MARIA STEHLE

University of Tennessee, Knoxville

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

Car rides along dark city streets, dingy bars, money and poverty, crime and violence, prostitutes on the streets: life stories of different people touch and intersect over the course of one night in the city. Two German city episode films, released in 1998 and 1999 respectively, tell such stories: Andreas Dresens critically acclaimed Nachtgestalten (available with English subtitles as Night Shapes, 1998) and Snke Wortmanns less well-known St. Pauli Nacht (1999). Dresens film follows three couples over the course of one night in Berlin, the night Pope John Paul II arrived for his 1996 visit to the city. Wortmanns film tells the story of a murder in Hamburgs notorious nightlife district, St. Pauli, tracks what led to the murder, and shows the ways in which this murder affected different people that night and, possibly, for the rest of their lives. As Barbara Mennel argues, the growth of cinema was intimately tied to the growth of cities (6). Cities like Paris in the 1910s and 1920s were the emblem of modernity and film was the medium to depict modernity (7). The postmodern city found its expression in films that depict fragmented locations where real and mediated spaces blur, where paranoia is ever-present, and where the cityscape becomes a temporally and spatially confusing pastiche (1214). A central question then is not only how and why films represent cityscapes in a certain way, but whether they reproduce or challenge the spatial divisions imposed by the dominant discourse of the time (Mennel 21321). When the films St.Pauli Nacht and Nachtgestalten were released, the dominant discourse revolved around the fears and hopes produced by the neoliberalization of society. The two films map out grids of urban time and space that mirror a variety of controversies about the neoliberal city, mobility, and the processes of globalization and gentrification of the European city. Both films depict peripheries, obscure spaces, hidden stories, and shadow economies. They offer different perspectives on how bodies and money circulate in the shadow spaces of the neoliberal cityscapes. I use the term shadow in this essay as a metaphor to describe the intersection between an economic condition that the films describe and the cinematic choices they make. A discussion
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2012, American Association of Teachers of German

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of the films within the political debates about gentrification in both cities shows that cinematic depictions of the dark sides of neoliberalism can be commodified into marketable fantasies of edgy Berlin and seedy Hamburg. Even though on the surface both films attempt to offer a critical perspective, upon closer inspection they illustrate the close connection between film as a global commodity1 and the city as a commodity that is often marketed via the cinematic image. In this sense, these two films manage neither to depict liminal spaces that elicit critique nor to resist nationalist nostalgia and globalist enthusiasm (Sieg 2). Quite to the contrary, their depictions of the shadow spaces of neoliberalism fit seamlessly into feelings of nostalgia for local spaces andin some cases, nationalfears of the global city. Neoliberalism is defined by an increased intensity of capital accumulation processes, a reinforcement of exchange-value-oriented activities, general liberalization, the strengthening of the coercive power of competition and a reinforcement of shareholder value in the economy (Keil 232). The social practices of neoliberalism have condensed into a geographically and culturally variegated set of societal arrangements that display at least some of the[se] tendencies (Keil 232). Neoliberalism is often understood as fostering gentrification, which leads to a rapid transformation of urban space. Gentrification, as defined by Myron Levine, implies more than [] simple class transformation; it also implies displacement, especially forced displacement. (91). In the last decades, discourses about gentrification and the neoliberal city have been highly political and contentious in respect to the cities depicted in the two films discussed in this essay, Hamburg and Berlin. At the same time as the films were released, both cities launched architectural competitions for large-scale urban redevelopment projects and the consensus between theorists and planners about how to execute and control urban renewal that existed in the early 1990s broke down (Bernt and Holm 31720). These often controversial city planning projects intersected with attempts, by city officials and investors, to maintain and market the artsy, edgy, creative, cosmopolitan, and multicultural city, which resulted in conflicts as well as strange new alliances between entrepreneurs and squatters, artists and politicians, city planners and city dwellers.2 In the late 1990s, Berlin cut state subsidies for urban development. At the same time, city planners started to question the usefulness of the terms gentrification and displacement, since the concepts seemed vague and were considered difficult to quantify (Bernt and Holm 319). In Hamburg, the remodeling of the harbor front was officially launched in 2000. Since then, this project has triggered many controversies, protests, and counter-actions. The HafenCity Masterplan brought companies like SAP to the newly remodeled warehouses along the harbor front and luxury lofts were built to revive the area as an upper-scale residential district. As Layla Dawson pointed out in 2006, this project is ongoing:

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The latest water city is the berseequartier, an eight hectare eastern extension of HafenCity centred on the Magdeburger Harbour. Citizens are being promised Mega-Mall shopping, a Mediterranean atmosphere (rare in these northern latitudes), and a new casino la Monaco. Star hotels and a new cruise ship terminal are intended to boost and sustain tourism.

