Schwarzbuch hässliches Deutschland - Der etwas andere Reiseführer (German Edition)

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Area designated for redevelopment in Berlin-Kreuzberg Inscriptions on a kitchen wall inside a squatted house Demonstration passing a squatted house in Berlin-Kreuzberg Map depicting the centres of the West German squatters' movement Cartoon depicting squatters as native Americans Wall decoration inside a Berlin Stadtindianer squat Inside a Berlin punk squat Young punks at Kottbusser Tor, Berlin-Kreuzberg Cartoon depicting Snoopy as a squatter Murals as a tourist sight AJZ activists tearing up a parking lot The first drug room in the AJZ Heroin dealers, piss off!

Fixer room in Hamburg, I therefore take great pleasure in thanking all the individuals who helped in the production of this study. I would first like to thank Armin Kuhn who provided criticism and advice when they were most needed. I am happy that his dissertation on squatting in Berlin and Barcelona became something like a twin project to my own research. I could give no notion by references alone what his work and our discussions have contributed to this dissertation.

I would also like to thank the members of my dissertation committee for their support. Bill French, Tamara Myers and first and foremost my dissertation adviser Eagle Glassheim helped me with their expertise and encouragement to shape, and ultimately finish, this project. I profited greatly from suggestions by many colleagues.

I want to express my gratitude to the helpful staff at various archives, especially at Papertiger Archiv und Bibliothek Berlin and Archiv der Sozialen Bewegung Hamburg. Without their idealistic and voluntary efforts this dissertation could not have come to life. Financial support was provided by the University of British Columbia, the province of British Columbia and the remnants of the German welfare state. Acknowledging the intellectual and financial assistance by people and institutions is simple. It is much more complex to acknowledge the emotional support that was at least as important for the successful completion of this dissertation, especially when emotional and intellectual help went vii hand in hand.

I had the great luck to meet some truly incredible people who I am glad to count as my friends. I am indebted to the Werkstatt's prima inter pares, Inge Marszolek, for her encouragement and for reminding me at the right time that all the interesting things that did not find their way into the dissertation could be used in future projects.

David Meola and Laura Madokoro polished my written words. If this thesis does not read like the Monty Python version of a German academic paper, it is due to their generous efforts. My room mates and friends supported me emotionally not to forget the food and beverages throughout these past years. I am thankful to my family for shelves of books, their financial support and for their encouragement of critical thinking. All these people have contributed to this work and for that, I owe them my gratitude.

All the errors and mistakes that remain are, of course, entirely my own. Considering you will then Threaten us with cannons and with guns, We've now decided to fear A bad life more than death. Introduction Yet it is necessary to notice that the space which today appears to form the horizon of our concerns, our theory, our systems, is not an innovation; space itself has a history in Western experience, and it is not possible to disregard the fatal intersection of time with space.

For instance, I used to get real rattled about this, like — how people are defining themselves through their job, you know. I was always, like: I don't need this. I am me, right? And I don't need to have some PhD degree or whatever to be something, you know. Prologue During the s and especially around the year urban space in Western European cities changed significantly. In the aftermath of the world economic crisis of whole regions were suffering from de-industrialization and high unemployment rates. Cities that had been centres of industrial production turned into neglected and impoverished places of a past era.

Social and political conflicts turned cities into battlefields, with clashes between young protesters and the police of hitherto unknown militancy. Whether in Zurich, Amsterdam, Bristol or Berlin, cities became sites of unrest to a degree that had not been witnessed during the previous decade. Apart from these violent eruptions, new spaces of a threatening social Other emerged: Hab' ick immer, ey: Ick bin ick, verstehste. Centaurus, , Some of these new, threatening spaces were seemingly connected with a youth gone awry. Reports on youth deviance filled the media in Western European countries and startled the general public.

Youth, urban space and questions of crisis, normalcy, and rebellion had apparently come to be strongly connected with each other. The topic of this dissertation is it to trace the historic developments that established urban space as a field to understand and govern social crises in general and deviant and rebellious youth in particular in the early s.

And yet one might need to start this story in a completely different way. As a troubled teenager I once ran away from home to escape the boredom of a small provincial town in north-west Germany. Although the main task in going away was to find myself, I thought it would be a good idea to also have a geographical goal to keep me going. Heading East, I wound up in the city of Berlin. As it was my first time in the big city, I had to rely almost completely on the imaginary landscape that stories, movies, and media reports had formed in my mind over the years.

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This landscape differed significantly from that of an adult tourist. Two places were of much greater importance and invested with much stronger feelings. It was the meeting place of youth who had run from their homes and were now hanging out at this train station—or so I thought. Here, useful information might be gathered that could help to survive in this big city. But, and I remember vividly how certain I was about this fact, you needed to move on as quickly as possible. For the Bahnhof Zoo was also the meeting place of the heroin scene and it was clear to me that I would end up a heroin addict if I stayed too long a week?

