Unscene Berlin

Detail of the Koepi's frontage What's alternative about the Carnival of Cultures?  Everything and nothing.  Every culture that you'll see there - on a float, at a stall or onstage - will be some kind of an alternative to Berlin's indigenous culture.   The jerk chicken and samba bands will seem exotic to some of us for sure.  But then again, there are also parts of India and Africa where eating currywurst and drinking beer with fake raspberry syrup in it may seem exotic. It's all a matter of perspective. The Karneval der Kulturen (May 22-25) was founded in Berlin in 1996 to combat the growing tide of nationalistic racism in the former East German capital.  Some would say that it also afforded the local prols (chavs) an excellent opportunity to work on their fake tans and get dressed up in pastel colours and bling-bling.  (Many seem to have taken that idea and run with it ). Some of the true minority cultures that are visible on the streets of ...

Here in Berlin, Spree is the name of the river that runs through the city. But in English, the word spree is used in one of two senses: 1) to describe a mindless spending binge (as in 'shopping spree') or 2) to describe a bloodbath (as in 'killing spree'). With the Mediaspree development project, Berlin’s city council seems to have done the impossible: it's found a way to combine all three meanings.   City councillors may appear to accept Berlin's underground arts scene; indeed, some of them claim to support it. Nevertheless, that scene is being threatened by the commercial developments that the council has initiated. Until recently, the city of Berlin existed within a bubble of commercial neglect. Politically and economically unstable, it was deemed too risky for commercial investors to work with. Berlin has managed to turn its risky reputation into a virtue though, attracting tens of thousands of D.I.Y. artistic refugees from so...

Melodramatic scenes like this are unlikely to occur in Berlin during the strike (the U-Bahn's too crowded for that!) Germany’s train strike has been happening on and off for 10 months now and yet somehow, it feels like it’s been happening for about 10 years.  Perhaps that’s because the details that we hear about it never seem to change.  Every new strike comes with the same, tired preamble, stating that no progress has been made between the parties hammering out an agreement (about what?  No one really seems to know).  They tell us that the negotiations have been broken off yet again, also for reasons unknown .  Like me, you might be wondering, what's even going on here?  After reading near-identical reports about the strikes on the Telegraph , BBC , Deutsche Bahn and Deutsche Welle , I realized that the world's news outlets aren't doing much to answer that question. Their coverage all follows the same formula: half the article is spent com...

If you were passing through the Wiener Strasse area yesterday, you might have noticed that it was not a day for 'business as usual', down at the local pool.  Semi-nude bathers inside the pool clustered by its windowed walls to goggle at a swirling pool of dancers outside on Spreewaldplatz, making waves of the sonic kind...  Yes, that's right: the Spreewaldplatz was briefly reclaimed by an underrepresented Berlin demographic: the ravers.  Not just the people who go to raves, but those who organize them, as well: living, eating, sleeping and breathing in the liberty that is found in the city's underpopulated, undiscovered nooks and crannies. Around 90% of inner-city Berlin used to be comprised of such nooks & crannies before the relentless march of commercialization began.  So it may be fair to say that many of the people at yesterday's Reclaim the Gorli party embodied the untamed spirit that put Berlin on the map in the first place. As often reporte...

Making feminism a threat again is the motto of this year's International Women's Day march in Berlin.  It's  not as scary as it sounds, though.  For some men, just being born female is enough to make someone a threat, after all.  It really doesn't matter to them what women say or do, how feminist they are or aren't, or how demurely they behave, or how promiscuous they are in their personal lives.  Just by existing, women will always upset certain men and, for those men, no excuse is needed to mete out a punishment that fits the 'crime'. But it always helps to have a plausible-sounding reason for attacking women and right now, that reason could be summed up as: "Feminists have gone too far and/or become too equal.  They need/want/are asking for a backlash." If the 'feminism has gone too far' bandwagon was an actual vehicle, it would be a Ford Model-T because its that old. as the foto below illustrates, fear of feminists has been around ...

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...