Giving these developments a distinctly positive spin, Dawson summarizes:

In Dawsons opinion, HafenCity marks a move away from provincialism and signifies the citys openness to globalization. However, this urban fantasy has since undergone a variety of modifications and has been challenged extensivelyfirst by a small group of activists, now by large-scale protests, and even by initial supporters. In 1999 urban redevelopment had long been on the way in Berlin; the controversial reconstruction of Potsdamer Platz was nearing its completion.3 But in the late 1990s, a new plan to rebuild the central district of Mitte with its new government buildings was launched and in general, gentrification spread across most central areas in the city.4 This Planwerk Innenstadt5 included a complete remodeling of the former East German part of Mitte and its central square, the Alexanderplatz, and would, as especially East German critics pointed out, erase almost all traces of East Berlins socialist past. The fact that in Berlin, in the wake of the controversy about the cold glass and steel look of the newly remodeled and almost completed Potsdamer Platz, the citys new planning initiatives took the opposite spin, points to a general tension in the discourse about the German and/or the European city as a global or globally marketable city. The Berlin Master Plan for the inner city was based on the idea of historic reconstruction:
The Planwerk Innenstadt [] was passed in 1999 by the Berlin local government as the official model for local architectural projects in an extended area that includes the historic city center. The plan is based on the urbanistic concept of the European City and has been the subject of a heated debate since its first publication. (Urban 68)6

This plan was based on a fantasy that the European city has grown organically. Such a conception of the city is not compatible with modernist planning and tries to restore spaces as they supposedly existed in the past. This restoration includes street grids, which, especially in the case of the eastern parts of Berlin Mitte, would completely rewrite the city map. Florian Urban describes this master plan for Berlin critically, by pointing out that its authors were

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caught up in a series of powerful images, which they chose to reproduce instead of consciously debating them (68). The plan got hopelessly entangled in its own contradictions and a collection of questions emerged:
Who are the citizens who will inhabit these spaces? How can pluralism be achieved through tight zoning restrictions? What sense does it make to inscribe public spaces into the ground plan when at the same time existing public spaces are destroyed by privatization? Why does a plan that claims to acknowledge historical differences cast one particular moment in history into perennial authority? (68)

A similar set of questions, albeit from a different perspective, could be, and has recently been, raised in response to Dawsons celebration of the HafenCity project. Both projects are based on an imaginary of the city: HafenCity uses the idea of the global, cosmopolitan city and Planwerk Innenstadt relies on the idea of an organically grown European city to which the new Berlin could and should return. It is in this context that I would like to pose the question whether St. Pauli Nacht and Nachtgestalten could be read as counter-fantasies to the urban renewal projects that were conceptualized in Hamburg and Berlin at the time. St. Pauli Nacht shows the seedy harbor front and uses traditional images of Hamburgs red-light district. The Nachtgestalten in Dresens film do not cross any historic or new landmarks in Berlin Mitte. Their car and bus-rides take them along dark and wet city streets with neon-signs, past subway stops, and lost-looking night crawlers. Dresens Berlin is not recognizable as the new glitzy Berlin or the Kaiserstadt with its bombastic buildings, but it is recognizable as the dingy, chaotic Berlin with its vast and desolate urban spaces. What looks like urban spaces untouched by gentrification, however, proves to be part of this development: economic forces drive the circulations of money and people in legal economic exchanges as well as in the seedy, dingy counter-sites the films depict. The shadow economies are commodified in the urban economy and incorporated into the fantasy of the global city rather smoothly. Urban renewal projects and their respective fantasies often include nostalgic spaces; they attempt to reserve a place for an alternative scene and an underground economy of drugs and prostitution. In this context, the urban landscapes and the displaced people that the films show become part of the fantasy of the globalized, cosmopolitan, and new European city. Such visions of city planners attempt the impossible: to plan an organically growing cityscape. Based on the work of urban theorist Richard Florida, the idea of the creative class, for example, has become a trope in European city planning. Philipp Oehmke explains:
In his theory, Florida argues that cities must reinvent themselves. In contrast to the 1990s, they should no longer attempt to attract companies, but people. More specifically, the right people people who invent things, who promote change