The other place that I knew of was the district of Kreuzberg. Here, the squatters' scene had basically turned a whole neighbourhood into an anarchist utopia. Every May Day they seemed to successfully defend it against the police in violent street battles which I could witness on TV. A song about a squatted house at Bethanienplatz had been played at parties even where I grew up, so if there was a place for youth who were fed up with everything that their parents and teachers stood for and that this society seemed to hold on offer—it had to be in Kreuzberg.

Needless to say that reality was sobering in both cases: But the questions that drive me today are: Why was I, like many others, driven to these places with such a mixture of hope and anxiety? What had turned these urban spaces into possible objects of identification? Many years later I ended up living in Kreuzberg. In the morning, when I leave my house —squatted in , legalized, now in the hands of a self-organized cooperative—and head over to my office-space—in a building squatted in , legalized in —I pass by the spaces of this history.

I cross Kottbusser Tor with its monumental high-rise buildings, a symbol for the inhumanity of modernist city planning. As gentrification changes Kreuzberg rapidly, rents are rising and new protest emerges. Some months ago, the tenants of these buildings, most of them of Turkish origin, started organizing weekly demonstrations and events and squatted the space in front of their building by pitching a large tent there. Only a few steps across the road some of the local heroin addicts are gathering every day, now and then dispersed by a police patrol.

They have made the area around Kotti, as the area is called affectionately, their preferred meeting place. In the neighbouring kiosk people can buy souvenirs from Kotti d'Azur, featuring an anchor and a syringe. There is no reason to take the subway to Bahnhof Zoo from here. Although only a few stops away, the formerly run-down area around the train station has changed significantly during the last two decades. As other train stations, it has been turned from a site of transit into a shopping area.

Although studies show that this does not reduce crime in any significant way, after each new criminal incident in public space the presented solution will inevitably feature an intensified surveillance and control of these spaces. How did those events around shape the city of today? Why do we perceive certain spaces as different from their surroundings? How come we identify heroin use with the architectural ensemble around a large crossroads, social protest with a neighbourhood —and ourselves with this space Kotti d'Azur?

And why is it possible to present the control of space as a reasonable means against crime and delinquency even though virtually all studies indicate the contrary? All the aforementioned aspects have influenced this research project. Partly it is concerned with the role that urban space had as part of the social and economic crisis of the s. Yet this study is also concerned with the role of these spaces for youth themselves or, in a change of perspective, the role of youth in the creation of these spaces.

For here will lie the answer to the question of how non-conforming youth came to identify with specific urban areas. Thesis and research approaches I will argue in this dissertation that between the late s and early s a spatialization of the social took place that established urban space as a prime object of governmental policies. I will further argue that the transformation of social problems into questions of spatial order was mirrored in a growing reference to space as a site of liberation on behalf of non- conforming youth.

In order to prove this thesis I will turn to meeting places of the heroin scene and the spaces of the political youth and squatters' movement between the mids and mids. One geographical focus is on West Germany, especially on the city of West Berlin. The highest death rate among heroin consumers in Europe and maybe the world and the record number of over squatted houses in confirm these perceptions.

The study of other West-German cities although to a much lesser degree than in the case of Berlin will complement the picture; this concerns mainly the cities of Frankfurt and Hamburg. The Birth of the Prison New York: Pantheon Books, , 31; Michael S. Zurich also had one of the largest visible heroin scenes and it was the city that adopted the harshest repressive strategy against visible heroin scenes in Europe. And it was here that youth activists first developed and implemented the idea of a safe-injection site for drug users. The study employs a double perspective: At the same time, I am interested in the practices and imaginations of youth who were seeking to evade or rebel against the hegemonic order through specific urban spaces.

To grasp the perspective of both governmental institutions and non-conforming youth I will combine an analysis of their discursive and spatial practices. Three groups of sources, produced by different social actors, could inform such a task: The main methodological problem lies with the disparity of these sources. Both archival records and media reports were almost exclusively informed by experts such as police, criminologists, politicians, and medicinal or psychiatric personnel.

The voice of youth is largely absent from these sources. A similar disparity as that between experts and youth can be found in self-representations of youth: Instead, media reports were used to reconstruct both the local tactics of governance that is primarily the tactics of police and the hegemonic discursive imaginations about heroin and squatters' scene. Especially the weekly news-magazine Der Spiegel, at that time arguably the key medium throughout German-speaking Europe, was used to grasp the most important discursive formations.

The analysis of governmental technologies and hegemonic discourse was then contrasted with self- representations and internal debates of the youth and squatters' movement. Here, a variety of sources came under scrutiny, from flyers to testimonials and from internal discussion papers to photographs of houses and demonstrations.

Due to the disparity of sources, the spaces of the heroin scene will be analysed mainly as an object of outside perceptions and governmental policies. This focus reflects the lack of sources but does not deny heroin users' agency—without their decision to join the heroin scene and to practically demand a place in the city, the spaces of the heroin scene would not have come into existence. By closer examining the popularity of stories about the heroin scene among teenagers, though, it is possible to deduce the importance of such spaces for youth, even if the voices of actual heroin users have largely been silenced.

