'Soaking Up the Punky-Funky All-Feel of Eastern Kreuzberg': Myth-Making, Preference Construction, and Youth Cultures

This chapter examines how the Berlin neighborhood of eastern Kreuzberg attained its mythical image as a youth culture neighborhood. It combines theories of myth-making and canonization with the concept of preference construction, thereby developing new tools to assess how certain ideas and images (e.g. from youth cultures) come to be collectively preferred and believed as more exceptional or true in spite of similar ones. It argues that through the construction of preferences, people have become invested in Kreuzberg’s historically alternative and contemporary trendsetting images. Through this case study, the chapter shows that youth cultures appeal to people because of their outspoken and elusive nature, something that continually urges people to ask themselves how they relate to them. People thus cultivate preferences when they take a position regarding youth cultures. When people become collectively invested in certain shared ideas and images, subcultural myths are born.