Capital B - Wem gehört Berlin?

November 1989: As soon as the Berlin Wall fell, the battles over the future of the still divided city and the distribution of the newly created spaces and opportunities began. Vain provincial politicians, enterprising property developers and battle-hardened squatters from the West, but also freedom-seeking young techno pioneers from East and West. They are all trying to seize the moment and stake their claims between derelict walls, dilapidated old buildings and the abandoned industrial plants of a lost country. For the subculture, it is a brief summer of anarchy in which anything seems possible, in which utopia and chaos lie side by side. But the old power elites of West Berlin put an abrupt end to this in a major police operation. The dream is over.

While East Berlin's GDR industry and hundreds of thousands of East Berliners became unemployed from one day to the next, investors from the West hoped for big business and took unprecedented risks. In their slipstream, techno pioneers and squatters conquer empty factory buildings, churches and cinemas in the center of Berlin to live out their utopias, at least on a small scale, or simply to party freely. The Love Parade goes from being a ridiculed event organized by a few dance enthusiasts to a success story. Berlin becomes the German capital and also bids to host the 2000 Olympic Games, which is too much for the citizens of the poor city and drives the left-wing scene onto the barricades. The fact that Nazis are increasingly hunting down foreigners and left-wingers in the eastern part of the new German capital does not fit in at all with the image of the international metropolis. Politicians continue to stick to their plans undeterred and are having the symbol of their metropolitan dreams cast in concrete erected in the heart of the city, at Potsdamer Platz. However, Europe's largest construction site on the former death strip can hardly hide the fact: Dark clouds are looming over the new German capital.

Even financially strong companies could not be attracted. The truth is bitter: Berlin in the mid-90s is not a world metropolis, but the capital of kebab shops. The city is poor and tough. Districts such as Kreuzberg, Wedding and Neukölln are left behind and threaten to degenerate into ghettos with their predominantly migrant and unemployed population. Crime and gang fights are the order of the day. At the center of it all: Savas Yurderi aka Kool Savas, who would soon become the most influential rapper in Germany. The only thing that works commercially in Berlin is techno, the first German-German youth culture that has long since arrived in the mainstream. The Love Parade and clubs like the Tresor conquer the hearts of Europe's youth from the center of Berlin. The number of visitors to the Love Parade doubles from year to year. Meanwhile, Diepgen and Landowsky are not giving up. They want to force the boom and put all their eggs in one basket: Berlin is now to become the German financial center rather than an industrial city - and soon rival London and New York. The beginning of a major catastrophe for the city: the biggest banking scandal in German history takes its course. And a young politician from the second tier skilfully seizes the opportunity to take power in the city: Klaus Wowereit.

Wowereit knows how to pack his policies into pithy slogans. When it comes to austerity, the smart mayor looks for and finds an ice-cold enforcer who hardly anyone knows at the time: his name is Thilo Sarrazin. Another duo at the head of the city: the friendly party mayor and the iron-fisted savings commissioner. The radical austerity programme they set in motion dramatically exacerbated the social conflicts in the poor city. This is particularly evident in the poor problem neighborhoods of Kreuzberg and Neukölln. The rough and poor image of the tough city of Berlin has long been exploited by young Berlin hip-hop artists around Kool Savas and his mate Sido. They transform it into hard-hitting and often adult-friendly Berlin battle rap and make it their trademark, which has conquered the youth rooms of the whole of Germany from the Kreuzberg basement. Berlin's techno and party scene also experienced a renaissance and moved from the now cramped center of Berlin to new locations full of industrial wasteland, which until then had been in a deep slumber: the banks of the Spree, where Bar 25 opened, among others, and made a significant contribution to Berlin's new image, which Mayor Wowereit once again put into a world-famous slogan: "Berlin is poor, but sexy".

After years of stagnation and decline, Berlin is suddenly growing at a rapid pace. Berliners and the club scene are feeling the downsides of the boom: first clubs are pushed out by financially strong investors, then the residents. The citizens' fight against displacement, gentrification and for a city that is still worth living in becomes the overarching theme of the decade. And citizens are constantly finding new means and forms of action to successfully defend themselves. Meanwhile, the increasingly out-of-touch mayor Klaus Wowereit no longer understands his citizens and makes a mockery of the whole world with a ruined building that was to become a major airport, while the old Tempelhof Airport becomes a refuge for refugees and the Neukölln district finally becomes a symbol of failed migration policy and criminal clan criminality. And as if that wasn't enough, at the beginning of the new decade, a pandemic sends the city, which is now truly a global metropolis, into a state of shock that changes everything. Welcome to the Berlin of the decade.