The meaning of supposedly free spaces for non-conforming youth will further be clarified 8 Kurt Ziesel, Die Meinungsmacher: As the political and press discourse on the squatters' movement have been thoroughly analyzed, this study focuses on the squatters' own practices and imaginations. Again, this does not imply that these spaces were entirely created by youth, independent of other actors or discursive formations, but it reflects an analytical lens through which to look at these spaces. Wherever possible, these dichotomies— governmental strategies vs.

Young people are coming together in scenes that are connected by their shared interest in drug use or political activism. No formal memberships exist and it is not necessary to qualify individually for an informal membership; to belong to a larger group that is part of a scene—a circle of friends, inhabitants of a squatted house—can be sufficient. Wallstein, , f. Scenes are, second, constituted through social and cultural practices. These include tastes in certain consumer articles and styles, consumption practices e. Finally, scenes depend on and are actively creating public and semi-public spaces.

Public meeting places, bars, nightclubs, neighbourhoods etc.

The knowledge about the whereabouts of these spaces often serves as a marker for an individual's affiliation with a scene. Klartext, , 79f. Berghahn Books, , Their high class and professional position, the constant availability and purity of the drug—contrary to common perceptions pure heroin has almost no cell-damaging effects—enabled this circle to lead a socially conform life without outer signs of their addiction.

Even after World War II, when many former soldiers had to be considered to be addicted to morphines, this caused only minor insecurities, the more so as this phenomenon came to an end once former army stocks had been consumed and no new supplies were available on the black market.

Since the mids the consumption of beer and other alcohol had risen constantly. It was accompanied by an open rejection of the norms and values of their parents' and grandparents' generation such as their work ethics. Drug consumption was henceforth mainly understood as a youth phenomenon. The criminalization of heroin use, for instance, can thus be understood as an ongoing, repetitive process rather than a fixed condition. Campus, , Die protestantische Ethik und die Geschichte des Drogenverbotes Berlin: Cambridge University Press, , Stephens, Germans on Drugs.

University of 11 But as the consumption of these new drugs was prohibited, no space could be created to legitimize and regulate it. As a consequence, public spaces were used for purposes other than intended; new spaces of drug consumption emerged. The situation came to a head with the emergence of visible scenes of heroin users in the early s. Despite the abundance of these meeting places only a few became symbolic for this new form of delinquency. In West Germany these included the area around Frankfurt's central train station and the Bahnhof Zoo in Berlin, while internationally the scenes at Amsterdam's Zeedijk and, since the mids, Zurich's Platzspitz park became symbolic sites of heroin use.

As such they were also visible signs of the international dimensions of trade and consumption as well as of the culture of heroin that was connected with this scene. And yet these new spaces of youth delinquency did not signify a return to a status quo ante in which certain neglected areas of the city could serve as a container for this and other forms of crime and, in a more encompassing sense, of deviant behaviour of youth.

Not only were drug users transgressing the boundaries between an orderly urban centre and negligible proletarian neighbourhoods by meeting at inner-city spaces such as parks, train stations or other public places. The perception of the city itself had changed as well. German cities, severely damaged in World War II, had been an urban planner's dream come true.

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Here an opportunity had arisen to implement the utopian visions of modernist city planning that had been developed since the beginning of the century. These visions were characterized by a functional division of city space into residential, commercial, and industrial areas, all connected by large traffic axes.

In contrast to the overcrowded and chaotic pre-war cities, these rational urban environments should also allow for a modernization of society Michigan Press, , 46ff. More often than not, though, these utopian dreams of rationality and the ability to design a perfect city and with it a perfect society turned out to be dystopian nightmares. Whole quarters had to make way for large infrastructural projects which turned formerly lively areas into inhumane environments of concrete and exhaust fumes.

The connection between a crisis of modernist urban restructuring and youth seemed to be confirmed with the emergence of a new radical youth movement that made the city the stage of its protest and the object of its critique. Based on isolated campaigns for autonomous youth centres, tenants' struggles and regional protests against large infrastructural projects during the s, a new movement—the squatters—emerged in various European cities in Starting 21 James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State. Yale University Press, Dietz Nachfolger, , esp. Since the early s Maoist K-Gruppen—a term subsuming a number of small Kommunistische parties—attracted tens of thousands of young people in search for a political home.

Yet due to their dogged in-fighting over the right general policy, the incomprehensible turns within this policy often influenced by turns in Chinese foreign policy and their disinterest in current political struggles, e. Geschiedenis van de kraakbeweging Amsterdam: Rowohlt, , Publications on the protest movements in Zurich and Berlin are discussed in the respective chapters.

Politik und Organisation des Kommunistischen Bundes bis Berlin: Erfahrungsberichte aus der Welt der K-Gruppen Berlin: Despite its formative effect on a whole generation of political activists, historians have ignored the history of the K- Gruppen for a long time. Only recently autobiographies and studies on single organizations have been published. Yet not all activists were content with such a retreat into an alternative milieu or, after the founding of the Green Party in , with parliamentary politics. The concept of autonomy promised to combine the personal with a more radical political perspective.

