by Amy K Grandvoinet
This essay was written back in the dark winter of 2023, and comes into light belatedly. Right now, at the start of the Lunar New Year of the Snake, Tu Hwnt (2025) – an anthology of d/Deaf and Disabled writers – is published, which contains an essay by Ed Garland, mentioned later on in my essay, on film captions and Greta Gerwig’s Barbie (2023).’ Our society is set up in a way that presents barriers to individuals with impairments or differences, exclusions and restrictions only exacerbated by contemporary profit-prioritising economic regimes. Please order a copy of this important tome for yourself or another here.
I was once in Hamburg, in a café by the name of ‘Nasch’, on the corner of Caffamacherreihe and Speckstraße, to the slight northwest of the city centre, just outside the area Gängeviertel. The area Gängeviertel is a living utopia. ROUGH GUIDES’s webpage ‘Going underground in Hamburg: 6 ways to see the city’s alternative side’ will assure you it remains ‘another of Hamburg’s squatting hubs’ jam-packed with ‘squatting artists’. Quite near the café by the name of ‘Nasch’, just outside the area Gängeviertel, an explanatory wall-sign is in Deutsch and in English. The English bit says this:
The Gängeviertel’s reputation as a criminal underworld and a hotbed of prostitution and radicalism resulted in the public call for its destruction shortly after the opening of the city gates in 1860. To this end, the construction of the Speicherstadt from 1883 onwards marked the first step. At the turn of the century, the Gängeviertel of the Altstadt had to make way for the Kontorhausviertel and the Mönckebergstraße – Hamburg’s famous shopping street. In the northern Neustadt, parts of the neighbourhood survived well into the Third Reich, when they were ‘cleansed’ and demolished by national socialist city planning or destroyed by allied bombs. Today, the last remains of the neighbourhood are located at the Valentinskamp and Bäckerbreitergang. Find out how the Gängeviertel resisted the various attempts to demolish them, how senators and merchants got rich by speculating when the Altstadt Gängeviertel were destroyed, and where you can still find hidden traces of the Gängeviertel today.
You can find out more about the area Gängeviertel by visiting Wikipedia, or better still the area Gängeviertel’s very own website.
My knowledge of Hamburg, and its area Gängeviertel, is small. But the story is all too familiar. Subversive pre-modern revelry in debaucherous streets, nineteenth-century hits and BOOM! scrub it down, industrialise it up, and roll on Marx’s nightmare of Capital. Factories grow, profits soar, reshuffle the poor. Throw in fascism’s urban policies in the 1930s and 40s, world war two’s rubbly trauma followed by heavy-handed post-war regen, rapid commercialisation come the 1950s and 60s and – hey presto! – cue Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism for the rest of all time (plz no). Yet residential resistance movements continue through the toughie 1970s and into the twentieth then twenty-first centuries, protecting utopian islands against a neoliberalist deluge. It could almost be anywhere.
But this was Hamburg, and the area Gängeviertel specifically, and lurking in the first-floor toilets of the café by the name of ‘Nasch’ just outside of it, on the corner of Caffamacherreihe and Speckstraße, was a Barbie Dreamhouse. See photo. I was surprised and excited. A gasp, aghast. Utopias within utopias. Contextualised by its presence just outside the squat-happy area Gängeviertel, Barbie Dreamhouse was confirmed to me an anti-capitalist Rebel Paradiso. In turn, Barbie Dreamhouse confirmed the area Gängeviertel a place of play and joy. Ken surveyed external threats from an elegant balcony as two Barbies napped peacefully upstairs, on plush sofa and lavish carpet. All around the majestic structure, politically-energised stickers gently educated each honourable guest: ‘Abyss / Abyss / Abyss’, ‘Trouble’, ‘ANTIFA’, ‘GOOD CAUSE’, ‘Fuck off Google’, ‘DEFEND SOLIDARITY’, ‘To see or not to see’, ‘Qwir! jung & queer in hamburg’.
Every-body knows that ‘utopia’ means good place and no place at once: an impossible Eden. But the area Gängeviertel and its Barbie Dreamhouse together prove this a pretense. The area Gängeviertel is a utopia that’s Real, right now, and Barbie Dreamhouse is a utopia that’s Real, right now, too.
A phrase ‘Wake up to the Real World, Baby’ has extremely limited acumen. Scoundrels who use this saying often mean get-your-head-outta-the-clouds-buddy or join-us-in-misery-at-the-daily-grind. Thankfully, many have seen right through such ideologies over the course of history. For example, the Lettrist International (active 1952–57) and the Situationist International (active 1957–72). Both avant-garde collectives were led by the notorious G. E. Debord, who considered himself a more politically woke successor to André Breton and his band of Surrealists. They were pivotal Marxist revolutionaries.
Lettrist Internationalists and Situationist Internationalists are best known for their fabled praxis of psychogeography. Psychogeography – defined in 1955 as ‘the study of the precise laws of the specific effects of the geographical environment, whether consciously organised or not, on the emotions and behaviours of individuals’ – has become a bit of a joke by now. You can hear Lee Rourke and Merlin Coverley converse on such matters, for example, at 3:AM Magazine. But seventy-or-so years ago it was at least somewhat respected as a reasonably effective semi-silly semi-serious way to critique bad civic design-work, and its potentially devastating physiological and psychological influences upon Earthly inhabitants. Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, better known as ‘Le Corbusier’, was psychogeography’s most contemptible contemporary architect-target, then imposing rigid grey grid-systems all over the urban terrain, curtailing collaborative freedom and wrecking the chance of anybody enduring life fully and / or artistically. The Real World, Baby, wasn’t a very nice place to be.
