“We blaze in the flare that blinds us”: last days in Berlin…revolutionary dreams and poems left behind, forebodings and foreclosures.
“My friends are my artists. My artists are my friends,” said the sign on the wall. I walked by and stopped, taken by the expression, friendship blurring between art and art with friendship, back and forth. Somehow this is what the city was about. It seems strange to me looking back. They were our last days in Berlin, the last of a yearlong sabbatical journey through a city and its history, its clubs, its arts, its expats, its arts, its trees, its cleavages, refugees, and revolutions, many, many revolutions. It was tempting to call it goodbye Berlin. But someone else beat me to it. Still the compulsion to explain what happened here in these last days, as we learned about ourselves and the world, the things we brought, and those we left behind, what remains, between finding something about ourselves.
A Steppenwolf lingered, deep inside. “There is… no way back,” writes Hesse. “You will instead embark on the harder, longer and wearier road of life…This is the road that Budda … has gone…his fortune has favored this quest.” Some days we lose our minds. “Madness, in the higher sense, is the beginning of all wisdom,” concludes Hessee. Madness, in its possibilities and its cruelness, had gripped this city like few else. The redemptive narrative of the city propels it, recalling the darkness, as well as the light, opening up something more seasoned and authentic. The divided city, with its histories of ever evolving peoples, reveals itself.
“Germany is now the moral leader of the world,” my old friend Matteo told us, referring to their response to the refugees crisis, taking in waves of desperate people in need of assylum. But it hasn’t always been that way. Everyone knows that, the fascists we see at the cemetery, on their pilgrimage to see Horst Wessell’s grave know a different story. The anti fascists digging up the butcher’s grave and throwing his skull in the Spree, they know still another story here. The stories are many here. The storytellers are everywhere. You see them in the parks, tourguides hustling their erotic wares wares, tales of dark days, poets in the cemeteries, tracing stories of what once was. I think about all of them, of Scott talking about Communes in Northern California, Max taking pics at the bar or gallery opennings, Marina regaling with snapshots about last night in Berlin, meeting Sean and Nina and Falco at Bar Drei, dancing with Steph and Federico at Renate, chatting about Mexico with Magda, Spain with Marione, Tblisi with Nicholas, Kosovo with Gentian, drinking draft beer after draft beer at Bar Drei, our beloved favorite dark bar on Weydingerstrasse 20 up the street from the Babylon “in the epicenter of Berlin Mitte at the end of Linienstrasse between Sohohouse, Rosenthalerplatz and Münzstrasse, nicely hidden in an inconspicuous cul-de-sac.” For Art Berlin, this is: “The perfect place not to be engulfed by the Mitte hype…. Bar 3 has established itself as a meeting place for the art, theater and film scene. Here, the Ü30 creative scene from Berlin Mitte joins in after work beer (preferably a "Kölsch") or an inexpensive glass of red wine.” It certainly was for us. The last month in town, as we installed and de installed our show. In between, I walked and went out late, exploring queer Berlin, stories neighborhood protests and revolutionary Berlin, mysteries of dead Nazis and their remains, trying to connect the pieces as my brain came unscrewed, dancing late into the night all through August.
It all started with the poems. A few days after the opening of “TreesTruthTrust, we met in the in the St Nicholas Friedhoff in Verwalterhaus to read poems August 3, many about the trees. Max animated Lorca's “The Song of the Barren Orange Tree”:
“Cut my shadow from me.
Free me from the torment
of seeing myself without fruit.
The day walks in circles around me”
It does for me too. I guess there are times when we all want to be cut free of the shadows. Other days, we embrace them all, dancing with our dark selves, howling at the moon.
Leading us about thet cemetery, one poem at a time, Max followed with “The Cypress Broke” a story about a “coy-mistress…” loved…”years before the flood…”
Her pleasures torn “… with rough strife
Through the iron gates of life…”
The iron gates are many, particularly here. On Max continued, sharing stories of poets subverting, accounts of the anti-fascists, who unearthed the grave of the Nazi burried here, throwing the remains in the Spree. Which Nazi I thought, strolling with our Berlin buddies, Max, Donna and Caroline catching up after decades in a serendipitous meeting, Andreas in the shade, amidst tales of the living and the dead, our roots connecting between this world and that underworld.
Ending his performance, he invited us all to read to the trees, reflecting on the dead, communing with roots below, the old lives, mixed with the earth, still lingering amidst us all, their remains, ever transforming into the dirt, odes to the trees, feeling the ties between us all in circles of friendship. We greeted the trees about us, reading Ursula LeGuin’s poem of Kinship to them:
“Very slowly burning, the big forest tree
stands in the slight hollow of the snow….
Rootless and restless and warmblooded, we
blaze in the flare that blinds us to that slow,
tall, fraternal fire of life as strong
now as in the seedling two centuries ago.”
Up at the chappel, I looked at the tree branches overhead, remembering past encounters, trees I’d seen.
And recalled, the “Tears” of Allen Ginsberg.”
And that day when he,
“cried at the sadness of the middle aged trees.”
Federcio recalled a violent loneliness between New York and here:
“Out of the darkness the city spoke . .
What did it say?
A canvas of wet streets asked me to stay and join my brothers.
Echoes of Wojnarowicz fill the air. I know that day is done. A new virus yet to come.
