Have you heard that Berlin is dead? I hear it often. I’ve even heard myself say it. “Berlin’s dead!” I announce to my sub as we both sadly snort lines of ketamine off my sub’s sub, who we occasionally use as a piece of furniture—an armoire, a Biedermeier settee—because this is Berlin. Our pupils are like convex pennies. It is a Tuesday afternoon. It is a phrase, alas, that I am wont to use. At Berghain for the twenty-fourth weekend in a row: this is Berlin. Sighing as my rectum is flushed thanks to the state-financed Enemas for the Gainfully Unemployed initiative: this is Berlin. When I am reminded that I live in Germany: let’s change the subject.
Befitting the demise of the world’s most important German-speaking city, the funeral notices have arrived in the form of an Anglophone publishing trend, a boomlet of Berlin literature written by expats. As the antiquated hype cycle of the book industry has it, these novels reveal the “true character” of the city, “summoned in exciting and visceral detail,” offering a “window onto its antiwork culture, eclectic individualism, and architectural sediments.” None of these reviewers live in Berlin, however; what they hear as a siren song is likely to sound like a dirge of hoary stereotypes to actual expats in the city. And so, dressed in black, because we are in mourning and because this is Berlin, we order my sub’s sub to become a bookcase.
Here in Berlin by Cristina García (2017): A nameless visitor arrives to a Berlin mysteriously full of Cubans and convinces notoriously loose-lipped Germans to unburden their life stories. They say things like, “The world we knew was flipped over like a fucking fried egg.” Quirky stories about the Holocaust and Stasi hitherto absent from the historiography are paired with ejaculations of profundity like, “Dreams . . . were the mind’s invisible broom.” As Goethe said, “Art is the 4 percent interest on the municipal bond of life.” Named by BBC as one of the ten best books of the year.
Oval by Elvia Wilk (2019): Set in a near-future Berlin where the weather is unpredictable and artists have become corporate “creatives,” the narrator frets over her privilege and her secret trust fund. A party drug fabricated by murky corporate interests puts neoliberalism in a pill. Berlin is burnt to the ground in an orgiastic craze of myopic altruism. The narrator decides it is now a good time to invest in real estate.
Red Pill by Hari Kunzru (2020): It is early 2016, and a writer is invited to a sinister version of the American Academy in Berlin’s far-flung Wannsee district, where he watches a mediocre cop procedural. He worries art has no revolutionary potential. He wants to make a difference in the world and offers a refugee some cashews. He begins to believe he is being surveilled, has a mental breakdown, and abandons his family. Donald Trump is elected, and the crazy man is not so crazy now, eh?
Other People’s Clothes by Calla Henkel (2021): Two American art students live in the home of a Berlin novelist and decide to host their own club in the apartment instead of leaving it. One realizes she is a lesbian after spontaneously making out with a woman on ecstasy and is subsequently accused of murdering her roommate in a “ketamine-induced rage.”
Berlin by Bea Setton (2023): A woman with a severe eating disorder flees to Berlin from London and compares her German proficiency to that of “first-generation Turkish immigrants” after a few months in the city. The window of her apartment is smashed shortly after the move, then the flat is broken into, leading her to find a new apartment, where she begins to hear screaming voices—only for the window to be smashed there too! It turns out it was the narrator all along: a literal Nestbeschmutzerin.
Good Girl by Aria Aber (2025): The daughter of Afghan refugees seeks an escape in club culture. A club that emulates Berghain is described as “a shelter from the war of our daily lives,” and Berghain’s bouncers are thanked in the acknowledgments. All of Germany’s ghosts are summoned in service of history’s most important lesson: self-actualization. “Youth,” as Goethe said, “is the silky apple butter on the good brown bread of possibility.”
