EXBERLINER Issue 170, April 2018

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Berlin
by Dan Borden
Mute’s
Mega-Berlin
Dan watched the Netflix flop
to find out how our city’s
future stacks up.
As a film, the recent Netflix thriller Mute is a
derivative bore. But for those of us fretting
over Berlin’s future, Duncan Jones’ sci-fi vision
is a blast. As our city drifts toward neutered
mediocrity, the director promises the
Berlin of 2052 will be a souped-up version
of the seedy 1970s playground inhabited by
his dad, David Bowie.
Bowie moved to Schöneberg in 1976, seduced
by Weimar Berlin’s 1920s decadence,
and produced his signature album, Heroes.
While Mute’s hero Leo Beiler (Alexander
Skarsgård) searches the Berlin of tomorrow
for his missing girlfriend, director Jones goes
back and reconstructs the wild and crazy
Cold War Berlin he glimpsed visiting his
father as a kid.
In Mute’s alternate future, American
soldiers still patrol the streets where insults
like “commie” and “yankee” are bandied
about, and everyone still uses deutschmarks
– printed with Angela Merkel’s face. But the
Berlin Wall is gone. A car chase through West
Berlin ends at the East Berlin restaurant
Ständige Vertretung, and Leo picnics next
to the Brandenburg Gate, shown wedged between
tall buildings. The best part of Jones’
alternate future: Berlin’s tight-assed city
planners have learned to relax and love two
current no-nos, neon signs and skyscrapers.
In 30 years, Mitte will be a forest of glowing
towers, like Dubai on the Spree.
The film doesn’t offer cameos by survivors
of Bowie’s Berlin like Iggy Pop, Brian
Eno or Romy Haag, but it gives screen time
to three Cold War landmarks we’re lucky to
still have around:
Kotti apotheosis
Mute’s hero Leo crosses paths with his nemesis
Cactus Bill (Paul Rudd) in a scene filmed
at Kottbusser Tor, in today’s Kremanski cafe.
It’s a ground level storefront in that sprawling
mega-project, the Neues Kreuzberger
Zentrum. Opened in 1974, the complex was
aimed at upgrading/sanitising a seedy corner
of then-West Berlin – with the unspoken goal
of scaring away the growing immigrant population.
It didn’t work. Today, 70 percent of its
300 flats are occupied by non-Germans. In
April 2017, city-owned housing company Gewobag
bought the complex, guaranteeing its
survival as affordable housing into the 22nd
century. But Mute literally takes the building
to the next level, showing it doubled in height.
Leo is seen traversing the project’s upperlevel
“street-in-the-sky”, a feature planned
but never completed in the 1970s due to
budget cuts.
Westside UFO
While scouting futuristic Berlin locations,
director Jones was psyched to stumble on
Charlottenburg’s Internationales Congress
Centrum (ICC). He described the late-1970s
megastructure to entertainment website
IGN: “It looks like a spaceship from Battlestar
Galactica that’s just landed in the city...
[and] on the inside it looks like a Kubrick
set.” In Mute, the ICC’s lobby plays a mid-
In Netflixe’s Mute, Mitte’s
Kraftwerk is transformed into
a futuristic red-light district.
21st-century shopping mall. In reality, the
asbestos-filled building has been unused
since 2014 and was threatened with demolition
until Berlin’s Senat kicked in €200
million to save it last year. Its future function
isn’t fixed, but they’ve singled out one option
not on the table: shopping centre.
Ossi AC/DC
The seedy underbelly of Mute’s Berlin is a
steamy, multi-level red light district. Signs
for a fictional Rudi-Dutschke-Straße S-Bahn
station place it blocks from Checkpoint
Charlie, but it was actually shot inside a
cavernous Cold War-era power plant. The
Kraftwerk Mitte on Köpenicker Straße
began generating East Berlin’s electricity
in 1964. Shuttered in 1997, it’s been revived
as a stunning event venue and home to the
dance club Tresor.
Director Jones should have waited. Blocks
from the real Checkpoint Charlie, a new
building’s going up that’s destined to rank
among the city’s futuristic megastructures.
The Axel Springer Neubau, by Dutch architect
Rem Koolhaas, will be a high-tech office
block with gaps in its skin revealing a cavelike
atrium. Set to open in 2020, it will be
daring, quirky and a camera-ready backdrop
for Berlin’s real-life sci-fi future. ■
The Berlin of 2052 will be a
souped-up version of the seedy
1970s playground inhabited by
David Bowie.
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EXBERLINER 170