Italian activists had emphasized the autonomia of workers' struggles that took place without being initiated and controlled by organizations like parties and trade-unions. Harvard University Press, Rather, emancipation was sought after in spaces beyond society.

The squatters' movement combined the New Social Movements' focus on the local with the first person politics and militancy of the Autonomen and the experiences that had been gained in the fight for autonomous youth centres. Neither state nor capitalism, neither institutions nor factories lay at the centre of their actions but the attempt to create free spaces for non-conforming youth that would also serve as symbolic and practical interventions into modernist urban policies.

Konkret Literatur Verlag, , esp. Books on Demand, With a focus on squatting: From an activist's perspective: Geronimo, Feuer und Flamme. Zur Geschichte und Gegenwart der Autonomen. Buechler, Social Movements in Advanced Capitalism. Oxford University Press, , By meeting places of young heroin users and the numerous squatted houses had thus become visible signifiers of a city in crisis that was also a city of crises, a socio-geographic space in which various forms of youth deviance were produced, became visible and had to be dealt with.

Scholars have shown that in contrast to the underground of the s, in which the consumption of illicit drugs mainly cannabis, LSD, and mescaline and the wish for social change went hand in hand,33 by the early s the underground had split up into a political, a soft drug, and a hard drug scene. Despite the general separation of political and heroin scene at the end of the s, the different scenes were linked on several levels: Rock and Psychedelics in the s Chicago: University of Chicago Press, , What users had earlier felt as an unconscious suspicion or intuition - that was just a lie - became, when high or tripping, a verity.

In Zurich activists understood themselves as a youth movement, demands for more funding for youth culture had been the starting point of militant clashes between youth activists and the police. Activists' demands for an autonomous youth centre mirrored the perception of a political struggle in terms of that of a whole generation.

But squatting and heroin consumption were also perceived as youth phenomena despite a relatively broad age spectrum in both cases. Youth was and is , in other words, a social and discursive construction, based less on biological age than on individual behaviour and its evaluation by those considered adults. The category of youth conceals differentiating factors like class, gender, educational background etc.

Youth appear thus as a risk both for themselves and for society and in need of strict guidance on their way to adulthood. In West Germany in these included the age of majority, i. After the reform of the criminal law in , the age of 35 For the heroin scene see p. Sage, , 10, In other words, it was not enough to refrain from certain actions until one reached a specified age—not having sexual relationships until the age of 16, for instance—what also mattered were the ways in which one acted once this age had been reached—what kind of relationships one had and with whom.

The discourse on youth delinquency and youth deviance thus became one of the sites where society's basic norms and moral values were renegotiated and codified but also where fears about its future could be articulated and possibly mitigated. Besides youth being the result of adult attributions and object of governmental policies, it was also a means of self-identification. Further weight to contemporary conceptions of heroin and squatting as youth phenomena was added by a cult of youthfulness that was prevalent in both scenes: But youth was not the only link between squatters and heroin consumers.

Both groups were, second, driven by a fundamental discomfort with hegemonic urban regimes. The modern city was perceived as a symbol of an encompassing regime of normative values, discipline and control, in which spaces for deviating youth were non-existent. As contemporary urban theorists put it: To many youth the city appeared thus as the manifestation of an encompassing normalizing regime. These sentiments were expressed primarily through metaphors of social and architectural coldness. Likewise, life in both scenes was, third, centred around the search for extraordinary corporeal and emotional experiences in order to oppose the perceived monotony of modern city life.

These teenage kicks could be found in individual drug consumption as well as in collective militant actions. Dissens und kultureller Eigensinn Opladen: On the emergence of the coldness metaphor see Lindner, Jugendprotest, The search for warmth and the search for adventure were thus two sides of the same coin. This may sound paradoxical in the case of addicts whose life was almost completely determined by the need to procure money for the next dose of heroin. Both scenes were also connected through an ideal of masculinity that was based on toughness, aggressiveness, and the willingness to undertake personal risks.

In the case of heroin consumers this could mean to possibility for identification with the peer group. They are always on the move and must be alert, flexible, and resourceful. This is most obvious in the idea of squatted houses as free spaces, but the creation of public scenes of heroin users also included a spatial component, as did trips to popular meeting places of the international drug underground, like West Berlin, Amsterdam, India, or Afghanistan.

Nach Tonbandprotokollen aufgeschrieben von Kai Hermann u. Horst Rieck, 1st ed. On militancy as a means of identification, though without a perspective on gender, see Schwarzmeier, Die Autonomen, 26ff. Some squatters were acquainted or even friends with individual heroin users and some were consuming heroin themselves, although further research will be necessary to understand the individual perception of such behaviour. Whether being a heroin-consuming squatter meant that one was seeing oneself as belonging to either, both, or none of the two scenes, would have to be clarified in each case individually.

For although the political and drug underground can be and usually are described as distinctive scenes, for individuals it was not necessarily a contradiction to be part of both scenes or to switch between the two. Comparing heroin and squatters' scene in the early s reveals that the separation of the two was only one possible result of discursive and spatial practices during the early s. Heroin consuming youth had participated in the struggle for the Leiche'. Aus dem Tagebuch der Fixerin Heidi S. Freitag, for an account of a heroin addict from Berlin about his unsuccessful attempt of withdrawal in a Buddhist monastery in Thailand.