Zuckerzeit
“Dear Visitor, the ghosts in Berlin aren’t confined to cemeteries. Listen. Don’t you hear their whisperings?” says one of the speakers in Here in Berlin. “The ghosts of the East were still present between the buildings,” observes the narrator of Good Girl. And if you pop open an attic in Berlin, “it would inevitably come with a skeleton” says the narrator of Other People’s Clothes. Better not look in the basement either: you might find the remnants of occult Nazi rituals, as in Red Pill; and that building, naturally, was once owned by a Jewish family, the spectral presence sine qua non of contemporary Berlin. A few years ago, a writer for The New Yorker heard glass break during her first night in the Joachimsthaler Straße and thought it was the opening salvo of the next Kristallnacht. As one of García’s interlopers puts it, “Berlin longs to define itself by its future, yet it remains a hostage to its past.” The present is elided, taken hostage by the paranormal persistence of history.
Berlin, if the gap-year fantasia of these writers is to be believed, possesses an occult prowess for manifesting lurid sensations in the bodies of its residents.
If not by the war, then Berlin is haunted by its subsequent division. These novels are largely situated in the former West but are pervaded by a received image of the GDR as an omnipresent Stasi state, evident in their preoccupation with surveillance. The narrator of Oval lives in an experimental eco-house and is spied on by its corporate overlords. The students of Other People’s Clothes are watched over by their landlord. The long section in Red Pill about a cleaning woman’s encounter with the Stasi is the middlebrow equivalent of foraging local insights from a taxi driver. All these writers have watched The Lives of Others. I was once invited to a Rosh Hashanah dinner at the house of a prominent intellectual from the former East whom I had met at a museum opening. When I looked up her name later, I learned she was a longtime Stasi collaborator who had betrayed four of her friends who were planning to flee; they were subsequently arrested and given prison sentences. I hoped this would somehow emerge over dinner—“So, anyone have something in their past to atone for this Yom Kippur?”—but no such luck. Such is reality outside the norms of contemporary realism. The dishes were by Ottolenghi.
Berlin, if the gap-year fantasia of these writers is to be believed, possesses an occult prowess for manifesting these lurid sensations in the bodies of its residents. Aural hallucinations, blackouts, dissociative episodes, paranoid delusions: the characters of these books are subject to a range of bizarre symptoms and afflictions. These seem to emanate from a pervasive guilt over living in Berlin, or their inability to be a “man of action,” a variant of which phrase appears across several entries in this oeuvre of Berghain gothic. Berlin is a city where no one works. It is a city where creative talents come to rot (“where everyone’s dreams came to die,” as Good Girl has it). Expats are privileged slackers who come to disengage. It is a place where disaster is passively accepted. The real business of life is happening elsewhere. Art cannot change the world and is therefore privileged, irrelevant, useless. That is the worldview articulated in these books. It is an unrecognizable portrait of a city where I have lived for nearly a decade.
Berlin emerges from these works as a city without a present. It is not clear, if you were to take these novels as your guide, why anyone would want to live here, let alone why this city has become a magnet for artists and intellectuals in recent decades—which is why these books exist in the first place. “Berlin is wonderful. I would like to be a Berliner and belong here,” says the protagonist of Irmgard Keun’s 1932 novel The Artificial Silk Girl. “Everything would be new now and full of excitement and adventure.” The simultaneously self-absorbed and dissociative corpus of ketamine realism, on the other hand, has a nearly pathological aversion to engaging contemporary Berlin. The party conveniently arrives at the doorstep of the two students in Other People’s Clothes. The only time the narrator of Red Pill ventures into the urban core of Berlin, he has a nervous breakdown. If they’re not acting as a vector for spectral voices, characters remain largely confined to a narrow corridor of experience, content to engage the world through a screen. It is rare to find passages that convey something of the city’s perceptional texture, the arpeggio song of the skylarks in spring or the burning tapers of a horse chestnut in bloom, old women following the sun like daisies with closed eyes on clear, cold days. Have you ever seen a middle-aged punk dutifully buying milk—only milk—at a discount grocer? Indescribable melancholy.
In a remarkable passage from Gabriele Tergit’s 1931 novel Käsebier Takes Berlin, a character goes for a walk and is abruptly beset by a ghostly procession of remembered impressions, the Berlin of her youth suddenly intermingling with observations of its turbulent Weimar years. Cities are haunted because we live in them. Their physical contours are bound with our memories. I remember walking past a well-known döner stand with my mother one evening. “Where do you see yourself in five years?” she asked me. Three years later, she was dead.
