BARBAROUS BERLIN THESIS (PDF)

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ABSTRACT

Title of Thesis:

“BARBAROUS BERLIN”: NARRATIVES OF
QUEERNESS, SPACE, SURVIVAL, AND
MEMORY IN A LIMINAL CITY

Raleigh Joyner, Master of Arts, 2018

Thesis directed by:

Dr. Hester Baer

The intent of my work is to explore the relationships between history, space,
community, and movement in and through the city of Berlin throughout the last
century. I trace common threads of liminality, memory, survival, and the
relationships between the urban space and the individual over a 100-year period. The
three periods that I particularly focus on are the Weimar era (1919-1933), the
division of Germany and Berlin (1961-1989), and the reestablishment of Germany
as a united country (1990-present).


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“BARBAROUS BERLIN”: NARRATIVES OF QUEERNESS,
SPACE, SURVIVAL, AND MEMORY IN A LIMINAL CITY
by

Raleigh Joyner

Thesis submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of
Maryland, College Park, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Master of Arts
2018

Advisory Committee:
Associate Professor Hester Baer, Chair, Germanic Studies
Professor Maud Casey, English
Associate Professor Julie Koser, Germanic Studies

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© Copyright by
Raleigh Joyner
2018

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Dedication
TBD

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Table of Contents
Introduction..................................................................................................................................... 6
Chapter One: Weimaresk ............................................................................................................... 8
“Das Nachtgespenst” ......................................................................................................... 8
“Kinder, heut’ abend, da such ich mir was aus” .............................................................. 14
“Raus mit den Männern” ................................................................................................. 20
“Die Notbremse” .............................................................................................................. 23
“Ich weiß nicht, zu wem ich gehöre” .............................................................................. 27
Chapter One Endnotes ..................................................................................................... 33
Chapter Two: Weeping Wall ....................................................................................................... 45
“a space, some temporary abode,” ................................................................................... 45
“hyphenated people” ........................................................................................................ 50
“the process of shattering and passing beyond” .............................................................. 57
“incite, literally incite, like a riot,” .................................................................................. 63
“everything is going to get worse” .................................................................................. 68
Chapter Two Endnotes .................................................................................................... 72
Chapter Three: Where Are the Queers? ...................................................................................... 85
GEGEN ASS ................................................................................................................... 85
GEGEN FAMILY ........................................................................................................... 90
GEGEN SHAME ............................................................................................................ 99
GEGEN FASHION! ...................................................................................................... 104
GEGEN FATE ............................................................................................................... 110
Chapter Three Endnotes ................................................................................................. 113
Bibliography............................................................................................................................... 129

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Table of Figures
Figure 1 ........................................................................................................................................ 38
Figure 2 ........................................................................................................................................ 39
Figure 3 ........................................................................................................................................ 42
Figure 4 ........................................................................................................................................ 73
Figure 5 ........................................................................................................................................ 75
Figure 6 ........................................................................................................................................ 76
Figure 7 ........................................................................................................................................ 80
Figure 8 ........................................................................................................................................ 81
Figure 9 ...................................................................................................................................... 115
Figure 10 .................................................................................................................................... 120
Figure 11 .................................................................................................................................... 120
Figure 12 .................................................................................................................................... 121
Figure 13 .................................................................................................................................... 121
Figure 14 .................................................................................................................................... 121
Figure 15 .................................................................................................................................... 128

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Introduction
Berlin’s history defines its spaces in that every square meter of the city is loaded with its
substantial past. In Berlin, it is impossible to exist in the present without the past punching
through space, perception, and concepts of community at any and all times – thanks to Berlin’s
history and its consequent tendency toward radical politically-charged (often queer, or queered)
social movements that push back against capitalist and neoliberal influences over the usage of
“burdened” (to use urban sociologist Claire Colomb’s term) spaces. Throughout the 20th and into
the 21st centuries, the liminal and transient nature of Berlin has therefore informed its
attractiveness to people whose identities – as queer people, expatriates, artists, and people who
occupy social spaces and identities that are somehow “in-between” – parallel the essence of the
city itself. City and people alike are informed by the effects of political vacuums, producing a
slippage in the ordinary relationships between people and the times and spaces they inhabit. Do
the spaces and history of Berlin inform and attract these people, or do these people shape and
inform the city? Or is there a constant exchange in which both of these phenomena happen
concurrently? Through meditations on spaces dominated by queer expatriate communities and
the people who forge and inhabit these spaces, I intend to explore the roles that “hyphenation”
and hybridity have in this relationship of mutual intervention between people and place. Berlin
passes through people and communities in the same way that those people and communities pass
through Berlin; neither is never quite the same afterwards.
My focus will be on three “chapters” in the city’s recent history that have been especially
conducive to this relationship: the Weimar era, the period between the construction of the Berlin
Wall and the reunification of Germany, and the period since Berlin was again made the German
capital in 1999. As many of my driving ideas and theoretical approaches emphasize the

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importance of fusion and ambiguity, it feels right that the form and content of my thesis should
reflect these same concepts. Therefore, I have chosen to write my thesis in the form of creative
personal reflection (very much in the manner of those who have written on Berlin before me)
with theoretical background rooted in queer theory, narrative theory, urban social theory, and
intersectional feminist theory woven into the narrative.

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Chapter One: Weimaresk

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“Das Nachtgespenst”1

During my first several months in Berlin, I lived near Mexikoplatz, in a wealthy
neighborhood only convenient in that it was fifteen minutes away from the university I studied
at. A sprawling arboretum dotted with mansions reflected in blue-glass-smooth glacial trough
forest lakes, it rousted old romanticized teenage daydreams I had presumed very long dead,
reasoned-past, moved-on-from. Images of 1920s post-Prussian suburban affluence and idealistic
rebels at repressive private schools came back to mind in a storm of age-regressive reverie.2 The
sumptuous front façades of houses on the Spanische Allee and Lindenthaler Allee shook awake
sleepy short story synopses about depressed queer barons and their flighty lovers whiling
summers away in lush back gardens, the adolescent children of merchant families languishing in
early August in the Grunewald (it was still fingertip-numbing, hateful March), husks of
characters and half-developed plots informed entirely by the books and films I consumed in my
bedroom at fifteen.3 Finally, at twenty-one, I could walk into the world that shaped the brooding
youthful foolish martyrdom of the 1927 Steglitzer Schülertragödie suicide pact gone awry at
Albrechtstraße 72, four stops away from me on the S14 – now the address of an optician’s office.
Once I went slightly out of my way to find it while visiting the Botanischer Garten and stood in
front of the optician’s office, squinting up at unassuming balconies and tall obsidian-black shut
windows, as if expecting some life-changing realization about the state of the young and
moneyed reckless of the Weimar Republic.5 Nothing came to me.
In time, my neighborhood made it abundantly clear it did not want me there. On the bus
toward the Wannsee, or on the U3 heading toward the University or further on to the Schwules
Museum where I worked in Tiergarten, I engaged in regular stare-downs with old people
clutching rolling collapsible grocery carts. Growing up taking the Green Line through Suitland