This book is a cultural history of post-Wall urban, social, political, and cultural transformations in Berlin. Branding Berlin: From Division to the Cultural Capital of Europe presents a cultural analysis of Berlin’s cultural production, including literature, film, memoirs and non-fiction works, art, media, urban branding campaigns, and cultural diversity initiatives put forth by the Berlin Senate, and allows readers to understand the various changes that transformed the formerly divided city of voids into a hip cultural capital. The book examines Berlin’s branding, urban-economic development, and its search for a post-Wall identity by focusing on manifestations of nostalgic longing in documentary films and other cultural products. Building on the sociological research of urban branding and linking it with an interpretive analysis of cultural products generated in Berlin during that time, the author examines the intersections and tensions between the nostalgic views of the past and the branded images of Berlin’s present and future. This insightful and innovative work will interest scholars and students of cultural and media studies, branding and advertising, urban communication, film studies, visual culture, tourism, and cultural memory.

This book explores the politics of place marketing and the process of ‘urban reinvention’ in Berlin between 1989 and 2011. In the context of the dramatic socio-economic restructuring processes, changes in urban governance and physical transformation of the city following the Fall of the Wall, the ‘new’ Berlin was not only being built physically, but staged for visitors and Berliners and marketed to the world through events and image campaigns which featured the iconic architecture of large-scale urban redevelopment sites. Public-private partnerships were set up specifically to market the ‘new Berlin’ to potential investors, tourists, Germans and the Berliners themselves. The book analyzes the images of the city and the narrative of urban change, which were produced over two decades. In the 1990s three key sites were turned into icons of the ‘new Berlin’: the new Postdamer Platz, the new government quarter, and the redeveloped historical core of the Friedrichstadt. Eventually, the entire inner city was ‘staged’ through a series of events which turned construction sites into tourist attractions. New sites and spaces gradually became part of the 2000s place marketing imagery and narrative, as urban leaders sought to promote the ‘creative city’. By combining urban political economy and cultural approaches from the disciplines of urban politics, geography, sociology and planning, the book contributes to a better understanding of the interplay between the symbolic ‘politics of representation’ through place marketing and the politics of urban development and place making in contemporary urban governance.