Carnival in Babylon
“These were our Weimar years and we spent them doing nothing,” says one of the characters in Oval. It is the sort of self-lacerating statement typical of these books and a curious way to describe a period of German history marked by protracted economic and political stability. Angela Merkel’s reign as chancellor was more than a year longer than the entirety of the Weimar Republic’s existence. The actual Weimar years in Berlin were vividly documented in an extraordinary body of literature, and the methodological contrast with these current novels is striking. “One of the most elementary and indispensable diversions of the citizen of a great metropolis . . . is to plunge into another world, the more exotic the better,” wrote the great Berliner Walter Benjamin. This dictum was taken up by Alfred Döblin, Joseph Roth, Irmgard Keun, Erich Kästner, Hans Fallada, Gabriele Tergit, and Christopher Isherwood, all of whom aimed to penetrate as many spaces, scenes, and aspects of Berlin as possible.
Going to Berghain is no different, essentially, than playing badminton. It is a scene.
There is a scene in Keun’s The Artificial Silk Girl where the protagonist leads a blind man around Berlin, describing the city to him; it reads like a metaphor for how these Weimar novels operate. Bars with telephones at the tables, criminal hangouts, cabarets, slaughterhouses, gay and lesbian nightlife, violent street clashes between Nazis and communists, the Jewish slum in Mitte, melancholic Russians, abortion clinics, maternity wards, six-day bicycle races, all-night steam baths, and nudist bathing clubs: you are made to see.
“One has the feeling wherever one goes that Berlin isn’t happening there,” noted Max Frisch in 1973. Berlin, past and present, is a city with multiple, centrifugal orientations. But if you find your way around enough of it, you might eventually find yourself there. “The diminutive of the parts is more impressive than the monumentality of the whole,” wrote Roth during his stay. As Berlin’s Weimar-era chroniclers intuited, it is in the accumulation and collage of unassuming details, anecdotes, passing interactions, newspaper headlines, advertising jargon, and other minutiae that the monumentality of the whole is secreted and made legible. And it is not as though contemporary Berlin lacks for raucous locales and twilight creatures on par with the overheated denizens of the artist hangout nicknamed Café Megalomania, the one-eyed man drunkenly fingering a paper flower as he denounces traitors to the fatherland in Berlin Alexanderplatz, or the one-legged prostitute who seems to have captivated several memoirists of the period. Such as the man who told me his sexual fetish is masturbating into new sneakers and assured me he was a good Freudian; or the German artist who announced she’d slept with so many Jewish men they should lay train tracks between her legs and put an arbeit macht frei sign above her vagina; or the bar that has placed mirrors around the urinals so you can better evaluate the penises of fellow patrons (the well-known local character known as “the piss goblin” is to be found elsewhere, alas). Yet the city’s crepuscular diversions, whose appeal is no great mystery, are mostly rendered in these recent novels as a portal to potent self-knowledge. Why do people enjoy going out in Berlin? It’s fun.
Besides a sense of humor, what truly sets Berlin’s Weimar novels apart from the self-obsessed precepts of ketamine realism is their ability to translate the period’s abject economic conditions into concrete reality. Economic precarity looms everywhere in these books. Exploitation and immiseration are constant threats. Callousness, thwarted hopes, and distrust are pervasive. A popular revue at the time was called Alles Schwindel: It’s All a Swindle. By faithfully detailing the economic misery and moral rot that surrounded them, novels like Kästner’s Going to the Dogs and Fallada’s Little Man, What Now? demonstrate the conditions which yielded the catastrophe that followed. The forces propelling Hitler’s assumption of power are retrospectively obvious, as are its consequences: he instrumentalized a latent cruelty and indifference to affliction already widespread, exemplified by the virulently antisemitic boarder in Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin, the police officer who beats Fallada’s unemployed protagonist for longingly gazing in a shop window, or the cabaret in Going to the Dogs where the mentally disabled are put on stage to be demeaned and berated by drunken bourgeoise. “A rape is more popular than a sentence by Goethe,” says a reporter in Tergit’s Käsebier Takes Berlin.
