990s Hamburg and Berlin launched large‐scale urban reconstruction projects, the HafenCity Masterplan in Hamburg and the Planwerk Innenstadt in Berlin. Both projects triggered debates among politicians, activists, and journalists about the future of German/European cities, and spaces for creativity, art, and alternative cultures within increasingly commercialized and gentrified cityscapes. After an overview of these debates, this article discusses two German city episode films, Sönke Wortmann's St. Pauli Nacht (1999) and Andreas Dresen's Nachtgestalten (1998), in the context of discussions about the politics of the neoliberal city. The films offer different perspectives on how bodies and money circulate in the shadow spaces of neoliberal cityscapes. The cinematic depictions of these economies, however, can be commodified into marketable fantasies of “edgy Berlin” and “seedy Hamburg.”