Zeitgeist

Comments

• judge not lest you be judged yourself

  Snack Daddy nailed-it-on-the-head. Gentrification is a complex social issue which has much greater ramifications for 1) locals and 2) immigrants who didn't move here to become the final arbiters of hip-ness.
  You failed to mention what made Neukölln great before you left, so I assume its because you graced it with your presence?

  Posted by Bob May 16, 2012 17:34:42

• moabit

  I work in Moabit. Have fun living in the shittiest bit of Berlin.
  No character, too far away from anything remotely interesting and Turmstraße aka hell.
  
  The only thing going for it is; a Vietnamese restaurant and the hilarity of watching retarded drug deals every afternoon.
  

  Posted by alex May 08, 2012 23:46:29

• Tapas

  Im so sorry, we now have the salted cod croquettes back on the menu. I hope you can be seen, to forgive us.

  Posted by The tapas owner. May 05, 2012 22:06:25

• idiot

  Funny how self-loathing hipsters seem to be more concerned with how the gentrification of their district reflects upon their own coolness ranking than with any of the real social and economic problems involved. The substandard art collectives, stupid beards and trendy bars are a mere symptom of a wider phenomenon which Gee Chapel has spectacularly failed to understand. This is not the Vice magazine dos and don'ts page, it is a real social issue.
  
  There is nothing wrong with moving to Moabit per se; however, writing a sneering parting shot in an expat magazine about how "No-kölln" (wtf?) is over because they've opened a tapas bar is a hipster move par excellence. I get that irony is a big part of being an urban creative, but this callous article shows a disregard bordering on contempt for ordinary people living in Neukölln. I hope that one day, when you have learned German and found yourself a proper job, you will look back upon this verbal diarrhea with deep embarrassment.
  
  Also, massive respect to Vera for telling it like it is, despite her inexplicable rage and unfortunate xenophobia.
  
  

  Posted by Snack Daddy September 22, 2011 17:32:51

• PLEASE

  the ex-berliner is soooooo shit. acting as a fungal lillypad for the free-lance journalists of the world to defecate on before hopping off to some other corner of the pond. bashing weserstrasse and neukölln has been done a million times. people know the arguments (which this article makes little attempt to even acknowlege) and, as the comments prove, have made their minds up. please please please let it be and everyone just stop talking about hipsters. if you ignore them they might just go away.

  Posted by Jonas August 30, 2011 17:18:23

• I like you annoyance

  Dear Christopher,
  Welcome to New-Williamsburg, erm sorry New-Cologne. I want to thank you deeply for your annoyance and your comment; you are indeed the living proof of my arguments. And you even come from Brooklyn! Man, how cliché is that? As you say the new comers to the trendy parts of town are “white educated monied nice” and let me add left-leaning (mostly Green –or for that matter Democrat or New Labour voters) people “reshaping the world in their own liking.” I wouldn’t be the first one to point out that most of the bad things in the world are done by nice people with good intentions, e.g. exporting “democracy” to the Middle East via military intervention. When it comes to Berlin, this reshaping consists mostly of leading a “hedonistic”, “decadent”, “neo-bohemian”, etc. lifestyle and buying into the latest installment of the Apple-Macintosh saga rather than caring about and doing something against the predicaments affecting the people existing outside one’s immediate and often privileged circle of “Lebenskünstler” friends. Of course you don’t have to fraternize (god forbid!) with the poor or sympathize with the people coming from “less developed” parts of the world who have a comparative disadvantage in making it to and in Germany. All I’m asking is if you are not willing to do these things please don’t go around pretending to be oppositional simply because you refuse to put on a tie and have a boring 9 to 5 office job like Merkel and what she represents expects you to. After all, the official economic policy of the Berlin Senate is to attract the people who have “exciting” and “creative” culture industry jobs which they carry out no longer from an office but from a trendy “co-working” space. Yes, such an existence is precarious and not luxurious, and there are all sorts of problems with that. But this happenstance also involves various privileges which the “guest workers” and pensioners who are being driven out of the city center don’t have. Is it too much to ask from these “white educated monied nice” people to become aware of their privileges, and then either to work (however subtly or futilely) towards creating an equality of opportunity for all, or to admit that they don’t give a shit and then stop kidding themselves about how they didn’t sell out like most of their “square” and “conformist” friends from high school did?
  
  best,
  
  vera

  Posted by vera lamonte June 30, 2011 14:33:11

• annoyance

  I once had a neighbor named Charlie who lived in the apartment below me in Brooklyn. He had survived the era of gangs and then arsons and fancied himself a tough guy. One morning I walked outside and said hello as he sat perched on the stoop. Uncharacteristically he didn't reply - he was gazing down at the main avenue where the masses were streaming by. "I could handle the gangbangers and crackheads" he growled, "but what can I do about this?" and waved his cane in the direction of the baby carriages and students and triathletes and flea marketers - what the neighborhood labeled fucking yuppie scum but was mostly just white educated monied nice people reshaping the world to their own liking your work scarred hands or 3rd world passport be damned

  Posted by christopher woodroofe June 29, 2011 21:35:11

• austin, tx is calling you.

  you could try (harder to be cool) there.

