Unscene Berlin

Who said, "Tear down this wall?" It hardly matters. All that matters is the people who actually  did  it - people like you and I.  If there’s one thing I’ve learned from living in an ex-Eastern Bloc country, it’s that the Iron Curtain didn’t fall just because of what any one leader said or did. It also fell because the majority of people didn't want it anymore, and refused to let it stand in their way. I think there is a lesson to be learned there for all would-be activists, but especially those who are frustrated with their government's inaction on climate change.  Not that many English speaking visitors to Berlin realise this, but quite a few people who lived in the GDR believed that the Wall was a necessary defence against the capitalist, militarised West.  That was what their leaders led them to believe. Nowadays, we are so used to thinking of the Wall as a fence that kept people in, we forget that for many people on the eastern side of it, it ...

"Peace, joy and pancakes!"     ... was the deliriously random tagline for the Berlin Love Parade, back when it started in 1989.  The Love Parade was founded in 1989 to celebrate DJ Dr. Motte 's birthday.  It was originally billed as a protest and had an ambitiously broad range of demands: global disarmament, unity through music and an end to food poverty.  The solution offered to all these problems was simple enough: bring people together to dance, hug and share. Tomorrow, the Zug der Liebe demo & street party will be doing something a bit similar, but it has made some necessary updates to the template that its predecessors created.  At the time when the first Love Parade happened, its organizers had a glaring example of division, corruption and repression sitting right on the doorstep in the form of the German Democratic Republic, lurking darkly behind its Wall.  After people started streaming through that wall that had been controlled by t...

I am in a hallway in a turn-of-the-century community centre with high ceilings; the patchy walls are decked with fairy lights, protest posters peel from the yellowing walls.   Every inch of the scuffed floors is filled with the shuffling feet of a rainbow crowd.  Dogs weave through a crowd of black and white Rastas, hippies with pastel dreads and randoms with out-grown, razor-cut hair do's. Fresh-faced white activists & weary black men cross paths and chat.   All around them, people are smiling & swaying in droves... People squeezing their way down the hall slow as they pass by a group of Africans propping up a bar, in the middle of the hall. Passers-by are dragged in by the exhibitionist banter.  The air is peppered with giddy outbursts of hilarity.  A nother exchange of stories and ideas ignites.  Hip hop and reggae throbs out of a spacious room, at one end of the hall.   At the other end, clean-shaven hardtek fans in militant gea...

“I think Frank Henkel should come here and see what he is doing,” says Anja, a German activist at a refugee protest in Friedrichshain. “Instead he stays inside his house, in his warm bed.” Anja wants the senator to explain why he ordered the eviction of 108 refugees that the Senate was housing in Berlin hostels. The fact that the refugees were all members of Lampedusa, an activist group that has been fighting for asylum reform, probably played a role in Henkel’s decision… but he isn’t about to admit it. Senator Henkel has almost entirely walled himself off from the refugees, going about his life as if they don’t even exist. This past September, his stonewalling forced Anja and her friends to take the battle to his doorstep. “We went to his office and sat on the floor,” she says. “We refused to leave until he came out.” But instead of answering their questions, Henkel’s staff called the police, who lifted the activists up and dropped them outside on a kerb, like bin ba...

Whether you've just stumbled out of bed, a club, a bar or a plane, you are probably looking for something to do this sunny Sunday afternoon in Berlin.  Well, you've come to the right place! Here are three tips from Unscene: If your morning coffee is looking a bit like the flyer above, then I suggest you get down to R19 (Revaler Strasse 19, near Ostkreuz) right off the bat, and check out their progressive, psychedelic trance party.  Entrance is by donation and smiles are free!  This slightly-off-the-beaten-track venue is very laid back and friendly and it has a small garden, plus some very nice visuals. It's an ideal place to let your mind float after a hard night of clubbing.  The '10' Exhibition at Berghain Halle.  You'll have to go there to see those photos close up! If you get turned away from Berghain today and still feel like giving them some money afterward just to say "Gee, thanks for that!" be sure to check out the exhibition ...

When I started writing this blog in 2011, Berlin was a city that was all about finding itself, finding the right way of being 'authentically Berlin'.  Every organizer of every event seemed to be clamouring to prove they had that original, underground Berlin spirit.  Droves of people were coming here to find a piece of the Wall, some 1960's clothes or anything else that wasn't nailed down that they could drag back and display like a trophy of the unrefined, undefined Cold War landscape that was vanishing as they watched.  Every weekend I'd see them clawing oversized 1980s jackets off the rails of Humana and scurrying furtively through the streets schlepping musty chunks of GDR furniture like packrats, afraid to run out of supplies.  Supplies of character.  "See?" I could just hear these droves of new Berliners declaring: "Even the chair I'm sitting on is a one-off that was hand-tooled out of old bed posts by an impoverished citizen of East ...