“The noughties were still ambivalent”

The brief phase of flourishing queer culture in Russia. The band Tatu in 2003. Yulia Volkova (left) ran in a primary election for the Kremlin party United Russia in 2021

The brief phase of flourishing queer culture in Russia. The band Tatu in 2003. Yulia Volkova (left) ran in a primary election for the Kremlin party United Russia in 2021

Your book about the noughties begins surprisingly with memories of scooters that were popular at the time.

I also quote a comic from the series “Calvin and Hobbes” from 1989. The character Calvin wonders what has become of the great promises of technology. He ends up dreaming of a rocket engine as he rides along on his scooter. This type of scooter became the means of transport at the turn of the millennium. In Berlin-Mitte back then, all the important people rode around on these ridiculous scooters. The hipster and start-up culture that didn't want to grow up was already emerging there. Today, different generations can still remember this scooter. It is an emblem of mobility. At that time, the “immaterial workers” emerged (a term used by the post-operaist theorist Maurizio Lazzarato; editor’s note). Everyone wanted to be nomads. People no longer felt tied to a specific city, but wanted to be in other places all the time.

»The concept of the dominant culture was developed by the Republicans. At the end of the 1990s, the CDU forcefully fed it into the mainstream until Friedrich Merz made the preservation of the dominant culture an election campaign issue in 2000.

At that time there was also discussion about the so-called German dominant culture.

To read this content, an online subscription is required::