  Posted by June 09, 2011 15:47:00

• good riddance.

  ...or you could move back to Brooklyn.

  Posted by June 03, 2011 18:25:02

• Trop de colère, pas assez de dédain.

  Funny petulant article, perceptive abuses. Too bad the subject is so boring - and your opinion on it so ordinary. I guess here are the limits of this critical exercise. The social satire is fun but it's ultimately not very corrosive. After all, I just wonder if you know how ridiculous it sounds, someone who grumbles about something that simply... doesn't exist anymore.

  Posted by Treptower June 03, 2011 15:02:02

• .

  Dear Ben,
  I wasn’t going to respond to your proposal since I know neither of us will manage to convince the other that they are wrong, and we’ll both want to have the last word so this will go on forever. But it’s fun isn’t it, just some friendly banter. I unfortunately do happen to own a very real Third World passport which means I have much less rights and mobility than you do and I’m afraid if we were to exchange nationalities you would have to go to the army and experience some very unpleasant things which your First World mind didn’t even know the existence of. By the way, I just had a phone call from Nick Clegg. Apparently he and Dave (Cameron) urgently need a business English instructor to act as Minister of Cynicism. It seems they’re having a hard time convincing the students that the world will never change, the tuition fees will rise and the points based immigration system is completely just and necessary. A good opportunity for you to go back home perhaps?
  best,
  Vera
  

  Posted by vera lamonte June 01, 2011 12:06:00

• idea

  vera, let's trade passports! you can have my first world one and i can have your (honorary) third world passport. also, you can have my incredibly creative job teaching business english and (occasionally) basic spanish and i can have yours legally representing slovakian roma people or whatever you do as you put the world to right. either way, we're going to be mates.

  Posted by ben May 31, 2011 16:56:04

• .

  Dear Ben,
  
  I'll gladly come spend some time with you in Prenzlauerberg the day you give up your precious First World passport and manage to make it to Germany as an average (i.e. noncreative) Third World national. Perhaps you should experience the reality of Fortress Europe first hand before you start accusing others of being right wing. Otherwise, I'll gladly keep holding hands with Turks in Neukoelln. I wish you all the best,
  
  love
  
  vera

  Posted by vera lamonte May 31, 2011 16:45:37

• keep them coming...

  more enjoying berlin's rightwing/fascist legacy actually which tends to be perfectly - if less murderously - embodied by tight-brained leftwing crusaders such as you, vera. otherwise, happy to be living in p-berg enjoying the fruits of unearned capital and brunch. come visit, we can buy swanky vegetables together and hate all the posh children. you'd like me, i'll make you feel better about yourself and your motivations.

  Posted by ben h(orovitz) May 31, 2011 16:27:56

• .

  Dear ben h(ur?),
  
  I'm afraid words appear more hilarious than they really are when viewed on the screen of your Macbook. Or perhaps your skintight jeans prevent enough blood from reaching your brain. Keep up the jokes though, I really admire your cynicism and the sarcasm of your Anglo-Saxon sense of humor. Your way of belittling societal issues and dealing with politics is indeed extremely effective; after all, the Democrats are in power and New Labour has made so much difference! (Is that sarcastic enough for you?) But then again, if such cynical escapism were the real answer would you not have been living back home across the pond or the chunnel rather than over here? Enjoying Berlin's libertarian/leftist legacy whilst ridiculing the very politics that has made this legacy possible seems to me to be paradoxical if not hypocritical. Speaking of hypocrisy, I'm not troubled by Chapel's article per se but rather by the makers of Exberliner for publishing such stuff and for pretending to be something that they are not. As far as moving to Moabit is concerned, why don't you move back instead to whichever Anglo-Saxon shit hole you've come from and let us be? Is that politically incorrect enough for you Gee?

  Posted by vera lamonte May 31, 2011 14:27:13

• keep the laughter coming

  who was it that said germans or people living in germany don't have a sense of humour? not vera lamonte, I'd wager. because she's hilarious! and i think willfully misses the stupid non-point of the article (it's supposed to be funny, right?) in order to make hers... and the tears of society stain her shirt. but lo they make a pattern! and it's meaningful! and she's holding hands with the turks in noble non-commercial ways - speaking german and everything! - and stirring up a tornado inside this perfectly boring teacup. i do miss the age of blogs.