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and who shape a citys image. He has classified these people as the creative class. Its a theory that has had unintentional consequences including bitter conflicts in places like Hamburg.

The creative class was deemed crucial for conveying a cosmopolitan as well as a distinctly European image of the city. Squatted houses in East Berlin, West Berlin, and even in the famous Hamburg Hafenstrasse, had become an alternative tourist destination in the early 1990s and reflected the sense of a transient, translocal community, but with a distinctly local flair. Today, the buildings in Hafenstrae which were formerly home to squats are [] surrounded by new glass towers which stretch for several kilometers along the banks of the Elbe River (Oehmke). After unification, certain districts of West Berlin that used to be peripheral, like parts of Kreuzberg or Neuklln, literally moved towards the center. As a consequence, throughout the 1990s and into the early twenty-first century, most squatted houses were brutally vacated and others were preserved as cultural centers and art studiosa strategy now commonly regarded as the first step towards a newly gentrified, attractive neighborhood (Dowling). As Florian Urban says about Berlin, the picture postcards of urbanity used by the Berlin counterculture were just as powerful and loaded in their promotion of an image as those of the developers (72). In both cities, these renewal projects were not supposed to eradicate the character of the cities, which, in the case of Hamburg, includes the St. Pauli district and the rather active squatter and artist scene, and in Berlin refers to a highly visible alternative culture. This means that the creative class as well as the seedy parts of the city that attract a certain kind of tourism are incorporated into a vision of the gentrified cosmopolitan and/or European city. Certain (mediated) peripheral city-spaces can become marketing tools that foster neoliberal economic interests.7 While the neoliberal economy still seems to drive the question of how to develop a successful city, ideas about how to realize such a lively, attractive, and commercially successful urban landscape have changed. This incorporation of the creative class into a neoliberal vision of the city stands in stark contrast to David Harveys assessment that neoliberalism destroys creativity. Most characters depicted in Nachtgestalten and St. Pauli Nacht are not marketable members of the creative class. Nonetheless, the gangsters, thieves, prostitutes, drag queens, illegal immigrants, and homeless people on the screen add local flair to their respective cities. The cinematic characters and their cities become a valuable commodity because they satisfy a certain voyeurism and give glimpses into imagined spaces and territories that appear to be threatened by extinction. They feed the nostalgic fear that change might lead to the disappearance of certain spaces and certain bodies might become obsolete and uselessor simply vanish. In Berlin, this nostalgia is for the edgy,