These contemporary novels, by contrast, barely mention housing scarcity and a concomitant rise in the cost of living in the city, which has been the dominant economic issue of the last decade. Between 2009 and 2023, rental prices in Berlin rose 112 percent. Sale prices went up by 287 percent over the same period. In a city where construction sites could justifiably be called a defining feature, demand far outstrips supply. The population increased by more than two thousand residents per month in the first six months of 2024. This has given rise to a real estate market rife with scams and exploitative practices, placing immense psychological burdens on those caught in its cracks. It has become common for newcomers to spend the first year or two of their time in Berlin moving from sublet to sublet every few months. But everyone in these novels seems to land an apartment with ease. A sense of impending catastrophe lingers over this oeuvre nonetheless, though its imminent source is elusive and vague: something they read on the internet. Here, in comparison, is the protagonist of Fallada’s Little Man, What Now? reflecting on his situation:
Whether I live or die is a matter of indifference to [government ministers], if I can afford a cinema ticket or not is not what they’re interested in, if [my pregnant wife] is able to feed herself properly now, or if she has too many excitements, if [our unborn son] winds up cheerful or miserable—who cares?
This is the moment when liberal democracy truly dies. Its later manipulation and subversion by political powers is only the articulation of that initial death knell. By that point—who cares?
Trans-Europe Express
One need not look back a century for compelling depictions of Berlin. Two recent novels, Leif Randt’s Allegro Pastell and, from an expat perspective, the Italian writer Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection, are notable for their deromanticized renderings of the city. The ironic, flattening approach of both authors limits the bloated interior life characteristic of ketamine realism while heightening the city’s social and material reality. Their characters frequent well-known bars, play badminton, mingle at gallery openings, and, yes, go to Berghain. No special meaning is attached to any of this. They are simply things that happen here. Going to Berghain is no different, essentially, than playing badminton. It is a scene.
One scene has found itself under immense pressure. Berlin, and especially the neighborhood of Neukölln, is home to the largest Palestinian diaspora in Europe.
Berlin is a city of scenes. There is a medieval reenactment scene, a castell scene, a klezmer scene. The prevalence of scenes is not unique to Berlin, but few other cities are so cosmopolitan and have simultaneously attracted en masse artists and intellectuals, who sniff each other out like dogs in heat. Every culture and current has its own nexus: Iranian intellectuals, Kurdish writers, Ukrainian artists. For two weeks in 2018, I somehow found myself in the scene of Icelandic avant-garde musicians. In reality, García’s atomized Cubans in Here in Berlin would, at the least, be aware of each other. According to official statistics, approximately a quarter of Berlin’s residents are foreign-born, certainly an undercount given how many EU passport holders do not register with the city as nominally required. The peculiar texture of life in an émigré scene, largely absent in these “expat” novels, was most ruthlessly diagnosed in an essay by the French-Romanian philosopher E. M. Cioran called “Advantages of Exile”:
It is a mistake to think of the expatriate as someone who abdicates, who withdraws and humbles himself, resigned to his miseries, his outcast state. On a closer look, he turns out to be ambitious, aggressive in his disappointments, his very acrimony qualified by his belligerence . . . Tuberculosis and masturbation, that is [the émigré writer’s] fate.
Thankfully there is now a cure for tuberculosis.
The origins of Berlin’s proliferating scenes were unwittingly set in motion during the city’s postwar division. East Berlin was the functioning, industrialized capital of a state; West Berlin was a heavily subsidized island whose residents were liable to become the first casualties in the event of war. It was necessary to entice people to move there to keep it afloat. Young West Germans were invited to skip mandatory military service if they went to live in Berlin. Soon a haven for freaks, dropouts, artists, radicals, and anyone else for whom enlisting in the Wehrmacht’s successor was anathema, this historical movement became the basis for Berlin’s contemporary brand, and it was, fittingly, a circle of exiles who helped coalesce this moment. In 1968, the artist Günter Brus and a few friends put on a performance in Vienna. Brus, among other ennobling acts, drank his own piss and masturbated while singing the Austrian national anthem. The performers were arrested and threatened with prison sentences. Brus and his collaborator Oswald Wiener fled to West Berlin, where the latter would go on to found Café Exil in Kreuzberg, which became the favored hangout of the city’s artists, among them David Bowie and Iggy Pop. A two-star Michelin restaurant serving “emancipated vegetable cuisine” today occupies the café’s former location.