The heightened environmental awareness that defines our contemporary urban age is both a challenge and an opportunity for urban planners and designers. In order to acquire perspective, context and leverage, city-makers must access the intangible realms of meaning to investigate the nature of social life and its relationship to space. In response to provocative spatial discourse from Lefebvre, Foucault and the Situationists International, Other Spaces, plural narratives of place in Berlin’s SO36, explores the application of theory in today’s broad and increasingly interdisciplinary planning and design practice. Deeply rooted in the philosophy of space, the concept of otherness is presented as a distinctive critical element and promising tool for contemporary urban analysis. As a source of spatial knowledge, otherness raises issues of relativity and reveals the layered, multi-dimensional reality of the urban environment. Both physical and symbolic, it complements conventional research methodologies with a qualitative, creative and proactive element. Unlocking a place-based imagination may be an instrumental tool for more responsible and creative urbanism. The SO36 case study suggests an alternative research approach that focuses on the observational, the experiential, and the intuitive as the fundamental basis for knowledge creation. An initial assessment of the built environment evolved to reveal abstract and subjective, but nevertheless complimentary dimensions of space. Alternative techniques of urban exploration and mapping were deployed, using otherness as a guiding principle to comparatively dissect urban morphologies and architectural typologies. Bridging the gap between professionals and citizens, this approach selectively explores urban themes and associations that reflect physical and symbolic otherness. The outcomes indicate a relationship between form and meaning, which is based and strongly supported by the community's distinctive personal and collective spatial imagination. Ultimately, what is revealed are conflicting social realities that exist simultaneously in symbiosis and define the neighborhood as a kaleidoscope of place. Das gesteigerte Umweltbewusstsein unseres zeitgenössischen, urbanen Zeitalters ist für Stadtplaner und Designer sowohl eine Herausforderung als auch eine Chance. Um bessere Sichtweisen, Zusammenhänge und Einfluss zu erlangen, müssen städtische Entscheidungsträger auf den vagen Bereich der Bedeutung zurück greifen, um das Wesen von Sozialleben und dessen Verhältnis zu Raum zu untersuchen. Als Antwort auf den provokativen Raumdiskurs von Lefebvre, Foucault und der Situationistischen Internationalen, untersucht Other Spaces, plural narratives of place in Berlin´s SO36 die Anwendung von Theorie in der weiten und zunehmend interdisziplinären Planungs- und Designpraxis der Gegenwart. Das Konzept der Andersheit ist tief verwurzelt in der Philosophie des Raumes. Es stellt sowohl einen charakteristischen, kritischen Faktor sowie ein vielversprechendes Mittel einer Analyse der zeitgenössischen Urbanität dar. Andersheit als eine Quelle des räumlichen Wissens wirft Themen der Relativität auf, gleichzeitig offenbart es die vielschichtige, multidimensionale Gegebenheit der städtischen Umwelt. Konventionelle Forschungsmethoden werden sowohl materiell als auch symbolisch mit einem qualitativen, kreativen und initiativen Faktor ergänzt. Das Freilegen einer ortsbezogenen Idee kann ein hilfreiches Mittel für mehr Verantwortung und kreativere Stadtplanung sein. Die Fallstudie SO36 zeigt einen alternativen Forschungsansatz auf, der sich auf die Beobachtung, die Empirie und die Intuition als die wesentlichen Bestandteile für die Generierung von Wissen konzentriert. Eine anfängliche Einschätzung der bebauten Umwelt weicht der Freilegung abstrakterer und subjektiverer, aber nichtsdestotrotz ergänzender Raumdimensionen. Alternative Techniken der Stadtforschung und Kartographie wurden eingesetzt, die Andersheit als ein Leitprinzip anwenden, um urbane Strukturen und architektonische Typologien aufzugliedern. Dieser Ansatz erforscht gezielt urbane Bezugspunkte und Gemeinschaften, die eine äußerliche und symbolische Andersheit widerspiegeln, und überbrückt so die Kluft zwischen Experten und Einwohnern. Die Resultate deuten eine Verbindung zwischen Gestalt und Bedeutung an, die auf der unverkennbaren, persönlichen wie kollektiven räumlichen Vorstellungskraft der Gemeinschaft beruht, und von dieser auch unterstützt wird. Letztlich werden widersprüchliche, soziale Realitäten frei gelegt, die in einer gleichzeitigen Symbiose existieren und Nachbarschaft als ein Kaleidoskop von Orten definieren.

Since Unification and the end of the Cold War, Berlin has witnessed a series of uncommonly intense social, political, and cultural transformations. While positioning itself as a creative center populated by young and cosmopolitan global citizens, the “New Berlin” is at the same time a rich site of historical memory, defined inescapably by its past even as it articulates German and European hopes for the future. Cultural Topographies of the New Berlin presents a fascinating cross-section of life in Germany’s largest city, revealing the complex ways in which globalization, ethnicity, economics, memory, and national identity inflect how its urban spaces are inhabited and depicted.

An unprecedented examination of the ways in which the uninhibited urban sexuality, sexual experimentation, and medical advances of pre-Weimar Berlin created and molded our modern understanding of sexual orientation and gay identity. Known already in the 1850s for the friendly company of its “warm brothers” (German slang for men who love other men), Berlin, before the turn of the twentieth century, became a place where scholars, activists, and medical professionals could explore and begin to educate both themselves and Europe about new and emerging sexual identities. From Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, a German activist described by some as the first openly gay man, to the world of Berlin’s vast homosexual subcultures, to a major sex scandal that enraptured the daily newspapers and shook the court of Emperor William II—and on through some of the very first sex reassignment surgeries—Robert Beachy uncovers the long-forgotten events and characters that continue to shape and influence the way we think of sexuality today. Chapter by chapter Beachy’s scholarship illuminates forgotten firsts, including the life and work of Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, first to claim (in 1896) that same-sex desire is an immutable, biologically determined characteristic, and founder of the Institute for Sexual Science. Though raided and closed down by the Nazis in 1933, the institute served as, among other things, “a veritable incubator for the science of tran-sexuality,” scene of one of the world’s first sex reassignment surgeries. Fascinating, surprising, and informative—Gay Berlin is certain to be counted as a foundational cultural examination of human sexuality.