""BERLIN IS OVER" is the line you hear and read everywhere. But what exactly is over-and what was so special and fragile that it could be wrecked? Maybe it came down to a combination that existed in various places at given moments in the postwar era: low rents, tourism, and art industries looking kindly on bohemians and knowing how to extract value from them; an international consensus that a specific city was where you'd go to meet people."
"In parallel with the decline of cosmopolitanism . . . Berlin today is seeing the emergence of something like an international bohemia similar to the one in 1920s Paris. Which, it's true, isn't all that productive. But the bohemia of the 1920s also wasn't exceptionally productive-Berlin is a utopia realized; and the realized utopia consists simply in not paying too dearly for one's lifestyle. . . . That attracts people from all over the world. I think that's wonderful."
Berlin's allure combined low rents, tourism, and art industries that tolerated bohemian lifestyles while extracting cultural value. Specific cities have repeatedly become international hubs where people gathered to meet, create, and exchange ideas. Contemporary Berlin resembles a realized bohemian utopia akin to 1920s Paris because inexpensive living made artistic and playful lifestyles viable for outsiders. Art, broadly defined, resists alienated capitalist labor by privileging meaning or play, yet often devolves into labor and privilege. Bohemians sometimes secure disproportionate advantages or parasitic positions within bourgeois economies. Political responses emerge to address both the bohemian milieu's visible successes and its contradictions.
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