DThe first impression: amazement. It’s amazing that something like this is still produced and broadcast on television. A documentary series about Berlin, from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the referendum on the expropriation of Vonovia in 2021. Extensively researched in the moving image archives, not the usual boring ready-made kit of well-known motifs that the broadcasters consider emblematic and which only documents their lack of visual imagination. Five episodes whose titles describe a development: “Summer of Anarchy”, “Megalomania”, “Crash”, “Poor, but Sexy!”, “The City as Prey”. A chronicle of decline that begins with ruins and is about ruin, about living and living in the metropolis, urban dreams and nightmares, East-West tensions and why Berlin became the way it is today. And how much of a beginning there was after the fall of the Berlin Wall!
This is “Capital B – Who owns Berlin?” Directed and written by Florian Opitz, who has made himself known through woke political documentaries. At the beginning there is a rapping opening credits, breathlessly mounted, which hints at what awaits you. Below that is “Black to Blue” by Peter Fox: “Good morning Berlin / You can be so ugly / So dirty and gray / You can be so beautifully terrible”.
Noted on the beer mat
It’s all a question of the mix – the founders of the Tresor club and Klaus-Rüdiger Landowsky, Wowereit and Peter Fox, Sarrazin and Güner Balcı, integration officers for Berlin-Neukölln. Eberhart Diepgen is allowed to spread his view of things. He resembles a caricature of an aging statesman and proudly reveals that he wrote down the plans for Potsdamer Platz on a beer mat. That’s what it looks like there too.
What is most striking, however, is that politicians have not been affected by any reflection to this day. An unbelievable self-righteousness emanates from them like a bad smell. Opitz lets her tell the story, which is clever and insightful. When Landowsky, then chairman of the CDU parliamentary group and bank board member, says in all seriousness that a loan is always a risk, even when buying a washing machine, then that explains why nothing could come of Bankgesellschaft Berlin AG and its billions in loans for the benefit of taxpayers came up. Klaus Wowereit, who was supposed to clean up the financial disaster with Thilo Sarrazin, only comes across as slightly more likeable. Behind him is a poster on the wall: “Too Much Is Never Enough.” You immediately think of “Wowi’s” full-bodied announcements about BER Airport. The fact that Landowsky calls Wowereit a “joke guy like Dieter Bohlen” shows that he never understood why Wowereit’s politics looked better even though they weren’t better. None of them ever got out of the Berlin felt and front-city miasma – and they thought it was a good thing. How refreshing is the perspective of Tresor co-founder Johnnie Stiehler, who says that he came to Kurfürstendamm for the first time from the East and was amused by how “provincial” West Berlin was.
Wowereit, after all, coined a viral saying “Poor, but sexy.” Sarrazin’s brutal savings concept paved the way to becoming a best-selling author who proved that with an accountant’s mentality that doesn’t care about people, you can also feature obscure racist theories. All that remains of the “string puller” Landowsky is that after endless trials he was not prosecuted for the banking scandal. Others had to pay. For example, the hyperactive building contractor Roland Ernst in Berlin, who almost had to go to prison. And today there is an investor named Jürgen Leibfried, who resides with a view of the hideous high-rise buildings at the Zoo station and is sure that he is on the right side of history when he announces with a mild smile that there is simply no human right to live in good ones Layers.
Then came the hangover
The series doesn’t sugarcoat anything. It shows that the subculture and the creative scene also remained in its bubble. As long as no one talked her into it, as long as political decisions didn’t affect her, people simply didn’t care about what happened to the city. The clubs were everywhere, vacant lots and vacant lots offered paradisiacal opportunities, there was never so much change. The hangover only came when it was noticed that others were taking over the city and buying the land, assisted by servile politics. The Love Parade had long since become a tourism factor. And after 2001 the city began to look more and more like investor Lego.
When they woke up, it was too late, that’s what people like the controversial and always somewhat clever urban sociologist Andrej Holm say. Or the communications designer and former squatter Sandy Kaltenborn, who speaks much more thoughtfully and self-critically about his own failures than the grizzled veterans of nightlife who didn’t see what was coming.
“Capital B” is not just a series for Berliners. But for everyone who experiences gentrification and political lack of planning that stifles urbanist fantasies; who think about where the lack of affordable housing comes from and what can be done about it. So basically for almost everyone. Maybe the film has a few too many slow motions, sometimes too suggestive music in the background, sometimes too picturesque city views. Doesn’t matter. He asks the question that matters: who owns a city.
“Capital B” is already running in the Arte media library, from October 3rd also in the ARD media library, broadcast on October 3rd and 4th from 8:15 p.m. on Arte.
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