The Neukölln Kids Have Their Own Soap Opera Now
The life of the young Berlin transplant—somewhere between 20 and 29, between a line of something and a dance floor at 6am—has always had the bones of good television. Someone just needed to make it.
Ecke Weserstraße was that attempt: a web series by graphic designer Hayung von Oepen and literature student Johannes Hertwig, set among a cluster of trend-forward misfits in Berlin-Neukölln. The premise wasn’t complicated. You take the actual texture of that neighborhood—the bars, the drift, the chemical recreation, the sex, the self-mythology—and you let it play out on camera. Screened at the 48 Stunden Neukölln arts festival, it was billed as a portrait of a generation doing what that generation does in the one European city that still lets them do it freely.
What strikes me about projects like this isn’t the subject matter—Neukölln has been someone’s muse since the mid-2000s—but the reflexivity of it. The people making the show and the people appearing in it are essentially the same people. The audience at the Koffer Bar were probably recognizing their own weekends. Berlin has always been good at that particular hall-of-mirrors trick: turning the scene into content about the scene, then watching the scene watch itself.