…I have to find within these empty streets and pathways into dark.”
Each day, a new poem.
Fatima helped us imagine, to see a mysterious beauty among the leaves and colors, foraging a few story.
Nathanial recalled the revolutions that arose from here. I’m still trying to make sense of it all. Rosa Luxenberg’s battles with oblivion, through our last days in Berlin. I feel like I haven't scratched the surface. Sure I've been out late and walked these lonely streets. But I'm only starting to live it, thinking about Berlin buddies, Isherwood and Auden, Razul and myself, catching up late at night, learning the histories of Rosa and Karl Liebknecht, Queer histories, the struggle to repeal paragraph 175, the law criminalizing homosexuality that stood from 15 May 1871 to 10 March 1994.
I met Federico and Dan in Berlin Schöneberg, outside of the Nollendorfplatz station. Dan told us stories about his three husbands here, the gay bars in this, the first gayborhood, the Nazi rise to power, with some 100,000 queer people arrested, jailed, castrated, tortured and killed. We stop walking past memorials of the plaques recalling the era, “Stolpersteine, or stumbling blocks – brass memorial markers set in the pavements outside the houses of people who were deported and murdered by the Nazis.”
We walked across the street to the Metropol, the 1930’s era theater and dance venue, where I found myself as an extra in a film my first month in town. All Quiet on the Western Front premiered here and the Nazis protested it. They let mice out in the theater. After the war, it became a porn theater, then a disco in the 1970’s; Giorgio Morodder’s electronic beats found a home here, transforming a sound that made its way around the globe, anticipating a sound that would explode. You can see it Mark Redder’s B Movie about Berlin. For a while there, the pansexual sexual KitKat even found a home there, Dan tells us.
Of course, the KitKat is named after Isherwood’s Berlin stories, about Sally Bowles and a triangular circle of friends, sometimes a ménage a trois, a place where they shed disguises and shared space together. Talking Dan walked us past the Cafe Bario, a historic gay bar on the way to Nollendorfstraße 17, with its plaque in homage to Christopher Isherwood’s tales of the freedom of Weimar years, before the darkness enveloped everything, not coming close to extinguishing light; this is the story of the Berlin they saw. He met the poet Auden and singer Jean Ross, the model for Sally Bowles here. She was political. And didn’t really like the charactor Isherwood created of her. “You want to talk about parties. I want to talk about socialism,” she told reporters, asking about Sally. She lived till the 1970’s. Isherood till 1986. His story here is one of a heroic struggle to escape the world, the fascad that took Alan Turing's life, medicated castration after he broke the Nazi war code.
“Berlin has more assylum seekers and refugees than most, many of who are gay, then and now. And they are welcomed here. Isherwood and Auden were two of them. On any given evening, you could find them at Motzstraße 24, the site of the the Eldorado, the iconic Weimar Era gay bar and cabaret in the early 1930s. It was the sort of decadent scene Otto Dix painted in his work Metropolis. You might might have seen Marlene Deitrich there, as Lola in Blue Angel. Dan recalled her casting in that film. She walked late, unpolished, assuming she would not get the part. Crossed dressed, she brought the Berlin attitude. The director was captivated. She seemed to embody a new era of tolerance, the world felt like it was opening. She transcended her moment in time, opposing the Nazis, later booed when she returned in 1960. Bert Bachrach came with her. She was eventually buried here. Federico and I visited her grave in January. On we walked to Motzstraße 11, the home of Magnus Hirschfeld, the prominent sexologist, whose collection was targeted and burned in the earliest days of the Nazi era, past lesbian bars, the Pussycat, on Kalckreuthstrasse 7, once a lesbian, now a gay bar, past the the Dorian Grey, another prominent lesbian bar.
Berlin has long been a home to lesbian culture and life, says Ruth Margarete Roellig in 'Berlins lesbische Frauen' (Berlin's Lesbian Women) - from 1928:
A copy of the guide found its way into the hands of Magnus Hirschfeld. Sadly, Ruth Roellig switched sides to support the Nazis, writing antisemetic tracks in the later years, anything to survive.
Dan, whose most popular tour is of Bowie’s Berlin, regaled us with stories of Chez Romy Haag, the queer venue where David Bowie hung out, perhaps even an having affair with its proprietor, Romy Haag, a circus performer who lived as a woman. Bowie returned to Berlin in 1976, spending new years 1977 with her. And he sings:
“We are lovers.
That is a fact.
We are lovers.
And that is that.
Nothing will keep us together.
We can be heroes.”
Its about her and a doomed relationship. Bowie wasn’t going to stay with her.
On we walk to the Sally Bowles and the Bull Bar, a small gay and fetish bar on Nollendorfplatz, open 24 hours, talking about hustlers and the ever changing face of their labors, German, Polish, Turks, Romanians, and today Ukranians. Its not a glamorous scene, says Dan.
Next stop is the Tiergerten and the Victory Column, where Christopher Street Liberation Day ends. Dan shows us some of the bathrooms, in between the bronze reliefs of scenes from the three victories against Denmark, Austria and France between 1864 and 1871 in the Victory Columns. Gay men have historically cruised here, sometimes more successfully than others, as we see in Taxi zum Klo, the 1980 film about a man searching amidst the “sexual playground” that is Berlin, when the door was locked. The extremes are sometimes vexing here. When Dan saw the chilling “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” scerne in Cabaret, with the young blond men singing, he knew he’d found his type: sexy men in uniforms.
