Theoretical Frameworks and Methodology
Studies of Berlin city branding not always incorporate extensive analysis of the cultural impact of urban marketing campaigns on cultural identity formations and cultural products (like film, art, and literature).
Scholarship on nostalgia in the German context has been mostly limited to studies of Ostalgie and Westalgie (nostalgia for the former East or the former West Germany), for example:
My project bridges the analysis of cultural products (documentary films) with the analysis of city marketing campaigns (Schaustelle, Be Berlin, etc.) and the cultural discourse around them (in literature and media) to gain a greater understanding of the post-reunification transformations in Berlin culture (in identity formations, in the ways the image of Berlin is constructed and communicated).
I position the films, and the historical locations they portray, as the structural framework for cultural analysis of Berlin. I look at spatial theory, marketing discourse, urban branding, and close-readings of film scenes and literary excerpts. The documentary films that I selected as my case studies reveal that there is a different kind of nostalgia in contemporary Berlin, namely, a nostalgia for what I call "Berlin Babylon" of the 1990s.
- Claire Colomb, Staging the New Berlin: Place Marketing and the Politics of Urban Reinvention Post-1989 (2012)
- Karen E. Till, The New Berlin: Memory, Politics, Place (2005)
- Janet Ward, Post-Wall Berlin: Borders, Space and Identity (2011)
Scholarship on nostalgia in the German context has been mostly limited to studies of Ostalgie and Westalgie (nostalgia for the former East or the former West Germany), for example:
- Dominic Boyer, “Ostalgie and the Politics of the Future in Eastern Germany,” in Public Culture (2006)
- Paul Cooke, Representing East Germany Since Unification: From Colonization to Nostalgia (2005)
- Nick Hodgin, Screening the East: Heimat, Memory and Nostalgia in German Film since 1989 (2011)
- Alexandra Ludewig, Screening Nostalgia: 100 Years of German Heimat Film (2011)
- Heidi Schlipphacke, Nostalgia After Nazism: History, Home, and Affect in German and Austrian Literature and Film (2010)
My project bridges the analysis of cultural products (documentary films) with the analysis of city marketing campaigns (Schaustelle, Be Berlin, etc.) and the cultural discourse around them (in literature and media) to gain a greater understanding of the post-reunification transformations in Berlin culture (in identity formations, in the ways the image of Berlin is constructed and communicated).
I position the films, and the historical locations they portray, as the structural framework for cultural analysis of Berlin. I look at spatial theory, marketing discourse, urban branding, and close-readings of film scenes and literary excerpts. The documentary films that I selected as my case studies reveal that there is a different kind of nostalgia in contemporary Berlin, namely, a nostalgia for what I call "Berlin Babylon" of the 1990s.
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