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alternative city that includes empty and desolate spaces; in Hamburg the nostalgia is for the seedy harbor city, its crime-ridden underground economy, and its famous nightlife. Both films, however, refrain from allowing their characters to transgress their assigned spaces or challenge traditional notions of the class-based, racialized, or gendered division of city space. Nachtgestalten and St. Pauli Nacht do not pose a challenge to the new urban fantasy, but function to satisfy a voyeuristic nostalgia for the old city. Positioned against the wave of comedies that dominated the German film industry in the second half of the 1990s, Dresens film uses a gritty style to depict a gritty German reality of homelessness, drug addition, unemployment, and loneliness. The humor in Dresens film is biting and intended to uncover forms of discrimination based on class and race, as well as other stereotypes. In comparison, Wortmanns film is much more conventional in style and format. Wortmanns success as a filmmaker was based on his early comedies, Allein unter Frauen (1991), Der bewegte Mann (1994), and Das Superweib (1996), just to give a few examples, and St.Pauli Nacht contains comedic elements, like the use of caricature and slapstick, but at the same time, this film intends to portray a certain social milieu. Compared to Wortmanns other films of the 1990s, St. Pauli Nacht was not very successful; for Dresen, however, the surprise success of Nachtgestalten at film festivals helped launch his career. Nachtgestalten follows three couples and a group of punks across the city. The film interweaves three stories, businessman Peschke who spends the night with a young boy from Angola searching for his guardian, the pig farmer Jochen who follows the young prostitute and drug addict Patty through her city, and the homeless couple Hanna and Victor on their quest to find a hotel room for the night. Each of the characters is driven by hope, but aside from brief moments of tenderness and diversion from their usual paths through the city, the new Berlin does not provide them with safe spaces, alternative paths, or life choices. The stories are connected via certain tropes and common themes, through the intersection of certain characters in certain parts of the city, and by characters like the old beggar, Zombie, who dies on the street that very night, or a group of street punks. The punks are the only group that leaves the city. In the final scene of the film, they wake up in the car they stole from Peschke, on the shoreline of the Baltic Sea. St. Pauli Nacht depicts a more coherent city space and contains more allusions to possible alternative life choices for its characters than Nachtgestalten. The different stories are directly connected, even though the characters themselves are not necessarily aware of how their lives are interwoven. Their paths intersect in the accidental murder of Johnny, which takes place on a busy intersection in St. Pauli. From these points of intersection, the narratives jump back to present background stories of how the different characters got to this intersection, and how their lives continue after the murder. St. Pauli Nacht organizes its storylines and narrative flashbacks by locating the stories in the St.

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Pauli district, and intersecting them at clearly defined points in time and space. Crime, prostitution, theft, and murder are located there; the film tries to make a distinction between a shadow economy and one that exists outside of this shadow and might offer the characters an escape. Similar to Nachtgestalten, however, St. Pauli Nacht offers a portrayal of the workings of the shadow economies in the neoliberal capitalism and the spatial inequality it produces that leaves each character precisely where he or she started. In spite of the movement within, the way out of St. Pauli is more difficult than it seems. Displaced characters remain displaced and the lost middle-class characters find their way back to middle-class life. St. Pauli remains the locus of the underworld, and the film thus feeds the fantasy of crime-ridden Hamburg.8 St. Pauli Nacht offers spatial consistency and temporal confusion; Nachtgestalten offers temporal consistency and spatial confusion. In Nachtgestalten, the different stories of characters moving across the city and through various neighborhoods are not connected narratively, their encounters are random, and individual lives intersect without seeming to affect each other. The characters exist in a spatial disconnect. With the exception of a few subway stations, Nachtgestalten very rarely shows any clearly recognizable landmarks. Berlins cityscape appears vast and confusing. Shadow spaces are not contained in a certain neighborhood; the whole city seems to exist as periphery and in Berlin, there is no good money/economy/life within the false. The punks are the only group that is able to escape to some kind ofhowever desolatealternative space at the end of the film. In Nachtgestalten and in St. Pauli Nacht, city spaces, movement, and compassion are mediated by the way money circulates in a neoliberal economy. The city and the people who inhabit it are mobilized by their involvement in the shadow economies of the neoliberal city; and it is that economy that defines the limits of their mobility. In both films, sex is one of the main commodities and, therefore, triggers various circulations of money and people. St. Pauli Nacht shows two couples, Johnny and Steffi and an unhappily married couple; both relationships are based on the exchange of sex and/for money. The husband constantly points out that he pays for his beautiful trophy-wifes extravaganzas; Johnny plays the romantic lover and lives off Steffi in the hope for a life outside of crime and pimping. None of these relationships lastJohnnys past catches up with him and the wife leaves her husband in spite of her presumed financial dependence. While both arrangements fall apart at the end of the night, it remains up to the viewer to interpret whether they leave the women stranded or freed. Aside from these couples, St. Pauli Nacht shows numerous professional prostitutes working on the streets and in brothels and nightclubs, but their depiction does not go beyond well-established clichs. The critical perspective on the exchange of sex for money is inserted via the depiction of all relationships as forms of prostitution. It is not the prostitutes, however, but the desperate and lonely men, the postal worker Manfred and der Friese, who de-

