Unscene Berlin

Nuit Debout. Wikimedia Commons photo Maybe it's because I smile a lot, but Germans seem to enjoy telling me, with near-zealous amounts of fatalism, that the world is going down in flames. And if you're in Australia  right now then yeah, that must seem pretty true. They must figure that I am oblivious to all of the latest apocalyptic news flashes - but nah, that's far from true. It's just that I look at the world with both eyes open: the one that sees the negative shit that is happening out there and  the one that sees humanity's equal and opposite reactions to it. Yes, I'm talking about activism. Again. The media pretty much always leaves activism out of the picture. It speaks about the concerns of the wealthiest 1 percent almost exclusively. Therefore, it sees everything with one eye closed, or one eye 99% closed at the very least. As everyone looks back on the past year and  the past decade, that tendency will surely be amplified.  So join me, if...

“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...