The stories of gay Nazis are many. Ernst Röhm was famously a friend of Hitler. He begged him to keep the gay bars open, before he was killed himself in the Night of the Long Knives, of 30 June to 2 July 1934, dramatized in the Vicsconti film The Damned. He lived in the Kleist Cassino in a period when the bankers thought they could control the Nazis. By 1933, tolerance ended. And Hitler finally had Röhm arrested for “moral terpetude.”
Dan shows us the plaque for Magnus-Hirschfeld, who organized the first homosexual emancipation movement, chatting about his work, including his 1919 film 'Different From the Others' about persecution of queer people. “Science is to bring justice for gay people" Hirschfeld is quoted here, at the location of his institute, where the House of World Kultures now stands. He saw the institute go up in flames in a newsreel when he was away in France. The 1933 fire and subsequent burning of his library sent him into permanent exile. Rosa von Praunheim's film Einstein of Sex traces his story. Sunken underground, empty library stacks serve as memorial for the book burning at Under den Linden. People stand staring at the the memorial across from the Opera House with the bronz words:
they will ultimately burn people as well.
Its hard not to think of the US watching this, thinking of the crusades to ban books, Shakespeare, critical race theory, on and on. That was the prelude. After all, “It Is Not the Homosexual Who Is Perverse, But the Society in Which He Lives,” says Dan, referring to the 1971 film directed by Rosa von Praunheim.
If you think of Germany, who do you think of, asks Dan.
Goethe, I reply.
Well, look across the street, Dan points to the statue of Frederick the Great, the Prussian King, who was known to be gay. Up the street, the university’s namesake, Alexander von Humboldt, the explorer and scientist, was also known to be queer. An early proponent of harm reduction, his brother Wilhelm argued people should be able to to act as they wish unless they cause harm to others. My mind races to the example of Kinsey, the entomologist, also queer, thinking about science and the lessons of biodiversity, and the ways he used research to challenge moralism, particularly moralism disguised as science.
The stories we find here remind us of a brighter path; the divides are also there, lingerring below the surface. Those willing to ban books and those willing to learn from the natural world, from science. Freedoms can earned and they can disappear. The conflict is always there. As always, Germany show us what happens when it all goes wrong. It also shows us we can rebuild something better.
The conflicts over freedom of choice, of expression, over work continue to this day. Strolling the city, I imagine revolutionary Berlin, from November 1918, Red Rosa's life, when sailors refused to fight here. I read Burning Down the Haus: Punk Rock, Revolution, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall, the histories of outlaw East German punks, who saw their music as a kind of “revolutionary philosophy,” later targeted, kids arrested and interrogated for playing punk shows in the East in the 1980’s. And visit the Stasi Museum, with its exhibitions on the cultural activists who challenged social controls, put on subversive fashion shows and the Environmental library, fosterring ideas, disseminating information, the world in flux, the city in motion. Standing outside Zion Church, I thinking of the activists who set up the library in 1986, full of ideas and books from the west, openning minds, expanding consciousness. "[T]he library becomes a focal point of East Berlin’s opposition movement...."
“There are still divisions here,” says Nathaniel Flakin, author or Revolutionary Berlin:A Walking Guide. We met in Potsdammerplatz, with rain pounding. I always think of Homer from Wings of Desire, the film that brought Dan to Berlin standing here, in what once was the space between the walls.
“You can see it in union contracts,” says Nate. “Workers get different contracts in the East, in Shonhauser Allee. Each distinct has its own identity. And resentments over the West taking over the East remains.” The divided city remains. “There were things about the East that were actually good. There’s a lot of resentment, anger about unemployment, instead of cradle to grave security. So they are voting for the AFD, the party that will hurt them. There’s lots of resentment.”
I ask Nate about the cleavages.
“By far the housing costs,” Nate replies. “It was still cheap. Its been such a change for us, for those who have been here. I was in New York for a year. I didn’t realize how good we had it. I almost think we have nothing to complain about. I didn’t realize how good it was.”
He pauses, reflecting on the years of the GDR. “Yet I know I would not have done well there. A friend I know was jailed for reading Trotsky.”
What can we learn about revolutions standing in front of this coffee shop, says Nate. “By the Mall of Berlin at the Expresso House, a hub of corporate capital. We’re gonna talk about November 1919, when revolutions rolled.” He looked about, at the corporate buildings to either side. Still he explained, “A century ago, an insurrection took place in Berlin. With the general strike of November 9, 1918, workers toppled the Kaiser and ended the First World War. This began the November Revolution. Millions of people took to the streets to fight for an end to capitalism. But the Social Democratic Party allied with the imperial military to drown the revolution in blood. A century after the uprising, we visit the spots where Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, Richard Müller, and countless proletarians in the German capital changed the history of the world.”
“What can you learn from an American about Berlin?” he asks, referring to himself. “Well, as they say the true Berlinner comes from Breslau, Poland. Its a cliche but the point remains. When I think of people here, they come from elsewhere.
