Article:

Gentrification by genre? The Berlin rom-com

Over the past few decades, there has been a significant uptick in the number of people relocating to Berlin. This influx is most of-ten viewed as a response to rebranding the reunified German capi-tal as a creative city – a tactic that foregrounded Berlin’s longstand-ing reputation for cheap rent, liberal attitudes, artistic culture, and vibrant nightlife. The housing market responded as vacancies plummeted while rent prices skyrocketed. Alongside the widely lamented changing face of the reunified capital, the spike in rent prices is one tangible outcome of Berlin’s rapid gentrification. This essay examines the aesthetics of gentrifying Berlin through an ex-amination of a genre commonly associated with the imperatives of gentrification: the romantic comedy. Unlike other cinema tradi-tions associated with urban space, the romcom is commonly un-derstood as a genre that frames the city as a site of aspirational af-fluence and consumerism. This framing has, to date, overwhelm-ingly referred to romcoms produced in the American context. Through analyses of three romcoms set in Berlin – Germany’s highest grossing romcom to date KEINOHRHASEN (‘Rabbit With-out Ears’, Schweiger, 2007); the 2019 installment in Emmanuel Benbihy’s ‘City of Love’ anthology film series, BERLIN, I LOVE YOU and Doris Dörrie’s GLÜCK (‘Bliss’, 2012) this essay interro-gates whether romcoms set in Berlin can be, as has been claimed of their US counterparts, understood as a genre of gentrification.