Aaron Rose recently made this short for incase about Kreuzberg, which is my neighbhourhood in Berlin. Kreuzberg literally translates to “cross-mountain” or “intersection-mountain”. It is primarily Turkish in population with inserts of an ausländer like me trying to make a living.
Since the 1980s, the historically Turkish neighborhood of Kreuzberg has also been home to a population of artists, musicians and anarchists. According to Rose, the film is a tribute to Brian Eno and David Bowie, both of whom recorded in Kreuzberg in the 1970s.
The film’s main characters are Fiona Geuss, an art historian who reads excerpts from Boris Groys’ essay on “light luggage,” and Nathan Harrington, a musician who created the film’s original score. In the film, Harrington recites a poem written by Rose.
The shot at 18 seconds in is right outside of my apartment. It’s by an area known to most people as Kottbusser Tor, and the ant-farm looking building is a residential and commercial complex built by a private contractor for West German investors in the 1970s as a tax-saving write-off project (known as the Kottbusser Centre). The centre was, from an architectural and urban-development point of view, intended to point the way to the future and to upgrade Kreuzberg’s image. And now, it looks like it’s stuck in the ’70s. Although I feel relatively safe in my hood, I know a few of Germans who still refuses to hang out here thinks this area as a “ghetto”.
Kreuzberg is certainly not the same as when Brian Eno and David Bowie were here. It’s definitely more “hip” than “ghetto” IMO, gentrification is the word, but I hope the idea of having to use a coal heater will keep enough people away, for now!