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serve compassion from the viewer. These men, roaming the streets of St. Pauli, give the Hamburg depicted here its character. While Manfred goes on a drunken rampage after his wife leaves him, der Friese seems to find love in Dorit as they sit on the beach together in the morning. St. Pauli Nacht does not ask the question of how people end up in the situations they find themselves in; it focuses on their (largely unsuccessful) struggles to get out or on their hopes of finding love. In spite of moments of tenderness, love is depicted with even more cynicism in Nachtgestalten than in St. Pauli Nacht and the fantasy of an escape does not play a central role; rather, the focus is on how the characters ended up where they are and how they might get by in their respective situations. Moneypursuing money, spending money, or the lack of moneydetermines where people find themselves and how they move across the city. While money triggers movement, it does not change the general situation that the characters are in. Addressing the exchange of sex for money, the film contrasts and compares its two main female characters, Patty and Hanna. Whereas the prostitute Patty sells her body to satisfy her addiction, the homeless Hanna reacts with rage to any suggestions that she could be a prostitute or would ever let a man touch her unless she wanted him to. Both women, however, get beaten in the course of the film: a pimp beats Patty to defend his territory when she first tries to pick up Jochen, and later, Jochen beats her in his clumsy attempt to stop her drug use. Victor beats Hanna out of frustration over her stubborn pride and resistance, which keeps them from finding shelter. Both beatings between the two couples are followed by moments of tenderness. Nachtgestalten does not offer any explanation for these moments of tenderness under rather unlikely circumstances; moments of compassion do not interfere with the circulation of money and sexualized bodies and the prominence of violence, rather they take place in spite of it. The insertion of the concept of love in St.Pauli Nacht and the depiction of tenderness in Nachtgestalten offer a sense of hope in an otherwise bleak assessment of relationships between people that are based on the exchange of sex and/or companionship for money. This hope for true compassion and the reality of relationships based on economic exchange or necessity, however, are closely tied together and gendered in a rather conventional way; womens bodies and the body of the transsexual Roberta are commodities that can be exchanged for money. Through the movement of sexualized and racialized bodies, Nachtgestalten depicts mobility in the city. The airport and other traffic hubs play a central role in the film. Feliz arrives in Berlin from Angola and he is there to stayas a supposedly illegal immigrant. Die Japaner are coming to do business in the city, the rural farmer comes to the city to find Kultur. Patty, Hanna, and Victor roam the city without any prospect of ever leaving its confines. Peschke is a self-proclaimed loser, ne Null, who will forever be stuck trying to please his much younger boss. The punks are the only ones who move away from the city, in a stolen car that they burn as they reach the end of the roadliterally,

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the shoreline. The question of what they will do next and how they will get back is not addressed in the film. The final shot, a slow camera pan across the faces of the punks as the sun rises over the Baltic Sea, conveys a sense of sadness, longing, and nostalgic loss. In the late 1990s, the Berlin of the punk scene is far away. In St. Pauli Nacht, most of the central characters are also not able to leave the city; their movements seem further confined to a certain district. Roberta dreams of getting away from the local city and entering the global city: on a trip to New York City with her lover and boss Brilli. This trip never takes place; instead Roberta is traded as a commodity. Steffi seems lost and lonely after she finds out that her lover has been shot. The unhappy wife is the only one who escapes her husband and the city by taking a last-minute flight in the morning, but her destination remains unclear. Similar to Nachtgestalten, the depictions of female characters in St. Pauli Nacht does not subvert class and gender assignments. The characters try to leave or dream about leaving their allocated spaces, but are ultimately put back into place. In both films, the movement of money and people across the city stands in stark contrast to the social immobility of the characters. Despite the fact that they depict similar processes, the films create two rather different maps for the peripheries of the neoliberal city: one map tries to limit this kind of economy to a small section, the dark side of Hamburg and its infamous nightlife district; another map shows the failure to contain or even locate the mechanisms of the neoliberal city in one particular neighborhood. In St. Pauli Nacht, the shadow economy follows the people who try to leave; it pulls them back, holds them in their grip, or haunts them. In Nachtgestalten, the city is composed of a collection of non-places (Auge qtd. in McGee 44) and postmodern urban life is a complex web of movement and social relations, a tangle (McGee 44). While neither of the two films show the newly constructed centers of the neoliberal economy, like Berlins Potsdamer Platz or the glitzy buildings that wereand still areconstructed all across Hamburg, both films show the effects of such urban development and the kind of maps that are produced in the process of urban gentrification. In light of rapid changes in both cities, the films offer a rather nostalgic perspective on shadow spaces and their economies and take a slightly romanticizing perspective on clich depictions of a crime-ridden Hamburg and the vast, disjointed cityscape of Berlin. The economies shown in the two films exist in the shadow of the official economy of the city, but they do not present an alternative to neoliberal capitalism; they are merely the other side of the coin. When it comes to sexual harassment, police brutality, and domestic violence, the different economies are hardly distinguishable. The exchange of money, the circulation of people, officially sanctioned slave labor, and legal prostitutionin Wortmanns film that also includes the economy of marriage and the sexual harassment of