Looking around Nate pivots to the larger story. “1916, The city is empty. Six million people are in the army, prohibition of strikes, mayday, international workers day was canceled. Still, signs started appearing on the streets. ‘If you are against the war, show up at Potsdammerplatz.’ ‘Down with war, down with this government,’ says Karl Liebknecht in a soldier’s uniform. June 28th, 50,000 workers rallied against the conflict, calling on working class resistance to the war.” We walk to a cement block outside the Expresso House. In in 1961, the half completed memorial to Karl Liebknecht was erected between the two countries. Within a few days, the wall went up and the memorial was forgotten about. It was finally taken out in 1995, only to be put back in 2001. Its a great post modern homage of image of him. He’s not here, but he’s here if we act on his ideas.”
Walking, Nate regales us with stories aboutu Germany’s fabled Social Democratic Party, founded in 1863 with its ties in Marxism. Three branches are always pulling art the party, says Nate: the left with Rosa Luxenberg and Karl Liebknecht who oppose the war, the right favoring war, and the center trying to hold the two sides together. August 1, the country lunges toward war with a vote for war credits, August 4th. While the SPD generally opposes war, they support war credits in this case. No one opposes it. War should be over by Christmas, people are told. The worker’s movement is betrayed by their party. Rosa Luxenberg has a meeting at her house and everyone discusses options for moving forward, including suicide. Spirits are low. Maybe suicide is the best option. It becomes impossible to stop the war. Democratic unions vote for civic peace, no strikes. All sides called it defensive. 5 December, 1914, the SPD calls for a second vote for credits. This time, Karl Liebknecht leads the charge against the vote. People had gone from eating potatoes, to turnups to straw. Rosa Luxenberg spent most of the war in prison. Still opposition mounted. By 1918, a quarter million people went on strike against the war. The German people were stabbed in the back by the Jews and Socialists, says the war’s supporters. Germany won the war on the ground, they say. Its delusional, as if feeding a cult. Nothing unfamiliar.
Revolution in the air. Thousands wait for Karl Liebknecht on his return, many standing on the railway platform at Anhalter Bahnhof, now in ruins. We last saw it in Wings of Desire, the 1987 of divided Berlin. In 1919, thousandscomrades celebrated Karl Liebknecht's liberation from prison and his call for strikes against the war. After the revolution, the train station’s took a darker history as a site. Jews were sent from there to their deaths from Theresienstadt, from 2 June 1942 to until 27 March 1945.
The first war, never really ended here.
With the October Revolution of 1917, the Russians had had it, quitting without negotiation. Inspired, the German socialists followed. No one thinks Germany will win. Revolution leads to Weimar, the empire crumbling. It started in Kiel, in the Baltic Sea, 3 November 1918, with a mutiny among the sailors walking off their jobs. Uninterested in fighting for lost causes, they begged to differ about participating in a final round of battles. Gradually the revolt found its way. Berlin was the last place it arrived. Karl Liebknecht called for a general strike Novemver 11th. It will take a year to prepare for that, say union organizers. Lets do it in a week, says Liebknecht. End the war, end the government, says Liebknecht. The Kaiser needs to abdicate now, says the Telegraph. On November 9th, he’s said to resign. It doesn’t happen for another month. He fleas for the Netherlands. Its raining again and we’re walking to the Gropius Bau. A rainbow stretches across the sky, where the wall used to stand. Over time, the shortlived revolution is waterred down; Liebknecht and Luxenberg are eventually killed by a goverment afraid of Socialists. And the Weimar Republic is born. Reform vs revolution, the conflict extends through the years to come. Socialist leaders out of the way, Nationalists rise to power ending the republic with their own brand of socialism, not particularly for the people.
January 1919, Rosa Luxenberg offered a warning about what might be of the city, between a violent past and gentrified future:
I always worry about politicians bringing order, be them Giuliani or the Germans today, out to clean up the rough edges.
Friday into Saturday, we talked about it at Verwalterhaus, in between viewings of the show, trying to make sense of the city, ever changing, ever revealing itself, out dancing, late into the night at Renate, a techno club in Berlin-Friedrichshain, dancing with dj with disruption, Guinen and Dr zeruckbroden, into a rainy Saturday morning.
A line wrapped around the block at Berghain, on Sunday, people in black, somber waiting to see if they make it past the door, into the club, the scene looking futile, a victim of its own success. There are other clubs and colors. I went every weekend from November through March, when the lines were short. Its good but so are the other clubs. Fed and I bailed, walking to find some colors, at the thriftmarkets along the water nearby, trying on sunglasses. On the way, he had run into Micah from Judson. I’m going to church and you’re going to Church, said Micah. Another go. Ahhh Berlin. A blurr of dancing into the afternoon, into the evening, outside, with colors blurring, techno music in the air, bodies shaking, moving, sexxxy bodies, imagining, hoping, expressing, longing, meandering, creating bodies, surrrealist bodies, kinky bodies, cheering bodies, applauding bodies, moving from floor to floor, from the outside dance floor at sunset to the side disco floor, my favorite, to the darket techno floors into the inferno, sensations flying, moving through us, unfiltered. Gonna miss you Sysaphus. Gonna miss you Berlin.