After the wall fell, the city’s population contracted, creating the overhang of housing supply that enabled the emergence of Berlin’s now familiar reputation: cheap housing, artists, parties, sex, and techno imported from New York and Detroit. The city became the sort of pilgrimage point for artists and intellectuals previously occupied by New York and Paris. Discussing 1970s New York in 2015, Edmund White wrote, “Could such a phenomenon occur today? Maybe in Berlin. But not in New York.” Many, many thousands of expats arrived to the city to partake in that moment, which was bolstered by generous state support for the arts. In Berlin’s otherwise rigid bureaucracy, visas were made easily available to artists. There is a special health care service for artists, substantial grants were given to artists during Covid-19, and the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin program has brought many of the most important artists and writers from the past half-century to spend time in the city, many of whom have gone on to stay. More than 8 percent of Berlin’s workforce is employed in the cultural sector.
Latronico writes of his protagonists in Perfection, “Art was the pulse of their life in Berlin. It kept the oxygen flowing, kept them in the loop about parties and the latest upcoming neighborhoods, as well as giving them a sneak preview of the new arrivals from Lisbon or Palermo or Malmö.” Over the past couple of years, however, much of the oxygen has been sucked out of the room as prices have risen and the contingencies of state funding for the arts have become clear.
One scene in particular has found itself under immense pressure. Berlin, and especially the neighborhood of Neukölln, is home to the largest Palestinian diaspora in Europe. Much of Syria’s cultural world arrived to the city between 2015 and 2016. Lebanese filmmakers, Egyptian journalists, Marxist intellectuals from Syria—Berlin is the most vibrant hub of Arab culture on the continent, but, since October 7, it has become acceptable to openly malign Arabs in the name of “supporting Jewish life.” Politicians claim these immigrants have imported antisemitism into peaceable, Jew-loving Germany. Journalists flock to Sonnenallee, the center of the Arab community, to produce lavishly racist reports portraying its residents as Hamas supporters. The country’s largest newspaper published a manifesto on what it means to be German, whose implicit target was readily apparent: we don’t marry off children, we don’t beat children, we don’t harass women, we don’t rape women, we don’t wear masks or veils.
Point number thirteen read, “The state has a monopoly on violence.” Police brutality at protests has become a near weekly occurrence in Berlin. Minors are viciously beaten and arrested. Holding a Palestinian flag or saying “Free Palestine” has become suitable pretext for arrest. Those supporting Palestinians are slandered as JEW HATERS in the city’s tabloids. The same newspaper promulgating the tenets of German identity charged that professors in Berlin supporting their students’ protest rights were Täter, a loaded word most commonly associated with perpetrators of the Holocaust. While Berlin’s city government sent in nine hundred police officers to break up a conference on Palestine before it even really got started—there were more officers than attendees—it has allowed neo-Nazis to regularly practice combat sports at a city sporting facility because they are unauffällig: inconspicuous. There is, indeed, an active neo-Nazi scene in Berlin.
Cancellations have roiled Germany’s heavily state-funded cultural world: theater productions, readings, prize ceremonies, performances. The Palestinian singer Ahmed Eid was recently told that he has been placed on a government blacklist, barring him from state funding and any state-funded venues in the country. Jews, less than half a percent of Germany’s population, represent 25 percent of known cancellations in 2023: it was probably for their own good. As a cohort, Germany’s “state-artists” have an incredible capacity for contorting themselves to thematic shifts in the funding on which they are almost totally reliant. When I arrived to Berlin, there were innumerable exhibits and performances about refugees; you don’t hear nearly so much about them these days. Efforts to protect freedom of expression have largely been led by expats, migrants, and other loathsomely disengaged cosmopolitans. German intellectuals, by and large, have packed their bags for another “inner emigration.”
