Back in the euro crisis days, with the single currency in turmoil, Berlin seemed as safe as houses. Berliner Stefan Hermann and his partner, fearful for their modest savings, decided an apartment in the German capital was a good investment.
Their three-room apartment in the eastern neighbourhood of Friedrichshain is everything a Berliner could wish for, with high stuccoed ceilings, old oak floorboards and a lift.
But in the property game, location is everything. And now the couple find themselves living in the city's most notorious street. For months, the Rigaerstrasse has been a war zone where riot police in RoboCop gear clash with left-wing radicals in black hoodies. The left-wingers and their supporters see this as the last stand of alternative Berlin against a sellout to big capital. Across the barricades, police and city politicians see it as a chaotic protest by a raggle-taggle bunch of radicals intent on violence.
Trapped between the two fronts are people like Stefan and his neighbours. Matters came to a head on Saturday when 3,000 protesters faced off against 1,800 police. After a peaceful demonstration, violence followed with stones, bottles and fireworks flying through the air. Police deployed pepper spray, 123 officers were injured and 86 protesters arrested.
Faces of hate
In Berlin’s
Tagesspiegel
newspaper, a photographer hospitalised after being hit by a flying missile on Saturday said he still had sympathy for some of the protesters’ concerns. But the man, a veteran of Berlin’s alternative scene who asked not to be named, added: “Saturday’s protest was different. As the protesters came closer I saw hate in their faces.”
Friedrichshain has always been a left-wing, working-class neighbourhood. But, recent years of low-interest loans and rising rents have seen Berlin catch the property bug. For those who cannot afford to buy, the fear of gentrification and its consequences is palpable.
Tom and his partner were at the receiving end of that anger when they joined a co-operative to buy an empty, century-old ruin on the Rigaerstr.
They had barely moved in when the first graffiti appeared on their building, sprayed there by squatters opposite.
Eastern Berlin’s squats are largely a product of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Unlike West Berlin’s communes, free-wheeling experiments in living that arose from the 1968 student revolution, Friedrichshain’s occupied houses date back to the 1990s when alternative groups broke into abandoned buildings and made homes.
As Berlin’s real estate market woke from decades of slumber, and their buildings’ owners eventually reappeared, some squatters saw a window of opportunity to regularise their situation and bought their homes. Those who held out are feeling the squeeze.
City politics
Rigaerstr 94 was bought by a London investment fund that emptied the building with police assistance ahead of a full renovation. With an eye on city politics, the new owners have offered two apartments to house Syrian refugee families.
That has put the evicted left-wing groups on the back foot. They accuse Berlin’s politicians of selling out to investors and provoking the situation to earn law-and-order points with voters in September’s city-state elections.
State interior minister Frank Henkel denies those claims but has refused dialogue with groups he says are responsible for a “massive left-wing orgy of violence”.
The lack of political will is not the only stumbling block to de-escalation talks; another lies in the nature of the squats.
After a year of sustained attack by their alternative neighbours, Tom volunteered to visit the occupied houses to talk – but he found no one to talk to. Instead Tom was given a lecture by recently arrived Italian punks – not even born when he moved to Berlin – that he was ruining their city.
After a shocking weekend of violence, the street is now in an uneasy stalemate as renovation of Rigaerstr 94 takes place behind a police cordon.
Heike, from Rigaerstr 94, says she feels she’s living under siege. “It’s an impossible situation, the police controls are completely disproportionate,” she said. But Maria, who lives around the corner, backs Berlin politicians’ refusal to talk with the left-wing groups: “This has to end, I’m against tolerance towards these groups.”
Supporters of the Rigaerstr 94 squat say they will continue their struggle “for a society living in solidarity instead of capitalism, for more squats and for a neighbourhood shaped by resistance”.
Though locals see blame on both sides in this feud, some sense a shift in the mood the longer the stand-off continues.
“We can only hope that things eventually calm down,” says Stefan, “but I sense that the left-wing protesters have increasingly less support in the neighbourhood.”