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women by more powerful menare closely linked with their shadows. With the increasing neoliberalization and gentrification of these cities, the shadow figures and stories do not disappear. They might be displaced and their paths might change; the violence they are exposed to and the speed of their movement might intensify. The characters try to escape their assigned roles and spaces, but only in a very few cases and often just for a short moment in time do they manage to get away. Most of the time they appear to be puppets in and of the city. Their movement through urban space is circular; it takes them back to where they started. In spite of their rather different cinematic approaches, both films were conceptualized and marketed as showing something authentic and offering a glimpse into an otherwise rather hidden world.9 While most of the characters operate on the peripheries of the legal economy, their existence is either tied to the neoliberal circulation of money or does not threaten its workings. Their movementswith the possible exception of the punks journey in Dresens filmdo not allow the characters to escape the neoliberal economy of the city; their mobility is caught in a cyclical movement fueled by the (futile) hope to escape. Their dreams, desires, and struggles keep the city in motion; they keep the money and the bodies circulating, but the city keeps their movements confined to certain spaces and their actions are defined by given roles. In light of large-scale urban redevelopment, both films depict a sense of romantic nostalgia for alternative, edgy, and authentic city-spaces, but in the process of neoliberal gentrification and the marketing of the creative class, their cityscapes are incorporated into the neoliberal city. The characters are safe as long as they act as entertaining reminders of the past in the urban landscapes of HafenCity, Planwerk Innenstadt, and their preserved alternative sites. Wortmanns characters circle back and forth between legal economies and their violent shadows. Dresens characters escape for brief moments of human tenderness, but then find themselves once again roaming the city streets in search for money and in hope of recognition. If the characters, like Hanna, Feliz, or the punks fail to perform their assigned roles, however, the outlook is bleak: they might, in fact, become obsolete. Whereas Dresens film includes moments that indicate that certain characters might simply vanish from sight, this kind of displacement is not addressed in Wortmanns film. The push towards a cityscape that accommodates the neoliberal economy preserves a sense of European history and incorporates a commodified version of alternative spaces, which continues to influence urban fantasies in the twenty-first century. What Matthias Bernt and Andrej Holm call a complete breakdown of politics of careful urban renewal (320, emphasis added) can also be understood as a frantic attempt to combine a collection of disparate fantasies without, however, addressing the problem of displacement (see Bernt and Holm 322). In 2010, the discussions about who has the right to the city10 and how and by whom the city should or could be shaped had not disappeared; on