A new cultural center, the Spore Initiative in Neukölln, is ostensibly focused on biodiversity but has become one of the few places in the city where you can have open discussions about Israel and Palestine because it is not state-funded. The poet Ghayath Almadhoun was one of the first artists targeted after October 7 when the release event of an anthology of Arab poets in Europe he co-edited was canceled for no discernable reason other than Almadhoun’s Palestinian identity. (Almadhoun fled Syria in 2008, citing censorship fears after the arrest of several friends.) The problem in Germany today, as Almadhoun sees it, is how you deal with a partial caesura in democracy. One segment of society is isolated and effectively has their legal rights rescinded; democracy continues to function as such for the majority. “It was easier in Syria,” Almadhoun told me. “The world has learned methods to combat dictatorship. I grew up thirty years with dictatorship in Syria. No one knows how to fight censorship in a democracy.”
Negativland
As of late, democracy is on sale in Berlin. At least that’s the impression you might get from the number of ads exhorting the citizenry to its defense. Movie theaters show ads for Freiheit and Vielfalt and Gemeinsamkeit like they’re available at the refreshments stand. A bus called the Demokratie Mobil is currently going round Berlin’s schools to inculcate the youth. The impetus of this phenomenon is the intractable rise of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland over the past decade. Though the far-right party has itself not (yet) come to power beyond a few small towns, its phantom exists to denigrate democratic norms. Every major political party in Germany has rushed to adopt the AfD’s draconian policies in a desperate, futile bid to stem its popularity. The furious suppression of public sympathy with Palestinians in Berlin (and elsewhere) is just one aspect. Politicians seeking the approval of “concerned citizens” cannot publicly align themselves with the AfD’s most prominent targets: refugees, migrants, and, in particular, Muslims.
Berlin has assiduously courted tech companies as
it previously had artists.
Fissures in Berlin’s democracy were already apparent before October 7. In 2016, a left-wing coalition swept to power with a mandate to ambitiously tackle the housing crisis. Their solution was a five-year moratorium on rent increases, which was subsequently revoked by the federal constitutional court. A civic referendum that would force the city to expropriate the apartments of landlords who owned more than three thousand units passed in 2021 with more than 59 percent of the vote, but Berlin’s new mayor, Franziska Giffey, vigorously opposed the non-binding measure, and it was never implemented. Giffey subsequently decided to become a junior partner to the right-wing CDU party, the largest vote-getter in the 2023 elections. For the first time in two decades, Berlin had an explicitly conservative mayor. An early act of the new government was to propose cutting twenty-three million euros in social funding to Neukölln, later reduced to ten million after criticism. In lieu of ambitious housing plans, cultural politics have instead emerged as a priority.
In late 2023, Berlin’s culture minister, Joe Chialo, attempted to insert a funding clause that would have severely restricted free speech around Israel and Palestine for recipients of state money. The effort failed after protests by local and international artists. A cultural center in Neukölln had its funding nonetheless withdrawn for the grave antisemitic act of hosting a peace vigil by a Jewish organization. Similar policies have been percolating on a federal level. In a country where the vast majority of antisemitic violence is committed by the far right, a recently passed Bundestag resolution for “the protection of Jewish life” is almost exclusively focused on the antisemitic threat supposedly posed by foreigners, artists, and students, all more concentrated in Berlin than any other German city. Those found guilty of anti-Israel thought crime, according to the resolution, can be barred from state funds, exmatriculated, or denaturalized. One of the examples cited by its authors was a Jewish-Israeli filmmaker criticizing the “situation of apartheid” in his own country at the Berlinale. The granddaughter of Hitler’s finance minister, a leader of the AfD in the Bundestag, praised the resolution. However shocking these developments are to those who cherished the city as an outpost of possibility in an creepingly unfree world, the interplay of local and federal policies is no coincidence. They are the latest effort to hasten Berlin’s lengthy normalization as a German city.
Berlin’s peculiarity as a national capital cannot be overstated. There is a joke that Germans move to Berlin to leave Germany. The joke used to be that no one was actually born here. Its status as a sort of exclave is a common thread in the erratic weave of the city’s history. Its population is lower than it was a hundred years ago. No other European capital acts as a net drag on the GDP of the national economy. And no other European capital has such an uneasy relationship with the country for which it serves as a nominal capstone.
