Comrades, companer@s y companer@s,
In december 2012 refugees occupied an empty old school in Berlin-Kreuzberg.
Now the green government of Berlin- Kreuzberg want to evict the 50 still remaining refugees.The ultimatum to leave the school voluntarily ends on october 31 friday, 2014.
A violent eviction now is very much possible.
REsist Now
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After the Nazis’ show of force last Sunday in Cologne, largely tolerated by the police’s repression of antifascists’ counter-demonstration, the Nazis and their football hooligans are planning “a revolution” on November 9 in Berlin, and attacks against Rote Flora autonomous social center in Hamburg during another demonstration on November 15. They plan similar demo in Wuppertal this weekend. [Read More]
When, for a short time at the beginning of the nineties, the underground was in charge of East Berlin’s centre, activist and photographer Ben de Biel was there: at Kunsthaus Tacheles, at I.M. Eimer, and as the founder of MARIA Club. Today, de Biel has moved on from organizing events and now works as the press relations officer for the Piraten Partei. In this monologue, part of a series of artists and other key cultural figures speaking openly about their artistic experience in the city, de Biel told us about his own Berlin experiment.
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East Berlin’s squatter movement erupted across the city after the fall of the wall in 1989. But what role did housing activists in the 1980s play in shaping an alternative vision for the contemporary city?
In September 1988, an anonymous report appeared in the East German underground magazine Umweltblätter describing the plight of a group of squatters who had occupied 61 Lychenerstrasse in the Berlin district of Prenzlauer Berg. In the squatters own words, they had “occupied the house in order to overcome the contradiction between, on the one hand, the many vacant and decaying houses [in Berlin], and on the other, a growing number of people in search of housing”. As “squatters (Instandbesetzer),” they proclaimed, “we will resist the further cultural and spiritual devastation of the country.”[i]
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On August 5th cops in Greece continued their campaign of repression against squats by raiding three squatted spaces in Patras: Parartima, Maragopouleio and the Self-managed Hangout inside the Technological Educational Institute (TEI). 16 comrades were detained in total; 5 squatters and 11 supporters.
While those showing solidarity were later released, the 5 occupants faced charges in court on the 13th. Therefore the next day we painted a banner to express our solidarity with squatters facing charges and evicted from their homes.
Additionally today we hung another banner to show solidarity with the squat Rigaer 94 and all those arrested during raids in Berlin on the 14th. The raids were supposedly related to arson attacks of various job centres and a Molotov attack against police, in solidarity with the revolts in Turkey after the eviction of Gezi Park in Istanbul. [Read More]
According to first reports, there were huge police raids on eight house projects and apartments in Berlin, including the Rigaer 94, this morning (14/8). The cops are supposedly looking for people responsible for attacks on various job centers (‘welfare offices’) as well as a recent molotov attack against police, who were conducting a drug raid in Köttbusser Tor during a solidarity demonstration for the revolt in Turkey. More news as it comes…
Below is a call for spontaneous demonstration in response to the raids:
This morning, August 14th, 2013, cops raided several apartments in the Mitte, Kreuzberg and Neukölln neighbourhoods of Berlin.
In Friedrichshain the police deployed a riot squad, along with special task force troops to invade the house project Rigaer Straße 94 [whose front building was already stormed by cops on August 2nd]. [Read More]
On the second anniversary of the eviction of Liebig 14
“An event can be turned around, repressed, co-opted, betrayed, but there is still something in it that cannot be outdated. Only renegades would say: it’s outdated. But even if the event is ancient, it can never be outdated: it is an opening onto the possible. It passes as much into the interior of individuals as into the depths of society” -Gilles Deleuze
Struggle and Repression
The second of February 2011: a Berlin house project is evicted by several thousand cops. This event paradoxically marks a moment that is both a recent high-point of struggle in Berlin, as well as a highpoint of repression. Thousands take to the streets to demonstrate a collective refusal: we do not accept this eviction, nor the eviction of any other emancipatory space, nor the eviction of any individual or family from their home as a result of a city politics that is so clearly rotten, twisted in its pursuit of financial gain. We refuse the power of this city politics, and its neo-liberal yea-sayers, have over urban space. We will continue to fight for this space – the city we live in – to be a collective creation and not an object of financial speculation.
