Brutal cuts to culture subsidies are about to make the city a welcoming place only for the lazy work of rich kid artists<\/p>\n
In 2003, Berlin had just woken up from a decade-long fever dream: the Wall had fallen, the city had reunited and the two German states had a common capital once again. Financially, Berlin\u2019s awakening was a total hangover: billions in debt had piled up and unemployment had reached an all-time high. Culturally, however, the city was blooming. The arts and nightlife were bustling like a never-ending after-hours party on the leftovers of the cold war. This parallelism of decay and pleasure was described by the then mayor, Klaus Wowereit, in an interview that year as \u201cpoor but sexy<\/a>\u201d.<\/p>\n The phrase was so cheesy and so powerful, it became a slogan for Berlin\u2019s image in subsequent years, drawing young creatives<\/a> from all over the world to the city\u2019s promising subculture scenes and its relatively affordable housing. One of these young people was me. In 2012, when I had just graduated from university, I planned to stay in Berlin for the summer. Twelve years on, I am still here.<\/p>\n Fatma Aydemir is a Berlin-based author, novelist, playwright and a Guardian Europe columnist<\/p>\n Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Brutal cuts to culture subsidies are about to make the city a welcoming place only for the lazy work of rich kid artists In 2003, Berlin had just woken up from a decade-long fever dream: the Wall had fallen, the city had reunited and the two German states had a common capital once again. Financially, … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-29426","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29426","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29426"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29426\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29426"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29426"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29426"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}