Berlin only became a metropole in the nineteenth century along with Prussia’s gradual domination of German affairs. The decentralized character of the Holy Roman Empire (the first Reich) produced a series of powerful regional capitals and identities. Berlin, in contrast, “was a ‘colonial city’ made up of the dispossessed and uprooted,” as the historian Alexandra Richie wrote in Faust’s Metropolis. “First, a mix of people, now a mix of peoples,” as Alfred Döblin put it. Weimar Berlin hosted a population like no other city in Germany: one-third of the country’s Jews, half a million Russian émigrés, and it was one of only two places in Germany where communists and social democrats took the majority of votes in the fateful 1932 elections. “Berlin is a suburb of the northeast,” Gabriele Tergit wrote at the time.
German nationalists long bemoaned the city’s inadequacy as a capital. Hitler’s grandiose plans to rectify this misalignment included replacing large swaths of the city with triumphant architecture and renaming it Germania (as the etymology of Berlin points to the Slavic origins of early settlers). The loose sense of extraterritoriality which has long characterized the city became literal after the war, when it was divided between four different occupying powers and two different countries, and this was only strengthened when increased numbers of foreigners began to arrive to the city after reunification.
The population of foreign-born residents in Berlin more than doubled between 2000 and 2020. It would be foolhardy to claim this increase has not put pressure on the housing market, but they did not author the city’s insane housing policies: most of them can’t even vote. Their arrival has nonetheless been integral to the city’s enduring attraction, touching nearly every aspect of life in this city (e.g., döner kebab) and making it a home away from the Heimat for those who followed, and it is thanks to their innumerable contributions that the performatively aware yet historically shallow canon of ketamine realism was even written and published. Editors are not salivating for salacious accounts of Düsseldorf.
Berlin’s emphasis on culture in its development has undoubtedly contributed to the decline of the “poor but sexy” reputation that initially drew many of its participants. While the role of artists in gentrification is a familiar story, cities like New York, London, and Paris never ceased to be the financial centers of their respective economies. By the time Berlin reemerged as a unified city, the geography of the German economy was set, and there were no new major industries up for grabs—except one. Berlin has assiduously courted tech companies as it previously had artists. The online retailer Zalando is one of the biggest employers in the city. Tesla recently opened a factory here. Amazon is set to open an office with 3,400 employees. Here cometh the “man of action.”
These new workers will need somewhere to live, and so prices will continue to rise. Yet cheap housing was only ever one half of the equation here. In many Berlin novels, both old and new, there is a pronounced tendency among characters to obfuscate their biographies. This, too, is a byproduct of the city’s peculiar status as a seam in the normative structures of nationality: the possibility of reinvention. It is this vague, persistent extraterritoriality that politicians are attempting to foreclose through repressive measures and market fatalism, and it may not matter if they succeed.
The initial lure of this historical movement is no longer so new now and full of excitement. The city is no longer cheap. It is difficult to find an apartment. Studio space is scarce. Big clubs are closing, as are smaller, experimental venues. Cultural budgets are set to be drastically cut by 130 million euros in 2025, with a similar reduction promised for 2026. The political atmosphere has become frightening. Anyone who has publicly evinced sympathy with Palestinians will not come. Nor will those who simply dreamed of pursuing a life within their own prerogatives without the necessity of onerous, life-immiserating wage labor. An apartment of your own, an identity of your own: it is that dream, if anything, that is dying here. An alluring, elusive, devastating illusion of freedom—that is Berlin. Or maybe was Berlin . . .
And what remains? Possibly the morning when the first crocuses bunch in patches along the side of paths. Or the ornery woman who mans the library’s café. A lone pensioner crying to classical music. Nefertiti in the Neues Museum. The ashtrays are distributed at 21:45. We said we would see each other again and never saw each other again. “Aber ich bin am Herzen gestorben!” says the dead man. It is snowing in May. The slow realization that you have nothing to return to. Leinestraße, Boddinstraße, Hermannplatz. The bath crystals smell like my father’s shaving cream. Familiar, unknown faces. Anonymity. Heartbreak. Municipal bliss. Im Anfang war die Tat. I thought I would live here for a year, maybe two. Memories are always spinning in concentric circles to revolving perceptions. It is impossible to know what will later remain of any place we once lived.
What remains? Gratitude that I was present.