Still, in these instances heroin users were squatters and they were constituting one of several sub-groups of the heterogeneous squatters' scene. In contrast to all previous studies I will therefore treat heroin and squatters' scenes as strongly interrelated and sometimes intersecting phenomena. The separation of drug and political youth scene and its relation to changing governmental technologies can thereby also be described as a process that was not completed by the early s but lasted well into the s. This approach promises new insights into the governance of youth and into the different ways non-conforming youth reacted to these governmental technologies.

The crisis of Fordism and the emergence of societies of control By addressing a profound crisis of society, urban space and youth in the late s and early s this study is engaged in two larger current debates in historiography and social sciences. So far I have described scenes of young squatters and heroin users as aspects of or symbols for a more encompassing crisis in the s and early s, namely that of the city 24 and of a social order that was experienced as cold and constricting.

The experience of crisis touched upon many facets of this order—from the organization of industrial production to the rise of consumerism, a social policy grounded in the welfare state and urban restructuring processes according to modernist principles. Throughout this study I will use the term of a Fordist regime to capture all these different aspects.

Fordism in this sense denotes therefore a historical epoch that lasted from the end of the Second World War until the mids. A History of the World, New York: Vintage Books, , Soon, rationalization and standardization appeared as desirable guiding principles for society in general.

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Assisted by experts, it was the role of the state to plan and control the transformation of society. Residential, commercial and industrial areas were to be clearly separated. From the city itself to the design of a kitchen, virtually all aspects of life were being rationalized. But in the early s this hegemonic model came under scrutiny.

These aspects will be discussed in more detail in section 3. Universe Books, ; the German translation was published the following year. In view of the exploding costs of social security systems economists like Milton Friedman started to demand their liquidation. To the mentors of the neoliberal project the Fordist state appeared as the contrary of economic freedom, initiative and individual responsibility.

Sind wir noch regierbar? Herder, ; Wilhelm Hennis, ed.

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Studien zu ihrer Problematisierung, 2 volumes Stuttgart: Wirtschaftspolitik, Expertise und Gesellschaft in der Bundesrepublik bis Berlin: University of Chicago Press, As standardization of urban space and society went hand in hand, with their demand for a non-standardized urban environment squatters also demanded space in a double sense for individualistic life concepts that did not fit into the Fordist model.

During the s and s, the new project of neoliberalism, with its preference of the market over the state and an emphasis on individuality and diverse life-concepts, would eventually become hegemonic. Dietz, , Campus, , 15ff. Although continuities did exist—from drug legislation to the student protests of —the break becomes more tangible when we understand Fordism also as a set of normalizing and disciplinary technologies. Although standardization has been described as a main aspect of the Fordist regime, the term does not fully catch the role of normalization in regard to youth and to urban space that was at stake.

As the emergence of heroin and squatters' scenes as spaces for non-conforming, individualistic, deviant, rebellious youth is at the centre of this study, the crisis of Fordism also needs to be described in terms of a crisis of a disciplinary and normalizing regime. Individual bodies and spaces were constituting each other and formed the base of an ideal social order. It is spaces that provide fixed positions and permit circulation; they carve out individual segments and establish operational links; they mark places and indicate values; they guarantee the 29 The disciplines76 created a mass of individual bodies, bodies that had to be subjected to constant coercion in order to improve them, make them more efficient, to adjust them to hegemonic norms.

Disciplinary techniques were complementing the punishment as a way to ensure this subjection. Both techniques, disciplines and punishment, were thus complementary means to ensure the same goal: Although in his later works Foucault emphasized the growing importance of security over discipline,78 this does not mean that disciplinary technologies, institutions and spaces had been replaced. They are mixed spaces: An Introduction New York: Blackwell, , In the industrialized countries discipline comes into crisis.

Suhrkamp, , f. Suhrkamp, , Edition AV, , ff. Geschichte, Bestandsaufnahme, Entwicklungstendenzen Weinheim: Beltz, 31 organization of urban space and the emergence of new sites of youth deviance indeed seem to indicate a profound crisis of disciplinary society and the spaces it produced. And by adopting the lifestyle and values that were predominant in these scenes youth also turned their backs to the factory as a space and an institution that produced disciplined, Fordist subjects. Yet the emergence of new spaces of youth deviance also created new technologies to govern deviant behaviour.

Understanding deviance as a matter of public urban space allowed for the policing of large groups of youth rather than or in addition to disciplining them individually. One of the questions that will guide the analysis of discourses about and practices at these new spaces of deviance is therefore: And if that was the case: What kind of spaces did non-conforming youth and the technologies to control these youth produce?