Time clicking, into the last week, most every day at the gallery. #ActinTime the climate clock ticks. Five years ticking, #ActinTime says the IPCC report, life imitating art and art imitating our lived reality. People from across the city and world, join us for the last few days of #TreesTruthTrust leaf printing Saturday, closing party Sunday, touring the gallery space, taking in the scenes from the Community Gardens and Public Spaces of New York, a film Peter, Barbara, Leslie and I have been working on for a decade, showing here. Public spaces are in play from Brooklyn to Berlin. Order is coming just as it came to New York. In the cemetery we see it. Before the war, it was a Jewish department store, then Nazi head quarters, then GDR administrative building, then the Soho House selling 15 euro drinks. In the meantime, the cemetary across the street has not changed. It would be the last weekend of #TreesTruthTrust.
We hadn’t seen Matteo and Fattima, our old friends from Italy and Pakistan for almost a year. Last August in Lake Maggiore, four years prior in Sardinia, before that Paris. They joined us at the gallery on Friday, before we all all ventured into the Friday night, magic light. We walked from the cemetary to "sorry, not tonight..".... A show down the street exploring club culture, full of stylish people exploring and reflecting the show’s themes of rejection and belonging, juvenile fantasies and allure, art work and design between style and substance, images of people striving to be a part of something, of individuality and unity, yearning to be distinct from and connected to our peers, navigating a tapestry of human connections, between the meticulous scrutiny of clubland, the eternal conversations about who got bounced and who got in, between rejection and desire, in an array of feelings. “The embrace of techno subculture welcomes you in unimaginable ways,” says Nadia Evans in the exhibition essay. “For many, this community discovered among the thumping bass and hypnotic melodies offers a profound sense of belonging, a place where we can transcend the constraints of...space and ...societal norms." I'm not sure. Still, the feeling of being part of it all, as well as part of nothing there is real. Little of it is certain. The feeling becomes compulsive, chasing an ellusive sensation, disappearing into the blurr of bodies, sounds and feelings.
Finishing the opening, Marina, Andreas, Matteo and Fattima step out for dinner by the Babylon Theater. Dodi joins us. And we all spread out into the evening. Falco meets us at Erika&Hilde a bar in Neukölln. Afterwhich Matteo and I run to Sameheads for some dancing and trash music that you can dance to late into the night.
Saturday is the apex of the show, the leaf printing workshop with @genius.loci_ Matteo and all our friends. Maria and Jenn drop by, as well as Fattima’s groupies helping us, prepare the materials. Fattima takes us foraging for leaves to print on on pieces of cloth people bring from home, berries, and green leaves animating the t shirts with colors all afternoon. First we go foraging, exploring the cemetary moving between the drug users to the left corner of the cemetary, as well as the pilgrims looking for Horst Wessel, the old Nazi’s grave. After we find leaves, we take them back for printing. Hammerring, knocking leaves, into cloth, imprinted into the t shirts, long into the afternoon, reveling in the color and hypnotizing happiness of the slow process, before a quick bite. First we go to Kater Blau on Holtzmarket, but its too sleepy. Federico suggests we try about blank, a techno club in the Friedrichshain district of Berlin, nineteen dj’s, non human sound, lightes blazing, into the evening, bodies moving, ideas, hopes, war and peace, longing and disappearing, finding and losing the self. Mostly we dance and explore the rooms, taking breaks in various corners, and chill out spaces, running into others, trying to find them. There all night, lost in the daydream, the sun rises and our memories of the year meander into a grand ending. Lets watch the sunset, says Federico. In between the sunset and the bodies in motion, music and hallucinations splashed across the sky.
“Where are you? Drunk, my mind becomes
Twilight after all your ecstasy. For I just saw…”
Something alluring,
“Bathed his youthful hair in the golden clouds....”
Holderlin saw a sun god; I saw dancers, their motion poems to the moon and sun, reminding, sensing, succumbing, touching, feeling, all night into the morning.
The #TreesTruthTrust finissage, a closing with bands was Sunday at 1600. Thank you Berlin. Thank you artists and friends from far and wide on our long goodbye to Berlin. “Raise money for the Ukraine!” we invited people to join us as we bid "Adieu" to Berlin and all the wonderful people we met. Celebrate with live music by the band "Isaak" and D/VI Anti-Dodi. Unique poster from Ukrainian artist Alena Grom will be for sale.
"i am doing my work with such precision that there is no money in the game..." says some graffiti in the back.
Bands play. Isaak warmed the room with folk songs. Our Berlin friends drop by. Maria, Barret’s boss from Many Tentacles, brought her Chinese sitar, performing, releasing a magic sound that filled the room. People stayed late, chatting about it, resonating with Caroline’s work, my video. “This happened to my mom in 1945. She only told me in 1990,” one many said referring to the soldiers who rolled through Berlin in April 1945 assaulting the women, their bodies collateral damage, in a city without a government. On we talked into the evening, sharing impressions of the show at 8MM, a city in flux.
Exhausted Monday, we rose for a bittersweet day unpacking, saying goodbye to #TreesTruthTrust and Niels and VerWalterhaus. Andreas helped us move the art, returning the pieces to their respective homes throughout Berlin.
Finishing packing up, returning my bike, I ran to join Raoul for a walking tour of Kreutzberg. Every year since 1987, Kreuzberg has seen protests on May 1, declared Nate. "Revolutionary May Day" combines Germany’s knack for organization with Berlin’s predisposition for nihilism. Nate helped us explore, “the neighborhood uprising of 1987, the refugee protests at Oranienplatz, struggles against rising rents, the stories of three occupied houses, the wall and what it meant for West Berliners.
