Berlin: The city where anything goes
Published on: April 13, 2019 04:00 (EAT)
Burlesque dancer Anja Pavlova unhooks her spangled brassiere, tosses it aside and turns to face the cheering crowd. In the steaming hot Hoochie Koo club, the temperature shifts up a couple of extra degrees.
A pair of feather fans hide her nearly naked breasts as she continues her dance. Eventually, even these are cast aside as, with a smile on her face, the act reaches its big reveal.
It’s a typical night in Berlin, a place where, says Pavlova, anything goes.
As the summer sun sets over the city, it certainly seems that way. The crowds pack into nightclubs like uber-cool Berghain or the bondage and erotica-themed KitKatClub to sweat and grind to some of the planet’s hottest techno music.
Anja Pavlova performs a burlesque dance in Berlin.
Long after dawn the next morning, they’ll scatter through the streets, either rolling into bed to get some rest until the next party starts, or powering on through until night descends once more.
This is no new phenomenon.
Burlesque dancers were disrobing on stages here back in the 1920s and ’30s as part of a scene that inspired the musical “Cabaret.” The city’s dusk-til-dawn hedonists have always found somewhere to do their thing, no matter what that thing is.
Existential crisis
Aside from the dark days when a wall divided the city between the communist East and capitalist West — and, of course, the darker days of Nazi rule — laid back Berlin has always been a city that knows how to enjoy itself.
It has also long enjoyed a double life. While the city revels in its countercultural cred, Berlin also has a deeply square side. It serves as the capital of the most powerful economy in Europe — a federal bureaucracy with a reputation for stability and a passion for risk adversity.
This coexistence is what makes Berlin such an intriguing city to visit, but how does it sustain such a split identity?
Can its bohemian nature survive as hipsterization drives up living costs? And will it weather Germany’s wider existential crisis over the record number of migrants and asylum seekers who now call the country, and Berlin in particular, home?
To understand how Berlin has evolved — and how it continues to reinvent itself in the face of repeated crisis — involves diving into its very turbulent history, and meeting the folks who now embody its diverse and irrepressible spirit.
“Berlin is not Germany,” says Esra Rotthoff, a photographer who, as a child of a Turkish mother and German father, is about as Berlin as anyone can get. “It’s always been different from the rest of Germany.”
Unlike other Germans, she says, Berliners typically shy away from materialistic pursuits.
Rotthoff should know. She’s an artistic collaborator with the Maxim Gorki Theater, a downtown playhouse named after a Soviet author that’s known for political productions. The theater’s walls are adorned with the deadpan faces of actors photographed by Rotthoff.
“It’s more about what you bring to the city in terms of concepts maybe as an artist, or in terms of ideas,” she says. “That’s my feeling. That’s the general culture… maybe.”
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