The focus on urban space as a site of crisis, protest, and governance in the s and ; with a regional focus on Westphalia: See also Ulrike Meinhof, Bambule. Mareike Teigeler, Unbehagen als Widerstand. Transcript, , footnote Barbara Budrich, , The end of the planning euphoria in regard to urban space and social order becomes apparent in the wide-spread uneasiness with urban redevelopment and the initial success of the squatters' movement. But the emergence of this urban space as a site and means to govern youth deviance—and to thereby manage some of the effects of the crisis of Fordism—also points towards another shift, that from disciplinary to control societies.

Youth created spaces in order to evade the normalizing regime that was structuring society and that became manifest in urban space. These spaces were in turn used as an object of new technologies of control that supplemented earlier strategies to discipline non-conforming youth. Conceiving space as an object of historiography For a long time, historians have privileged time over space. While in time there was change, space was conceived as an empty and unchanging container, an empty space that was populated, perceived and used by people. This notion of space has come under scrutiny in the past two decades and scholars have highlighted the dynamic aspects of space.

Especially the work of Henri Lefebvre has informed what might be termed a post-structuralist current in the history of spaces. University of California Press, , Bodies are not distributed in space but actively create and shape spaces. In the context of this study this means that youth did not simply meet at already existing spaces but created spaces by meeting at certain geographical places and that the character of these new spaces was determined by their concrete practices and that of the police.

These newly created spaces did in turn structure the social practices of the subjects. Space thus appears as a process rather than as a static order. Space is also, second, the product of discursive representations. A neighbourhood or any other spatial ensemble is therefore not just perceived in a certain way, but it is discursively brought into existence in the first place: In the context of spaces of youth deviance the creation of such spaces always went together with the creation of spaces of normalcy.

And just as the spaces of normalcy and deviance could not exist without each other, the drawing of borders between the two always created the transgression of this border: This idea of a limited number of clearly distinguishable spaces that were totally different from their surroundings can be found on the side of police, politicians, and press—to whom these spaces appeared as those of a lawless, chaotic, deviant and threatening Other— but also on the side of youth for whom these spaces were liberated islands that stood in stark contrast to the constricting social order around them. Cornell University Press, ; Judith R.

Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight. This function unfolds between two extreme poles. Either their role is to create a space of illusion that exposes every real space, all the sites inside of which human life is partitioned, as still more illusory [ Or else, on the contrary, their role is to create a space that is other, another real space, as perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged as ours is messy, ill constructed, and jumbled. In our society, these crisis heterotopias are persistently disappearing, though a few remnants can still be found.

For example, the boarding school, in its nineteenth-century form, or military service for young men, have certainly played such a role, as the first manifestations of sexual virility were in fact supposed to take place 'elsewhere' than at home. Looking at heroin and squatters' scenes as heterotopic spaces at society's margins promises therefore new insights into the fundamental order of this society's centre.

Rather, I will use it as a concept to describe contemporary assumptions about these spaces. Heterotopia thereby becomes a way to denote a specific mode of thinking space. These sites were imagined as totally different, but it is the task of critical historiographical analysis to deconstruct the notion of dichotomous and utterly different spaces itself. Used in such a way, the concept of heterotopia, despite its inconsistencies, can become a powerful tool to understand contemporary attributions to and functions of spaces of squatters and heroin users in the s.

Michel Foucault's ideas on heterotopia, http: Polity Press, , See also Soja, Thirdspace, They offer no resolution or consolation, but disrupt and test our customary notions of ourselves. These different spaces, which contest forms of anticipatory utopianism, hold no promise or space of liberation. With different degrees of relational intensity, heterotopias glitter and clash in their incongruous variety, illuminating a passage for our imagination. Thesis outline In the first chapter I will use the case of young heroin users to illustrate the process of spatialization of youth deviance.

In a first step I will show why and how heroin use became a symbol for the profound crisis of the Fordist regime in the s. As such, it was translated into a problem of order in public urban space, in an attempt to render heroin use and social crises less threatening. The practice of heroin users to meet at public places and to thereby constitute visible heroin scenes and its interpretation as spatial symptoms of a crisis paved the way to govern heroin in and through urban space.

Two complementary developments will elucidate these processes: This symbolic containment was complemented by practices of policing of open heroin scenes in urban space. The second chapter deals with squatted houses as spaces of non-conforming youth. In contrast to the first chapter now the perspective of youth themselves comes into focus. After a short history of the Berlin squatters' scene and the related press discourse, squatting as an emotional and social practice will come under scrutiny.

This idea of free spaces was also experienced as a possibility to create whole liberated territories on a district level. Spaces of politically active youth and of heroin users were not necessarily located at different geographical sites. As the example of the autonomous youth centre AJZ in Zurich in chapter three shows, the use of the same space by different groups of youth who It was the attempt to react to governmental policies to spatialize drug use and to disperse drug users from public urban spaces by providing a safe haven for young heroin users.

Informational campaigns to keep the misery of these drug users visible show the potential but also the difficulty to react to new forms of governance and control without accepting urban space as the only field to deal with problems of marginalised youth. In those instances where activists fully adopted a spatial logic, their radical opposition missed its mark and their spaces turned into sites of stagnation rather than liberation.