We met at Kottbusser Tor, at the corner of Admiralstraße, in front of Südblock, walking two hours to the Schillingbrücke. Nate led the tour with a discussion of the struggle for social housing here. From 2000 to 2010, rent prices doubled. Neighbors were forced out. Finally in 2012, protests against rising costs, culminating in the 2018 rent cap law, that was later canceled by the constitutional court.
On we walked through SO36, the old zip code for the neighborhood till 1991. For three decades it was surrounded by a wall. Guestworkers poured in from Italy, Greece, Turkey, and West Germany, a unique zone outside of West Germany and East, with no military service, creating a distinct culture. “24 months of ass wiping,” quipped Raoul, referring to his time in the service. The neighborhood was full of squats, maintenance occupations, some just kicking down the walls, with more and more people living in the 170 squats here. Some squats were legalized, others evicted. Dubbed “Little Istanbol,” the neighborhood went from marginalized to chic. Rent prices and evictions increased.
On we walked to OPlatz (Orienaplatz) the orange square, home to the refugee protests of 2012. During the refugee crisis, people arriving were assigned a city in Germany, many away from urban areas. Waves of suicides followed. Over time, people started organizing, violating law, moving to Berlin, where some six hundred camped in the square, creating a refugee camp in the middle of Berlin. The Green Party tolerated it. The right wing opposed the camp, full of “pests.” School strikes started and ended here. The movement lasted some 18 months till April 2014, when one protester, Napuli Langa, climbed a tree during the eviction. She stayed for four days. Direct action and occupation after occupation, the activists plowed forward, changing the terms of the conversation around refugees. Napuli eventually got residency, by marrying a German activist.
Walking through the neighborhood, Nate turned his attention to the Neighborhood Uprising of 1987, when activists pushed the police out of the neighborhood for a period of a few hours. Mayday is a public holiday in German, with trade unions marching, red and black blocks marching in support or opposition for their demands, usually ending in a street festival with bad music and foood. In 1987, activists were up in arms about a census, organizing to boycott the census. Police raided their offices and charged into their Mayday march, teargas everywhere. Raoul, who was at the march, smiled, laughing, as Nate described the escalating tensions. The police teargassed everyone. “No revolution wihtout liberation,” people chanted. Throughout the neighborhood, people fought back, plunderring shops. It was a police free zone for five or six hours, till 3 or 4 am, when the beer finally ran out and people went to bed.
Word of the action spread around the world. People were moving, pushing for freedoms.
“Opponents of W. German Census Riot in Berlin, Causing Heavy Damage; 100 Hurt,” reported the L.A. TIMES on the third of May 1987. The article continued: “[D]isorder erupted at a block party organized by leftist political groups at about 9 p.m. Friday and lasted until 4 a.m. Saturday in the working-class district that has attracted thousands of West German draft resisters, dropouts, squatters and members of the counterculture, all living alongside foreign workers. Demonstrators rampaged through the Kreuzberg subway station and “made firewood of it,” wrecking signal equipment so that traffic had to be diverted to buses…”
Each year, a new mayday action marked a new theme for the movement. More and more activists moved from West to East, and East to West, planting a tree house in between. The world was changing. After the wall fell, more and more squats were born. At 137 Köpenicker Straße, Köpi was was occupied after unification. This was an East West squat that housed 100 people. And legalized in 1991. It looks like its been designed by a hundred different artists. Throughout the years, its hosts hardcore and East European music shows in the sweaty downstairs. There had been plans for an eviction. But the prolonged battle for Ungdomshuset, a Danish squat and social center, in which tens of thousands descended into the streets in black masks forced the government to provide a different location for a social center, seemed to inspired the city think another way. The battle for “free spaces” was widespread, taking inspiration from Berlin and Italy. Over the years, the city has gone after various corners edges of Köpi, with thousands rioting, hundreds arrested. And today, it remains, a place where people live, cook and share space together, community comes together, and bands from around the world perform.
Of course, Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg is facing the same pressures every city is facing, increased rents, condos, big box stores and seas of identical details looming, order coming. Nate finished the tour on the water. The fight for public space is everywhere here. More and more condos are rising up along the river. The fight for a people’s livable city is ongoing. People can change the direction of history. They’ve done it here.
We spend the next day trying to get it together, with final packing etc and errands, stumbling into Alter Garnisonfriedhof Berlin (Alter Berliner Garnisonfriedhof) and other favorite places of Berlin that we were already starting to miss. Its not so easy saying goodbye and sending our lives back to the US. Last day we pack all day, shipping off packages from the show, making arrangements, before strolling through Manytentacles, the old print shop where Bear worked, bookstores and my favorite places. We've all seen sooo many cities, spaces, stories, all of us growing, aging, life passing along together. Trying to leave, the ticket for Shannon the cat did not come through. Unable to leave Shannon behind, I stayed behind.
And met friends and a trip to Kotti. There’d been a long line outside the secession show at alte national galleria, “Klimt, Stuck, Liebermann, the exhibition is the first to compare the three art metropolises of Munich, Vienna and Berlin at the turn of the century.” Standing there, I thought of all my trips to see these works, the Klimpts I saw in Vienna and New York, the trip Liebermans home in the country here, worlds and ideas in flux. I looked at the androgenous pan, and her painter Wolfhorn who perished in the camps. I looked at the dancer inside, and thought of the trips dancing after going to this gallery in the winter, strange feeling that Berlin was calling me.
