Contents 5 51 91 133 Introduction Colour Plates Colour Plates The Berlin That I am Looking at Martina Schmücker 59 99 Berlin: An Old and New Promise Aeneas Bastian Berlin’s Art Market: Between Sarah Hegenbart and Sven Mündner 11 Berlin Story Fact Sheet Rye Dag Holmboe 17 Interview with Christian Boros 63 Berlin / London Susanna Davies-Crook 69 103 Aelyn Belyn 107 Hannah Arnold Creative Stasis in a Post-Industrial Utopia Daniel Udy 35 73 117 Bettina Pousttchi: Echo Berlin Ohne dem Haus Interview with Nick Jeffrey Richard Cork Robert Rapoport Christina Danick Arriving in the Present 139 Berlin. City of Free Space Katharina Beckmann, Stefanie Gerke and Nele Heinevetter Katie Paterson Sarah Hegenbart and Sven Mündner 27 Ambition and Reality Hello to Berlin Vid Simoniti 149 To Have and to Need Fact Sheet 153 Hannah Höch and the First Mythos Berlin Daniel Herrmann 159 Interview with Jessica Morgan 41 81 123 Berlin Rent Prices and the Effects The Impossible Desire Artists’ Income ne"Fdmsqh“b̀shnm Donatien Grau Fact Sheet Fact Sheet Sarah Hegenbart 164 Biographies 45 Interview with Bettina Pousttchi Sarah Hegenbart 87 127 Berlin Heute John Holten Ghost of a Better Future Samara Grace Chadwick Introduction Sarah Hegenbart and Sven Mündner 6–9 The mythical status of Berlin is based on the fact that you have to fight with very few limitations. A lot is possible here. To feel free is very atractive and erotic. – Christian Boros Looking at the crack in the purple oil paint on the canvas, we agreed that it was an integral part of the work. It had been added on the 6.05am Ryanair flight from Schönefeld to London Stansted when the canvas was rolled up in the overhead locker. The unplanned addition to the painting occurred roughly a year since the artist had decided to follow the call of Berlin, the city to which so many of his artist friends had recently moved. He was back in London to bring the painting to an exhibition at which he hoped it might be sold. Money too short for shipping, he simply de-stretched the canvas, rolled it up and brought it over as hand luggage. The work, and its accidental finish, struck us as a neat expression of the cultural relationship between London and Berlin which was fuelled by the advent of budget flights in the early Nineties. Looking at this cracked paintwork was the start of a deeper investigation into why so many young people move to Berlin to live and work. There is no simple and singular explanation, so we labelled the phenomenon the Mythos Berlin, the legendary reputation that has proved so irresistible to a generation of artists, musicians and writers. We ourselves were subject to the pull of Berlin. We arrived as naive school leavers from the western provinces of Germany in the early 2000s. Before us, a daring generation had unearthed hidden bunkers and derelict basements for nightclubs, explored the charm of the city’s eastern districts and created cultural phenomena like the Love Parade. Introduction In 2005 we let for London, part of a new wave of cultural migrants who flow in and out of Berlin. Living in London, we were struck by people’s excitement about Berlin. We were asked about this ‘cool’ place with its seductive ‘cheap rents’, ‘parties in hidden basements’ and ‘vast studio space’. We were amazed at everyone’s focus on the positive aspects of a complex city. This was the mythos surrounding Berlin. We almost didn’t recognise the city from the descriptions we heard. Berlin is very self-aware and self-conscious. Its cultural discourse is dominated by endless debate about itself. Its inhabitants are continually evaluating the city’s standing, its advantages and disadvantages. Berliners are forever debating what the city is, and what it should be or should not be. In order to live the Berlin life it seems one has to develop a personal narrative precisely aligned with the city’s cultural codex, as its population crats narratives about Berlin to which the city is expected to conform. The most famous single statement of identity is perhaps Mayor Klaus Wowereit’s phrase, utered in an interview with the German magazine FOCUS -Money in 2003, that Berlin is ‘poor but sexy’. The sense is of a place fluctuating between hyper self-awareness and daydreaming: myth-making in action.1 The OED defines mythos as ‘a traditional or recurrent narrative scheme or plot structure’. According to Jan Assmann’s functionalist concept of myths we might identify Berlin as a hot society that makes use of the power of the mythical structures to build and foster identities, provides an everyday code of conduct and helps to explain our environment. All three of the listed functions are apparent in Berlin’s on-going conversation with itself. 7 The challenge of mythos, as Ernst Cassirer describes it, is that it is non-theoretical. Hence, a purely rational approach would not be a helpful tool when exploring the mythos surrounding Berlin. For this reason we have strived with this publication to present a variety of voices. The selection of texts was driven by conversations with authors and artists and is dominated by perspectives from the art world, a driving force in the city’s cultural development. By including overlapping accounts or contradicting tales we hope to find key narratives that contribute to the construction of the Mythos Berlin, which might even be traced back, as one contribution suggests, to the Berlin of the Roaring Twenties. Cassirer suggests that ‘analysis of a mythos may proceed in a double direction. It may apply an objective or subjective method. In the former case it will try to classify the objects of mythical thought; in the later it will try to classify its motives.’2 In order to capture the many subjective narratives that collectively constitute the Mythos Berlin we were keen to document individual voices through interviews, essays and lyrical texts. We hope to obtain a degree of objectivity from the fact that we are viewing the mythos from the safe distance of London, and by including contributions from a variety of backgrounds including collectors, artists and curators both émigré and resident in London and Berlin. Any atempt to comprehensively document the mythos surrounding Berlin is a mammoth project, and by focussing on the art world we have only skirted the periphery. We believe that the exercise is worthwhile nonetheless as an atempt to understand the cultural relationship between London and Berlin and as a means of documenting atitudes to Berlin at a time of great change. We hope that this might Introduction serve as a starting point in a deeper investigation into the phenomenology of a city that, at the beginning of the twenty first century, instilled a feeling of ‘freedom’ in its residents and exerted an ‘erotic atraction’ upon so many young immigrants from London and elsewhere. This publication is neither a deconstruction nor a blind celebration of this atraction. It is writen in the hope that many more generations will continue to knit the yarn of the Mythos Berlin. Wunenberger, Jean-Jacques, ‘Mytho-phorie. Formes et transformations du mythe’ in Religiologiques 10 (1994) 2 Cassirer, Ernst, Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1944) 1 9