Berlin’s Greenwich Village - McDonaldized. . . ?
Sep 14th, 2007 by Paul Moor
During my years as a gung-ho Parisian Left-Banker (1949-51) - complete with full beard, beret basque, British Army surplus duffel-coat, and a grungy little walk-up hotel room that cost me $1 a night at those days’ black-market rate (and where, the New York girl who’d preceded me to Paris and got me installed there assured me, male tenants of all such grungy little St. Germain-des-Prés hotel rooms peed in the sink), the political left used to rumble against what it denounced as “la Coca-Colonization de la France“. On a wall of one of the Latin-Quarter buildings belonging to what foreigners incorrectly tend to lump together as the Sorbonne (in fact only a part of the Université de Paris), I once saw a far more electrifying warning someone had written with chalk: “Le Coca-Cola donne le cancère“!
In more recent times, another stateside staple has become an all-European neologism - for instance, here in Germany “die McDonaldisierung Deutschlands“. When I drive down the Potsdamer Strasse on my way home from the Philharmonie (where I spend a sizable number of my waking hours) I pass a huge rooftop electric sign on my left proclaiming that Berlin today has “50+” locations sporting the golden arches.
A brand-new outpost has just opened in the borough of Kreuzberg, a onetime purely proletarian neighborhood (with some absolutely charming old houses and greenswards) which in recent years, thanks to its lower rents, has turned into a sort of Berliner Greenwich Village - and the opening of the latest McDonald’s there has attracted the attention of the Anglophone edition of Der Spiegel.
Dear Mr. Mohr,
as a resident of Berlin-Mitte I have to say that I often have the feeling that the community is somehow colonized, not by McDonalds (in fact it has removed a store in the Oranienburger Str.), but by the crowds of adolescents (most of them Americans, I have to say) tourists doing pub-crawling. It might be a good business for the organizers, pubs and participating bars though. Yet, why does it not seem possible for young Americans to make certain experiences in their homecountry? I think it might be a good topic for a book, don’t you think so? Also the massive amounts of bycicles with lots of tourcycling Americans (who besides do not obey the rules of the StVO) and dramatically rastafari acting tourguides is making me seriously think. America must be full of bikes and everyday life massively boring, or the knowledge of other countries and others entirely suppressed. Just an impression.
Yet, I am quite impressed what I have learned about you today - apart your achievements as a journalist, your dedication towards the psychological effects of education in post Germany, which cannot be exhaustively appreciated.