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  • Berlin Calling: A Story of Anarchy, Music, the Wall, and the Birth of the New Berlin by Paul Hockenos, and: Cityscopes: Berlin by Joseph Pearson
  • Mirko M. Hall
Berlin Calling: A Story of Anarchy, Music, the Wall, and the Birth of the New Berlin. By Paul Hockenos. New York: New Press, 2017. Pp. xiv + 328. Cloth $26.95. ISBN 978-1620971956.
Cityscopes: Berlin. By Joseph Pearson. London: Reaktion, 2017. Pp. 280. Paper $22.00. ISBN 978-1780237190.

Berlin continues to captivate the global imagination as an epicenter of artistic experimentation and progressive political activism: a metropolis that David Bowie once supposedly described as the "greatest cultural extravaganza that one could imagine." Largely written for general audiences, Paul Hockenos's Berlin Calling and Joseph Pearson's Berlin explore the people, places, and movements that transformed the city into a powerful site of cultural creativity, critique, and resistance during the Cold War and after the Wall's fall. Both authors provide an exhilarating account of Berlin as an angst-ridden, yet explosively creative city through historical analyses and personal anecdotes. As longtime residents, their observations are frequently marked by an undercurrent of hagiographic adoration or melancholic remembrance, but one that always manages to capture the city's unique cultural-revolutionary promise. Hockenos is an American-born journalist and political analyst, who has written extensively on European governmental affairs, political extremism, and transatlantic relations. Pearson is a Canadian-born writer and cultural historian, who edits The Needle, one of Berlin's popular blogs on art, culture, and lifestyle.

In Berlin Calling, Hockenos recounts how a "rich countercultural past" (2) played a decisive role in not only making the city a "sanctuary for contrarians" (1) during the second half of the Cold War, but also a world capital of the creative class in the new millennium. He pays particular attention to the motley crew of vanguard artists, musicians, and thinkers—on both sides of the Wall during the 1980s—who imbued Berlin with an often shocking ethos of "utopian politics and libertine practices" (5). The first chapter of Berlin Calling investigates the aesthetic and political interventions of queer activists, radical anarchists, graffiti artists, punk rockers, and house squatters in the western boroughs of Schöneberg and Kreuzberg from the 1970s to the 1980s. Chapter 2 focuses on the bohemian dissidents, Protestant pacifists, and punk rockers in the eastern borough of Prenzlauer Berg in the 1980s. The third and final chapter examines how experimental artists, young entrepreneurs, and anonymous hackers are reshaping a reunified Berlin since the 1990s. Many of these histories are interpreted through the city's punk and postpunk music scenes: from predecessor David Bowie to the band Einstürzende Neubauten in West Berlin, to bands like Die Firma and Namenlos in East Berlin, and to techno DJs like Dr. Motte in the New Berlin. For Hockenos, music provided the city's rebels with an intoxicating soundtrack that promoted an antiauthoritarian program of democratization and experimentation. This [End Page 440] program "wielded culture and lifestyle as political weapons" (144) against postwar capitalism and communism in the service of human freedom.

Because Hockenos only addresses those topics that are part of his own personal experiences as a "child of the Cold War" (197) in West Berlin, he does not (fully) explore a number of other important contributors to the city's progressive profile: these include hip hop artists and musicians, the cultural critics affiliated with the Merve publishing house, trade unionists and labor activists, and guest workers from throughout the Mediterranean. Of course, no book can ever exhaust the aesthetic and political coordinates of a metropolis like Berlin, but readers should be aware that there were additional critical and creative forces at work within the city.

Pearson's Berlin is part of an innovative new series by Reaktion Books that offers historical and cultural introductions to major world metropolises in the form of glossy illustrated guides. In this attractive volume, he undertakes two complementary projects: a targeted overview of Berlin's history since its origins in the thirteenth century and a contemporary portrait of its key spaces and places. This latter project is intimately connected to his everyday experiences of moving through...

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