Abstract

This thesis will analyze neo-expressionist paintings made in Kreuzberg during the late 1970s and 1980s. The analysis will include Helmut Middendorf’s “Electric Night” (1979), "Großstadt Eingeborene" (1979), “Big City Natives” (1980), and “The Singer” (1981), Rainer Fetting’s “Van Gogh und Mauer V” (1978), “Grosse Dusche” (1980), “Figur an der Mauer” (1987), Salomé’s “Self-portrait” (1981), “Verschärftes Aufsteigen” (1981), “Nackt in Gelb” (1981), Luciano Castelli’s “Olé” (1981), and their joint work “Rote Liebe” (1979), as well as Bernd Zimmer’s “Brennende Fabrik III” (1981), and “Verwandlung” (1983). Ultimately, I seek to demonstrate that these works offer insight into the obscured subcultural communities of postwar Kreuzberg.
My analysis of these artworks will draw on several methodologies, frameworks, and concepts. It will be heavily centered on affect theory, masculinity and queer theory, semiotics, fashion history, as well as the deep and complex entanglement of all of these notions. I will also draw from the anecdotal and oral histories provided to me by the artists themselves, artistic experts, and other individuals involved in Berlin’s postwar artistic and subcultural scenes. Through these many avenues, I will unpack and analyze the aforementioned artworks in order to demonstrate how they present distinctive transgressive aesthetics that can be read as an affective archive of Kreuzberg’s punk and queer subcultures of the late 1970s and 1980s.