This is shown in chapter four for the West German squatters' scene and its treatment of conflicts about drug use and gender roles. In contrast to Zurich, heroin users were constructed as alien and a danger to the squatters' scene and consequentially excluded. Similar notions can be witnessed in regard to gender: Further self-segregation into women's spaces or the exclusion of individuals from squatters' spaces were the only possible choices for activists that had fully adopted a spatialized understanding of the social.

Governing through spaces of heroin consumption Conflicts were necessary in particular, conflicts over urban space [ While the surface was remodelled to suit the needs of motorized traffic, people could travel from dormitory towns at the fringes of the city to its consumerist centre by using the subway.

The modernity of this concept was even underlined rather than contradicted by the absence of sunlight and the illumination of the vast concrete tunnels with artificial lights. Barely bothered by the occasional two-men patrol or police raid, before the eyes of partly shocked, partly fascinated passers-by, they are strapping their wrists with colourful Foucault, The History of Sexuality, At the same time the left-wing Konkret had published a series in three parts on heroin use. Yet the symbols of the counter-cultural underground in which drug use had been understood as a mind-expanding and rebellious experience had undergone a significant change: Media and general public witnessed the shooting-up of heroin with an unsettling mixture of fascination and fear, lust and angst.

The report by Der Spiegel exemplifies many of the facets that would dominate the drug discourse of the s and s, which will be discussed throughout the following chapter. Heroin use was, first, discussed as a problem of public urban spaces. Two worlds, that of orderly citizens and that of drug users, were colliding in the same place.

Drug users did not use public places to stroll from shop to shop but rather, to sojourn there. Telephone boxes were used to prepare and inject freshly acquired heroin in relative peace. The topic of heroin use urgently needed to be addressed partly because it created conflicts about the proper use of public urban spaces. These conflicts were fuelled by the conspicuous character of the heroin scene.

The heroin users' greatest affront was not that they were breaking the law, but that they were doing it in public, in view of passers-by and even the police. The visibility was further enhanced by the negative effects of diluted heroin on drug users' bodies. Even if no criminal acts could be witnessed, visible milieus of delinquency continued to exist and could not be avoided by orderly citizens. One of the main focal points of contemporary drug discourses was therefore the visible presence of heroin users in public urban spaces—and not the criminal act of consuming illegalized substances itself.

The visibility of the heroin problem was, third, significantly enhanced through media reports such as the one cited above. Heroin use has always been a phenomenon that concerned only a very small minority of the overall populace. It could be encountered in public spaces, especially in the bigger cities, yet most people knew heroin use and heroin users solely through the media. Heroin might have been understood as a phenomenon of the margins or periphery of society.

In public urban space and through the news coverage, though, it was extending into society's very core and became a topic that concerned everyone. Starting from these deliberations, this chapter will examine the creation of visible heroin scenes both discursively and spatially.

Discursively, heroin was conceived as a problem of youth delinquency and linked to other forms of social, economic, and cultural crises. These crises were translated into a terminology of space: The focus on the visible symptoms of heroin use, that is, on groups of heroin users in public space instead of individual consumers, also allowed for new ways to govern problems of transgressive youth.

The example of the Berlin train station Bahnhof Zoo will show how the 42 media turned one of many meeting points of the local heroin scene into a symbolic site of heroin consumption and indeed of many other forms of threatening social developments. On a symbolic level, certain forms of behaviour and groups of people could thus be socially excluded and spatially contained.

The discourse on heroin use by adolescents became one of the sites at which society could reassure itself of its fundamental norms and values. And by conceiving the Bahnhof Zoo as a counter-site to the rest of the city, it was seemingly possible to prevent youth from pervasive danger by keeping them from this singular space, that is by exerting strict spatial control. These assumptions in turn informed governmental strategies to combat juvenile drug use. While funding for therapeutic programs remained scarce after the economic crisis of , the policing of open heroin scenes intensified in the early s, which in turn fostered perceptions of heroin use as a spatial problem.

This repressive strategy, implemented most strictly in the city of Zurich, could not prevent youth from taking illegalized drugs, nor could it dissolve local heroin scenes. Instead, the young heroin users were forced to constantly change their meeting places and to move through the city; as a consequence their situation worsened significantly. This chapter shows how it was nevertheless possible to present policing the heroin scene as a replacement for the care for and disciplining of individual drug users and how drug consuming teenagers—and the encompassing social crisis they signified—could seemingly be brought under control, once again, through the control of urban space.

Yet this was not just of concern for the parents of these children, as youth—and children in particular—also represented the future of society in general. These anxieties were fuelled by the experience of a severe crisis that affected the economy as much as matters of culture, migration as much as sexual norms, and the nation-state as much as the city. I will show how heroin consumption, understood as a youth phenomenon, came to signify these crises; and in particular, how the social crisis of the s was translated into a crisis of youth.

I will further argue that this interpretation was supported by a second translation, that of social phenomena—changing consumption patterns, youth delinquency—into questions of space. Their innocence was as much endangered by the spread of heroin as the innocence of children. In turn, it was not so much social conditions or individual behaviour that needed to be addressed in order to govern the problem of juvenile heroin consumption and to mitigate the effects of the crisis. Rather, it was necessary to control the spreading of heroin which usually was synonymous with controlling the movement of heroin users in the city.