  Posted by ben h. May 31, 2011 04:51:14

• a bit of self-criticism please

  Fucking hell, it has finally come to this! Being anti-gentrification and anti-tourism has become so hip and trendy that even Exberliner, published by, catering to, and dependent on First World expat YUKIs (who still can't or won't be bothered to learn German) and hipster tourists, seems to suffer from dual personality disorder and scolds its fellow members of the bionade bourgeoisie for gentrifying Berlin. Such lack of self-reflexivity and class-consciousness is astonishing. D. Struass writes in the magazine's current issue that "Berlin is now home to thousands of a certain type of loaded expat and South German curious to simulate how the other half lives - or wishes it did." So are we to understand from this that during those golden days (5 or 10 years ago?) of "poor but sexy" expats and South Germans, who just like their current "loaded" counterparts had deliberately kept their distance from Berlin's unsexy poor, the city's "creatives" had been more dissident, nonconformist or oppositional to capitalism? Enough already with this self-glorification and this bullshit about evil businessmen coming out of the blue to kill "subculture and creativity" (See Moesken's obituary for Maria in the same issue). Stop conveniently ignoring the link between the happenstance that "creatives" and expats such as those who publish Exberliner have come to exist in large numbers in Berlin and the consequent attraction and official invitation of the the investors to the city. And enough already with Hardt & Negri inspired glorifications of fashion blog scenesters as casualties of late capitalist precarity. Those priviliged First World hipsters who may come and live here visa-free and who combine income from the dole with free lance jobs on the side to sell their immaterial labor to the culture industry in order to support their drug habit and mix work with play, do not have the right to present themselves as migrant victims of capitalism as long as they don't start questioning the role they themselves play (directly or indirectly, deliberately or unknowingly) in forcing those who do need a visa to live in Berlin to move out of their homes. So I'll take Gee Chapel's advice and be politically incorrect, i.e. not disguise my contempt with "starting a discussion": Expats, you all contribute to the process of gentrification so please stop kidding yourselves about how "alternative," "creative" or "subcultural" you all are and how things had been soooo much better before this new wave of migrants had arrived. By the way, I wonder how many of those "procreating Turks" Gee Chapel has attempted to befriend or engage in a noncommercial relation with during those 15 years (1993-2008) he claims to have live in Neukoelln.

  Posted by vera lamonte May 31, 2011 01:23:16

• hipster perfection

  this is so meta

  Posted by May 30, 2011 12:30:17

• ...!!!

  Obviously your ties to the local area aren't strong enough for you to fight for its future. Its fickle waves of relocating that add to the gentrification phenomenon, not the poor young casualties of capitalism or immigrants from any border, or any nation, regardless of their clothes or choice of bar. Atricles about 'cool new areas' are equally destructive, but the topic of gentrification could have made for a progressive and interesting article.... Unfortunately it didn't!
  
  There is more to Neukolln than Wesser Str. Enjoy gentrifying Moabit....

  Posted by May 28, 2011 15:21:25

• -

  the only thing more annoying than the word "no-kölln" is gee chapel.

  Posted by pilik May 23, 2011 20:54:59

• Great trip!

  Great piece Gee, enjoyed the trip. Have fun in Moabit!

  Posted by Another Forgettable Canadian May 23, 2011 11:08:14

• It's a crisis I tell ya

  Thank you for illustrating this insidious cultural travesty! It's a good thing we have journalism like this to illuminate such unknown yet dangerous phenomena. The bad taste and inauthenticity brought by gentrification will destroy society as we know it! Also, several thousand poor people will get displaced but as your article implies, it's way more important to stand up for less self conscious style by simply leaving the scene.

  Posted by Brendan May 23, 2011 11:01:08

• -

  I gather that the writer is also neither an aging german nor a procreating turk. Which makes him/her what exactly?

  Posted by May 23, 2011 03:43:49

• No-Kölln

  Can you translate that please in german?

  Posted by Pipi Longstocking May 22, 2011 23:32:55

• too perfect

  
  "Maybe one should simply learn German and start living in the city and stop walking around as a tourist spending so much effort on complaining and start living."
  
  The man who wrote that sentence actually complains about bad writing.

  Posted by jose May 22, 2011 15:22:25

• Hi

  How far can Exberliner go downhill? This is one of the worst articles I have read. Such pretentiousness. The author believes it possible to write utter nonsense.
  
  How can they get away with such bad writing. Maybe one should simply learn German and start living in the city and stop walking around as a tourist spending so much effort on complaining and start living.

  Posted by Evan May 22, 2011 13:12:23

• Unsafe

  Wobbly bikes have been a mainstay of BerlinerInnen in every Kiez since time immemorial.

  Posted by Maurice T Frank May 20, 2011 11:00:46

• Old hat

  Hey, those Himo hats you bagged out where previously received your praise… http://www.exberliner.com/reviews/himo2
  
  It's all a bit narky…

  Posted by Lala May 19, 2011 15:46:32

• Hey!

  I'm canadian!

  Posted by canada calling May 18, 2011 20:00:51

• hhhhhhhhhhhhh :-)

  hhhhhhhhhhhhh :-)

  Posted by May 18, 2011 14:29:19

• You like o don't you like it?

  what do you mean by the article I did not understand

  Posted by Henry May 17, 2011 22:26:41

• off to moabit

  Yup. Headed there too. We're going to help in the killing of another neighborhood.

  Posted by off to moabit May 17, 2011 21:20:30

• get over it already

  Posted by Alex May 17, 2011 17:38:23

• Bye then....

  Posted by Babs May 17, 2011 15:46:28

• ...yes...perfect...

  ...

  Posted by Stefanie Wilhelm May 17, 2011 15:02:37

• sad but true

  nuff said

  Posted by a prophet May 17, 2011 14:58:46