Throughout the show, Andreas joked about the stream of visitors on a pilgrimage to Host Wessel’s grave. I thought he was joking. Who was Horst Wessel I thought, only making the connection with Max’s story from the poetry session a week later.
Berlin doesn't let you go. In town a couple of extra days to get the ticket sorted fir Shannon the cat's return flight, I enjoyed a final stroll through queer Berlin, on the way to the Käthe Kollwitz Museum. We saw her memorial on our first day here a year ago. We have to go see that we said. A year later, her sorrowful and majestic works on poverty and struggle made me weep. Berlin remembers. You see it in the streets. The horrors and the beauty are all here. I just sat watching. Taking buses around the city to a final tour, with Nate, meeting him in front of Kino International, his tour addressing the question, who killed Horst Ludwig Georg Erich Wessel? Born 9 October 1907, finally departing 23 February 1930). He was “a German street gangster and, according to some sources, a procurer of prostitutes who became a Sturmführer ("Assault Leader"), the lowest commissioned officer rank in the Sturmabteilung (SA), the paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party. After his murder in 1930, Joseph Goebbels turned him into a martyr for the Nazi Party." He was buried at the cemetary where we held our show. We all talked about him.
Nate began at Karl-Marx-Allee 33, U5 Schillingstraße at 17:45, introducing his tour on The Death of Horst Wessel (A Historical Murder Mystery). He explained: “Horst Wessel was a young leader of the Nazi Party in the working-class neighborhood of Friedrichshain. On January 14, 1930, he was shot in his apartment, and he died a month later. Joseph Goebbels turned him into the Nazis' principle martyr. After 1933, the Horst Wessel Song became the national anthem of the Third Reich. There were Horst Wessel Streets, Horst Wessel Squares, a Horst Wessel Hospital — Friedrichshain even became Horst Wessel City. Hitler said that Wessel would be remembered for hundreds of years. Today, most people have never heard of him. Two myths have since competed about Wessel's murder: the Nazis said he was assassinated by a red hit squad; the communists said he was a pimp and was killed in a dispute with another pimp. Both these myths are false, and the real story offers important insights about working-class life in Berlin in the late 1920s. Our tour starts at the site of the murder. In the style of a historical murder mystery, we will trace the path the murderers took on that cold January night so many years ago. We will end up at the site of a Communist bar in the Scheunenviertel.”
Before it was Karl Marx Allee, it was Stalinallee, and before that it was Große Frankfurter Straße. It was under this name that Horst Wessel lived and was murderred. After he was shot, his supporters looked for a doctor for him. The first to arrive was Jewish. They turned him away. It took over an hour for the Nazi’s to approve of someone to see him. He’d spend the next 24 days in a sepsis fog. He probably would have lived if they’d just approved a doctor earlier, Nate chuckled, begging the question, who killed Horst Wessel, the Communists or his own anti-semitism? Soon enough he was dead. Goebbels starts building up the myth. Nate leads us to, Café Möwe (Seagull Café), Große onFrankfurter Straße 84, an old Nazi meeting place in Friedrichshain, opposite from where Horst Wessel lived. They were getting the same support as the SPD, the Communists even more, until the crash, when more and more moved rightward to the party preparing for a civil war.
Nate stops by an old police station. Trotsky said, 'Politicians come and go. The police stay the same,’ says Nate.
Horst was fighting more and more with his landlord, who was increasingly frustrated with the foodtraffic of Nazis coming through his apartment, staying late into the night. Walking and talking, we pass a mural painted with the ubiquitous, “Fuck Putin.” No love lost here. Word in the street in the former East Berlin, where Putin's idol divided the city, families, lives, and ideas. What a lesson living in a city that has endured some six radically different regimes in the last century, give or take a decade. From imperialism to Weimar, National Socialism to the cold war dividing totalitarian and democratic regimes, ideologies shifting, Berlin with its own rules, ceding with unification and globalization. It seems the only thing that's stayed the same were the cops, for the most part.
Walking through the Alexanderplatz shopping mall, Nate points out, “one symbol of capitalist domination after another.” And stops at an restaurant referred to as Berlin’s oldest. But its not the original. Everything was bombed. Its probably from the 1970’s. Well, if you start two world wars, you can’t complain about losing cultural relics, said Brecht after the war.
We stop at Jüdenstrasse, the old name for the street of Jews, between Rathausstraße and Stralauer Straße, one of Berlin’s oldest streets.
“There we go,” says one of my American friends on the tour, laughing.
The street dates back to the 13th century, with millennia of connotations, still reverberberating.
Growing up, Horst agreed with his father’s conservative politics, says Nate, getting back to our story. He joined the Bizmark Youth, getting into fights with lefties and later the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP), Goebbels program, becoming a rising star in the party. He wrote a poem about the party, that later became a sort of anthem.
Standing at Berlin Alexanderplatz tv tower, constructed between 1924 and 1926, Nate tells us about the neighborhood during those days. Petty criminal life was common here, with lots of prostitution. The relationship between Horst and his girlfriend, Erna Jänicke, was a complicated one. Once a prostitute herself, she was thought to have quit the business after she met Horst. Some speculate this may have had something to do with his early demise. Was his death a political crime or a mob hit or both?