The phenomenon of heroin use was turned into a matter of control over public urban space. Heroin use as a youth phenomenon Adult anxiety has consistently been expressed in terms of youthful vulnerability, nuisance and misbehaviour and has focused on the simply undesirable, worrying and disobedient as well as criminality.

Der Spiegel summarized the knowledge of experts and politicians Ibid. At the same time, drug use was perceived to be spreading from urban centres to the countryside and from upper to lower classes.

Probably the best example was the idea that cannabis was a gateway-drug, the consumption of which would lead young people to other, harder drugs like heroin. By subsuming all illegalized substances under the term drugs, contemporaries missed the development of two different, and distinct, drug scenes.

While the use of cannabis and LSD had been popular amongst upper class pupils and university students and was already on the decline, heroin consumption became more and more popular, though primarily among working-class adolescents who had not been part of the hippie underground of the late s.

Later studies showed that minors were disproportionately charged with offences against narcotics laws, largely because of illegal consumption, while the actual number of teenage and adolescent drug consumers was significantly lower than statistics based on police controls suggested. Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft, , Of the drug users at Zurich's Platzspitz park in , the average user had started using heroin at the age of nineteen, although some claimed to have started when they were only twelve years old. Zurich, , The younger people started with heroin, though, the longer and more intensely they would continue to do so, an effect that has been observed in the case of nicotine consumption as well.

The study showed that the number of heroin addicts was much higher than had been assumed previously. Instead of an estimated 3, addicts in West Berlin, the study concluded that about 6, people were addicted to heroin and other opiates. Extrapolating from these figures, estimates for West Germany spoke of approximately , heroin addicts—three times as much as the official 45, Although the majority of heroin users and addicts were young adults, there were some twelve to fourteen year-old drug addicts. Yet these clearly atypical representatives of the heroin scene were presented as stereotypical, as symptomatic of a wider trend in drug consumption and, not the least, for a whole society for which its base and future were about to be poisoned.

This reliance on stereotypical images was, and is, characteristic of mass media coverage of juvenile delinquency, including drug use. Deissler voraus, mit neuen Erscheinungsformen: On the discursive connection of drug use and teenage sexuality see section 2. One of the unuttered bases for the moral panic about teenage drug use was the disturbing fact that children turned into youth and finally into adults precisely by taking drugs, whether it was the largely accepted alcohol or illegalized heroin. If anything, stories of drug addicts becoming ever younger might therefore indicate an earlier end of childhood in general, at least as perceived by adults.

In a way, the individual crisis of adolescence was a means of understanding and coping with an impersonal and much larger societal crisis. One that even adults couldn't control. In the United States, a report on an eight year-old heroin addict even won the Pulitzer prize in , but later turned out to be a hoax. Based on this risk-rationality it is possible to identify potential subjects of intervention and to determine objects and limits of 'legitimate' actions. The consumption of illegalized drugs could thus be understood as a failed attempt to master the transition from child to adult.

The more intensive someone's drug consumption, the more likely he or she was to have sexual experiences as well, starting from an earlier age, with more frequent changes of sexual partners, and with a wider range of sexual practices employed. Experts viewed this confluence in light of the social conditions of youth: The use of heroin was thus understood not only in terms of youth but also of sex and gender. Young girls were believed to be the passive victims of seduction to both drugs and sexual intercourse, which in turn implied a greater need for control.

This gendered difference was also based on different meanings in regard to the nation state: These general convictions about youth as crisis were complemented by a historically specific perception of youth in crisis during the s. Following on the economic crisis of and the successive dismantling of the welfare state, the social conditions of youth and especially their prospects for upward mobility looked rather dim; from the mids, youth unemployment continued to be alarmingly high.

The unemployment rate among heroin users was higher the longer and more severely heroin was used. Unemployment was and is an effect rather than a cause for heroin consumption. Bezeichnenderweise fanden sich bei Demonstrationskrawallen, gewaltsamen Hausbesetzungen, Gefangenenbefreiungen und Terroristenaktionen Personen aus der Drogen-Szene oder mit Verbindungen zu ihr. Hans-Wolfgang Sternsdorff and Paul Lersch. As scholars like Robert P. Stephens have shown, two positions 54 the liberalization and growing permissiveness that supposedly came with it was complemented by a critique of the Fordist welfare state and its supposed passivating effects on young people in particular: There is a lack of demand in regard to the shaping and mastering of one's life: Individual and familial provisions [Daseinsvorsorge] are being handed over to collective governmental and social institutions welfare state.

Young people are learning passive experiences on multiple levels e. Drug use thus needed to be viewed as one possible effect of this deep social crisis. The crises that were touching the core of society were met with a crisis of its borders. Stephens, Germans on Drugs, Geworden ist daraus ein Reisetagebuch und eine Geschichtsstunde, vor allem aber eine sarkastische Dokumentation des Grauens.

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