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the contrary, the voices calling for a different kind of city (planning) had gotten louder. In spite of the fact that the squatter scene, as it existed in the 1990s, has all but disappeared in Berlin, the city still makes headlines with violent and supposedly left-wingactivity: burning cars, destroyed shop windows, and street riots. Recent reports on Hamburg outline the controversies that have developed in the city, especially in the Gngeviertel, a part of the harbor front, and Hamburg Altona, a traditional working class and immigrant neighborhood that is being considered for the home of a new site for an Ikea storethe first in a city center (Bll and Reissmann). In the Gngeviertel, the enthusiasm for a new cosmopolitan Hamburg has shifted to nostalgia for a Hamburg-past, which has led to a new set of alliances11 that are caught up in contradictions, as Thomas Ewald cynically remarked in the left-wing weekly paper Jungle World: In Hamburg lsst sich beobachten, was passiert, wenn die Sanierung alternativer Viertel abgeschlossen ist. Pltzlich untersttzten die Befrworter der Gentrifizierung die Gegner. Von Springer ber die CDU bis zur Subkultur, alle lieben das Gngeviertel. City officials and conservative and nationalist media joined artists and squatters in rallying against the Dutch investor Hanzevast. The investors cash flow was affected by the financial crisis of 2009, so that they were more than willing to sell some of the buildings back to the cityfor a higher price, of course. The artists and squatters could stay and the buildings could be restored instead of mostly torn down, as the investor had initially planned. The question remains, however, if the artists who were allowed to stay in the formerly squatted buildings are just another vehicle to upgrade the neighborhood or if they, in fact, symbolize underlying tensions as to who has the right to the citytensions that are only barely papered over by a half-hearted attempt to retain local flair behind the glass-and-steel constructions that signify Hamburgs global fantasy. Oehmke seems to suggest that, in spite of the artists awareness of and fight against becoming the creative class that markets the city, the former is more likely the case: This is why the artists of Gngeviertel have penned their manifesto against the branding of the city, called Not in Our Name! The weekly newspaper Die Zeit and the daily Hamburger Abendblatt, owned by Axel Springer, have both printed the artists manifesto (Oehmke). Oehmkes summary sounds cynical:
But times have changed. Nowadays, squatters look like management consultants, and vice-versa. Conservative newspapers print manifestos from the leftist subculture, while a guru from Toronto [Richard Florida] quotes Marx to deflect suspicions that he is providing recipes for gentrification. The citys negotiator talks about artists as if they were his children, while the city unofficially aligns itself with the squatters. Its former ally, a financial investor of the kind that cities would previously never have turned away, has now become the enemy.

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These shifting fronts and frustrations over seemingly questionable friendships and alliances reflect the web of tensions outlined above. St. Pauli Nacht and Nachtgestalten are cinematic representations of these kinds of tensions; they depict a sense of loss and nostalgia for the edgy or seedy city, a longing for a different kind of city-space, and a vision of the mechanisms and fears of the global city. In these tensions, their characters become displaced, replaceable, and circulating commodities. The stories told in St. Pauli Nacht and Nachtgestalten do not challenge neoliberal notions of the city and its inhabitants at the end of the twentieth century; their storiessome nostalgic and some attempting to be realisticabout how money and (sexualized) bodies circulate in the city can be incorporated in the neoliberal economy, its tourism, and its entertainment industry. The global connections, and possibly disruptions, that new forms of mediation and technology foster do not play a major role in either of the films. Nachtgestalten offers only a brief glimpse of the confusing politics of this kind of mediated translocal connection when the three pairs depicted in the film, for a brief moment, watch the same television channel from their respective, short-term, safe spaces: the Popes address to the people of Berlin in 1996. While the characters are falling asleep and Pope John Paul II delivers an appeal for peace and love, large-scale protests against the politics of the Catholic Church, especially in developing countries, were held all across the city of Berlin. This shared media moment does not however affect the depiction of the characters lives. As they awake in the morning, they return to their lives and respective urban spaces: Hanna and Victor are back on the street, Peschke is back on the phone with his boss, and Patty is looking for the next customer. Mainstream cinema productions pose questions, give diagnoses, and catalyze fears, but the economic pressures under which films are produced might prevent them from offering counter-fantasies to national nostalgia, [] globalist enthusiasm (Sieg 2), or the commercially successful mix between the two: national nostalgia vis--vis globalist fantasies. The seemingly seamless incorporation of these cinematic depictions of urban shadow spaces into neoliberal cityscapes certainly does not mean that every space in the city and every fantasy of the city has become a neoliberal commodity.12 Roger Keil asserts that while under neoliberalism most critical forces were pushed into a register between criminalization and creativity, there has been growing unrest or at least unease about the victimization of large parts of the urban population [], and struggles to democratize urban politics have occurred in many places (239). In the process of chaotic negotiations, new peripheries emerge, people and ideas are displaced and new spaces are uncovered. Further, electronic media allow for spaces to be linked in new kinds of ways. Concepts like Little Istanbul or China Town take on a new meaning if telecafs,13 cable, satellite, and the internet broadcast voices, stories, and images of life from old cities across the world, and allow for linguistic, political, and personal