Psychogeography is famed for its technique of dérive. But! it ALSO involved dreaming up utopias. New, passional locales for the likes of you and I to much more pleasantly live in. Damn that Corbusian functionalism, putting profit above people at every turn! They called it UNITARY URBANISM.
Unitary urbanism was utopian scheming. Scheming and dreaming. You can hear Karl Whitney discuss such matters at 3:AM Magazine additionally. All unitary urbanism wanted to do was vision imaginatively towards soothing the fissures of a hideously broken modern milieu. It designed a number of speculative cities, variably dysfunctional – a ‘Haçienda’, a ‘New Babylon’, et cetera. It was not too concerned with practicalities, and this was all part of its charm and transgression.
Reality could be whatever you wanted it to be, Baby. And don’t let them tell you otherwise.
Areas like the area Gängeviertel are exactly the kinds of areas Lettrist and Situationist Internationalists cherished. My hunch is that Barbie Dreamhouse had a complex place in their hearts, also.
Barbie Dreamhouse, Hamburg’s Gängeviertel, & unitary urbanism met at a mid-twentieth-century moment. Unitary urbanism began in the early 1950s and lasted til the early 1960s, an era sometimes referred to as the Lettrist and Situationist Internationals’ ‘Architectural Interlude’. Henri Lefebvre was in on the game, and lots of intellectuals were doing utopias at that time of big change and upheaval. The area Gängeviertel was meanwhile busy defending itself against the construction of Unilever’s 98-metre high ‘Unileverhaus’ HQ, plus further corporate colonisations of its diminishing territories. America’s multinational toy-manufacturing company Mattel, simultaneously, was making a plastic Barbie Dreamhouse. No longer available from Toys ‘R’ Us (b. 1957 d. 2021 R.I.P.), you can still purchase it online at the Recommended Retail Price of £349.99 to this day.
Many. Competing. Utopian. Competitors.
It is highly significant and means a great deal that there is a Barbie Dreamhouse in the toilets of the café by the name of ‘Nasch’ just outside the area Gängeviertel, howsoever it was acquired (fingers crossed a generous freebie in a gigantic pack of Sugar-Puff Cereal or similar). It is a clever appropriation of one of hyper-consumerist Mattel’s most enviable lifestyle-model commodities. Lettrist and Situationist Internationalists also liked to cleverly appropriate all sorts of cultural phenomena, and turn them towards serving their own revolutionary projects – a hack called détournement. Of course, the café by the name of ‘Nasch’, on the corner of Caffamacherreihe and Speckstraße, may not have featured a Barbie Dreamhouse in its first-floor toilets until well after the Lettrist and Situationist Internationals had folded, but I’m pretty sure they’d have liked what was being achieved there.
Another clever appropriation of Barbie Dreamhouse, incidentally, can be found in Greta Gerwig’s recent Box-Office-hit Barbie, starring Margot Robbie as well as Ryan Gosling. I promise you it is a sheer coincidence this piece appears in the wake of the Big Pink Bang that film has been; my Hamburg trip was some time ago. Greta Gerwig’s Barbie blockbuster’s Dreamhouse is a beautiful party-world pretty much totally celebrated. On YouTube, you can watch a 7.24-minute video titled ‘Margot Robbie Takes You Inside the Barbie Dreamhouse | Architectural Digest’ by the US online magazine Architectural Digest in the style of MTV Cribs. MTV Cribs shows drippingly successful celebrities show off their outrageously excellent and beloved homes. It can be a bit gross. Margot Robbie loves showing off Barbie Dreamhouse, with its heart-shaped-waffle toaster, fake swimming-pool and spiral waterslide, garden chess-counters, numerous disco-balls, funkified fin-de-siècle lampposts, and bubblegum Cadillac parked outside. Why shouldn’t she?
Why shouldn’t everybody want to live in the Dreamiest Spaces?
Barbie Dreamhouse, Hamburg’s Gängeviertel, & unitary urbanism all ask this ultimate question. They all see the Real World developments of capitalist modernity as woefully inadequate, and struggle after its festive transformation. They all want something better than the Capitalist Realism World we’re all stuck in. Of course, such utopian mish-mashes are hardly Perfect™, but they speak.
The Capitalist Realism World likes to smash delightful possibilities. Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (2009) elucidates and counters ‘the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it’. In Greta Gerwig’s incredibly popular Barbie, which I saw with E- in Aberystwyth at a 5pm subtitled screening in August 2023, Barbie falls into that world and, with tears, despairs: ‘This is the lowest I’ve ever been, emotionally and physically’. In doing so, she is labelled by Capitalist Realism’s intoxicated humans a ‘reality challenged’ freak. We soon, however, learn that her configuration communicates valuable truths. Watch Greta Gerwig’s Barbie if you can.
Prost! to the Reality Challenged Freak in our current mad climate. Gesundheit! to utopian places that dispute (capitalist) Reality Utopia binaries. Utopia is the Real World, Baby. I’ll say it again and again.
A Barbie Mirror in the café by the name of ‘Nasch’ just outside the area Gängeviertel affirms each of our Rightful Existences in a Utopian Reality of healthy experiment and exuberance. Danke schön.
