Enter the hipster. In the aughts, Berlin’s package deal of pilsner, falafel, Airbnb, and bleary nights at the famed Berghain (described by one in-flight magazine as “the best club in the world”) was a big success. The number of nights that tourists spent in the city doubled between 2003 and 2011—from eleven to twenty-two million. Beginning around the contested Bush victory of 2000, and accelerating after the recession of 2008, the face of the typical visitor to Berlin changed: from German to non-German, from the oversize sweaters of the academics to the zigzag haircuts and fluorescent sweatshirts of the artists or, at least, the arty. As rents peaked in Brooklyn, San Francisco, Vancouver, Melbourne, Copenhagen, and London, Berlin beckoned. Streams of young people with postsecondary degrees in literature, art, and theory arrived in the city seeking rooms in shared apartments. Craigslist became a clearinghouse for stolen cruiser bikes and homogeneous Ikea-furnished rooms where savvy landlords added one hundred euros to their usual asking price and promised proximity to the “current hipster district Berlin-Neukölln, with lots of bars, galleries, international artists.”
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