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connections that were unthinkable just a decade ago, when the two films were released. The racialized and sexualized body, poverty, violence, and voice take on a different meaning in such contexts. As urban theorist Henri Lefbvre anticipated almost four decades ago, urbanization now increasingly unfolds through the uneven stretching of an urban fabric, composed of diverse types of investment patterns, settlement spaces, land use matrices and infrastructural networks across the entire world economy (qtd. in Brenner 205). The urban has become what Neil Brenner calls a planetary condition (206). In this process, it remains to be seen how the tensions between images of the cosmopolitan and the European city and between local urban fantasies and realities play out. The critical impetus that can emerge from cultural productions that occupy a liminal space, as Katrin Sieg describes it, remains to be analyzed in greater detail. New possibilities for connections, projections, and intersections pose new challenges, but they also create different venues for a critical and political depiction of the circulation of money and mobility in urban space and open up new spaces for political and/or artistic intervention. Notes
1 For a more detailed description of the intersection between national cinema and

cinema as a global market, see Halle. 2 See, for example, Oehmke; Stewart; Shaw on Tacheles (15760); and Levine on the Pfefferberg in Prenzlauer Berg (100). 3 The Daimler building opened in 1998 and the Sony Center in 2000. 4 See Bernt and Holm (320); for a less critical view, see Levine on the developments in Prenzlauer Berg and Oehmke on various Hamburg districts, including Altona. 5 For a more detailed description of Planwerk Innenstadt, see Urban or Levine (9495). 6 Compare Krier. Urban also suggests that Kriers ideas derive to a significant degree from Aldo Rossi and Colin Rowe. 7 For a discussion of the difficulty of attempting to preserve alternative spaces, see Shaw. 8 This fantasy is rather familiar to German TV audiences from shows like Tatort, which are often located in Hamburg and depict a similar cityscape. 9 See the statements on the DVD release of Wortmanns film and reviews of Dresens work, for example Tittelbach in Die Welt or Keseling in Welt am Sonntag. 10 For an overview of the history and politics of this slogan, see Marcuse. 11 Fatih Akins film Soul Kitchen (2009) depicts this nostalgia for a Hamburg past in all of its complications. 12 For a discussion of artistic counter-fantasies, see Sieg; for urban case studies in Helsinki, Berlin, and Brussels, see, for example, Groth and Corijn; for suggestions about the future of urban activism, see, for example, Mayer. A selection of German films from the last decades also attempt a different approach; for example, in addition to Fatih Akins Soul Kitchen (2009), the documentary films Berlin Babylon (dir. Hubertus

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Siegert, 2001) and Hito Steyerls Die Leere Mitte (The Empty Center, 1998) offer critical depictions of the gentrification process in Berlin. 13 For a discussion of telecafs in Berlin, see Stehle, A Transnational Travelogue.

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Shaw, Kate. The Place of Alternative Culture and the Politics of its Protection in Berlin, Amsterdam and Melbourne. Planning Theory and Practice 6.2 (2005): 14969. Sieg, Katrin. Choreographing the Global in European Cinema and Theater. New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2008. Stehle, Maria. Berlins Potsdamer Platz as an Interactive Textbook: Space, Perspective, and Critical Research Skills. JEMMS: The Journal for Educational Media, Memory, and Society 2.1 (2010): 13953. . A Transnational Travelogue: Borders, Misunderstandings, and the Telecafs in Berlin. Women in German Yearbook 21 (2005): 3661. Stewart, Janet. Das Kunsthaus Tacheles: The Berlin Architecture Debate of the 1990s in Micro-Historical Context. Recasting German Identity: Culture, Politics, and Literature in the Berlin Republic. Ed. Stuart Taberner and Frank Finlay. Rochester: Camden House, 2002. 5166. Tittelbach, Rainer. Wenn Schauspieler pltzlich Pommes verkaufen: Realistischer Hoffnunstrger: Der Filmemacher Andreas Dresen. Die Welt 28 May 2001: 37. Urban, Florian. Picture Postcards of Urbanity: Reflections on Berlins Inner City and the 1999 Master Plan. Journal of Architectural Education 57.1 (2003): 6873.