Neuköln “Heroes”
In collaboration with Hannah Darabi
Neuköln
“Heroes”
2011-2013
“There’s a track on the album “Heroes” called ‘Neuköln’, and that’s the area of Berlin where the Turks are shackled in bad conditions.”
David Bowie, interview with Allan Jones, Melody Maker (UK), 19 October 1977.
“We live in a cataract of time.”
Siegfried Kracauer, The Last Things Before the Last (1969)
Thirty-five years later, Hannah Darabi and Benoît Grimbert photographed this area. A contemporary counterpoint to the Neuköln of Heroes, these photographs evoke both the present time, and the time that passes, or on the contrary stands still. It is primarily a “cataract of times” that confronts us in this book which, by going through texts such as Siegfried Kracauer’s The Salaried Masses or Franz Hessel’s Walking in Berlin, or even film stills from People on Sunday (Robert Siodmak), also echoes Isherwood’s Berlin of the ’30s.