Queer Berlin: Lifestyles, Performances, And Capitalist Consumer Society (1) (Literary Depictions of the Relationship Between Queer Lifestyle, Consumer Culture and the Media Before and After the Fall of the Berlin Wall‪)‬

Responding to the relative neglect of gay themes in the critical literature on contemporary Berlin, this essay focuses on recent novels that explore new representational strategies for depicting the ambiguous relation between queer lifestyle performances, capitalist consumer society, and the media industry before and after the fall of the Wall. The protagonists' self-stylizations emerge vicariously through the adaptation of cultural reservoirs ranging from the myth of Weimar Republic modernity to post-reunification sexualized city space. While the texts generally affirm capitalism's commodifying spectacles, they also employ the classical language of subject-centered authenticity for potentially subversive purposes. These novels thus promote a renewed metacritical reflection on the possibilities and limits of contemporary queer theory in German Studies. I