Abstract: "Nostalgia for Babylon"
I trace and outline the concept of what I call “Nostalgia for Babylon” in Berlin documentary films released between 2009 and 2011, where "Babylon" stands as a metaphor for the pre-gentrified Berlin of the 1990s. Building on Hubertus Siegert’s 2001 metaphor of “Berlin Babylon” as a contested place of demolition and (re)construction, architectural and historical debates, as well as identity debates, my project re-examines Siegert’s film in relation to four other Berlin documentaries that also engage with questions of contested spaces and identity, and have either literal, aesthetic, or thematic references to Siegert’s film.
I argue that not only is there a new type of nostalgia emerging in Berlin today, which transcends Ostalgie and Westalgie, but that this new nostalgia for the voids of post-Wall Berlin can be traced across the cultural spectrum. In the context of recent Berlin documentary films, such as Deutschland 09 (2009), The Invisible Frame (2009), Mauerpark (2011), this is a new cultural trend in need of closer attention. All these films engage in various ways with Berlin’s transformations since reunification, with its space, its history, and it’s “Babylonian” nature – that is, its contested identity. As it will become apparent from these case studies, what emerges on a cultural level, as witnessed in the body of films, is a new relationship towards nostalgia in Berlin.
The fact that nostalgia has entered a number of Berlin documentary films is striking in itself. What these films reveal about contemporary attitudes towards nostalgia heralds a new understanding of nostalgia in contemporary urban contexts. The case studies also show that there is a new type of nostalgia in the context of Berlin – nostalgia not for a unity, or community, or a search for “Mitte” that was so significant throughout the 1990s, but a nostalgia for the yet-unclaimed voids and no-man’s-lands of un-gentrified Berlin.
My understanding of the term nostalgia is based on a temporal and conceptual collapse of the hierarchical spheres of time: rather than a limited or selective mechanism of reflection, I use the concept nostalgia as a two-directional lens, both engaging with the past and with the future to inform our understanding and awareness of the present. I base my understanding and use of nostalgia on studies (by Sprengler, Boym, and Todorova) that recuperate nostalgia from its limited use as selective memory, or a non-critical engagement with the past. Thus what I term nostalgia can also be described as desire-driven mobilizations of the past, in which the increasing lack of voids and emptiness in Berlin mobilizes the desire to look back towards the emptiness (towards "Berlin Babylon") and recuperate some of the hope and promises of the post-Wall Berlin of the early 1990s.
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