On we walk to Volksbühne,a theater on Rosa Luxenbergplasse, across from Babylon Berlin, the old movie theater. For a while there, it was known as Horst Wessel Platz, with a Nazi eagle, as a monument to Nazi martyrs in front. Nate tells us stories about the various clashes between the police and the communists in the area, the Communists shot there. Still the police killed more there in the Weimar era. It was all contested, the naming and renaming of the Karl Liebknecht house to the Horst Wessel Haus and renamed back. For a while there in the 1930’s, the Babylon was a police station and detention center where Communists and Jews were held and interrogated.
Sharing stories of the period and the case itself, Nate walks us to the Red Front Fighters League (RFB) Bar. A communist meeting hub, Horst’s landlord went there to vent and seek help with her subletter. Her husband was a member of the RFB. At the bar, the communists want nothing to do with the case. Get the fuck out of here, they say to her. Yet, when they find out its Wessell and the landlord had the keys to this Nazi’s apartment, they have a change of thought. They decide to give him a proletarian drubbing. A crowd leaves the bar to go to get a gun. Nate walks us over to a plaque, or Stolpersteine on Max Beer Str. 48, Mitte, Berlin, for someone killed by the Nazis. Its for Sally Epstein, one of the people who took part in the plot as a scout. He wasn’t tried at the time. But in 1935, the Nazis had their own trial. And he was convicted. The charges were only reversed in 2009. From here, the RFB gang walks to another tavern, to find another potential shooter with another paramilitary league, another guy with a guy with a gun. Now they have two guns, one a communist, another a pimp. They go to his apartment. Albrecht Höhler, a young communist, pulls the trigger, shoots Horst Wessel. Yet, why? Was it that he was a fascist, or that he took his girlfriend off the market, a dispute between pimps, or was it basically a dispute over rent. After the January 14, 1930 shooting, the assasin was put on a train and sent to safe house in Prague. He was later murdered in the forest. Kaiser Wilhelm’s son was one of the murderers. All involved with the squad were killed. Some sent to Bbuchenwald; others to Bergen Belsen, where they perish.
Horst Wessel was buried in St Nicholas Cemetary, within a few feet of Verwalterhouse, right by his father. Hitler spoke at his graveside, by the monument. The police seiled off the entrance. That wasn’t enough to prevent communists from shouting insults, and singing the International. Inside someone had painted some graffiti with the words, "To Wessel the pimp, a last Heil Hitler".
Yet, that wasn’t the end for Horst. In 1945, the Communists removed the grave and the monument. And in 2002, an anonomous group of antifascists announced they had removed the body, throwing the head in the Spree.
Nate is finishing up his tour. “In the end, I would propose, as soon as there are new crisis of system, the old will be new. The ruling class will resort to their old brutal tactics. Get organized,” he implores us.
I thank him and walk up the street, past the cemetary to Schmitz Bar on Torstraße, to catch up with Berlin buddies. Nicholas as Gentian, my old comrades from school are waiting, sharing stories about their travels and work, Gentian regaling me with tales about the Balkins. “The Balkans are blessed and cursed at the same time,” he tells me. “History and geography still fighting, trying to find its own identity between East and West. Every Balkan knows, East, West, North, South, will become its harbor. Its where it is and will be for a long time.”
He’s off to a meeting. Nicholas and I chat away about music and the city, Berlin's cultural contribution to the world, even if they build on the Detroit House, from the good old USA. The mix is what I love, I tell Nicholas at Schmidt. Saying goodbye, I’m off to Schokoladen, on Ackerstrasse 169. Federico and I chat for a while, recalling our year of adventures, our trips to clubland, to Marlene Dietrich’s grave. Danke Berlin. No goodbyes, as Rachel says. See you soon. I stroll into the night, thinking about queer berlin and its struggles for freedom, against book burning and mechanisms of annihilation, the fights for socialism that Rosa and Karl fought for, the refugee protests and neighborhood uprisings of Kreutzberg, and the fights between Horse Wessell’s fascist paramilitary crew and the communists, the red lights of berlin, the bodies shaking cheering to the techno beats, grabbing some late pommes and going to bed, even if I wanted to go to out. It was time to sleep and make my way home.
Shannon and I are reunited for the journey. Bags are lost, flights delayed. But I make my way back. Reading Burning Down the Haus, on the way home, I am struck by the ending:
“And sometimes, if you stand at the edge of the dark river as rosy- fingered dawn clutches at the Eastern horizon and the music thumps behind you in Kater Blau, Salon zur Wilden Renate or Griessmuehle, you can almost hear the city whispering: Don’t die in the waiting room of the future. Create your own world, your own reality, DIY, revolution,” (p. 356).
"Stop showing up in black... Wear a colourful outfit!" said KitKit on instagram on my return. ““Wear a colourful outfit… something fabulous, glamorous, glittery, magical or fetishistic-colourful!” Felt like vindication for me wearing colors my first few trips into clubland there, wondering about the compulsion toward conformity. I recalled my first demos in Berlin in 1991, in demos outing Frederick the Great. The world was changing; Berlin was changing. New York was changing. I was glad to have seen some of it.
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