It's a beautiful day for the revolution.
Because May 1st is a national holiday here in Germany, I had Monday and Tuesday off this week. Since 1987, the year when a May 1st demostration for workers' rights in Kreuzberg, the off-beat, heavily Turkish area I've mentioned here a few times, turned into a riot, there's been a tradition of marching, demonstrating, shouting communist slogans, and throwing stones at the police on the same date.
My original plan for that day was to lie low and avoid the area. However, when I was talking to a long-term resident of Berlin early Tuesday, she told me that the May 1st chaos has calmed down in recent years, since the residents of the street most involved, Oranienstrasse, decided to try to avoid the worst of the bother by throwing a street party. "Besides," she said, "if there is trouble, it probably won't happen until after dark."
I was wearing (purely coincidentally) a red sweater with a hole in the back of the collar that I hadn't noticed until I left the apartment. The sweater was the deciding factor, I think; I figured that I was wearing a properly communist color and looking scruffy enough to pass as a member of the proletariat. So, off I went.
Most of the street was, in fact, taken up with stands selling food and drinks. The Turkish population of the neighborhood was heavily represented, but there were also people selling samosas and burritos. Interspersed with the food stands were people handing out information on various political causes; the main liberal party in Germany had a stand, as did the Turkish Communist Party. It was a gloriously sunny day, not too hot, and people were strolling along the street or sitting and having picnics. I spent a really nice hour there, where everything that people like about Kreuzberg seemed to be on display: its multiculturalism, its liberalism, and its laid-back air (I bought a soda out of a green garbage bin that someone had filled with ice).
A little later, I wandered down to the big sqaure where a communist demonstration was taking place. The demonstrators had stretched an enormous banner over the street announcing, in Turkish and German, that there would be no end to global exploitation and oppression of workers without a revolution. As I got there, a young man with an extremely shrill voice was lining people up for their march and denouncing American imperialism. Some of the demostrators were carrying flags with the hammer and sickle or pictures of Mao. Even here, though, people didn't seem to be all that worked up; there was a lot of playful shoving and people taking pictures of their friends with cell phone cameras. The whole demonstration seemed somehow quaint, in a weird way. As a member of the post-Cold War generation, I'm used to thinking of communism as consigned to history's pile of Good Ideas That Don't Work, so the sight of people proposing it as a solution for the world's evils was oddly old-fashioned, as if a modern physician were to suddenly start talking about putting a sick person's humors back into balance.
I left soon after the demonstrators started their march. I did, however, check in with the radio from time to time during the afternoon, and the reporters there kept saying that the demonstration was "still" going peacefully. It wasn't until after sunset that a few stones were thrown and a few trash cans set on fire, but all the violence seems to have been pretty quickly contained by the police. The attitude of the news I head the next day was a quiet sigh of relief that things hadn't been worse - although, as the newspaper I read rather dryly pointed out, most other Western cities would be freaking out at the idea of flaming trash cans and battles between demonstrators and police. The fact that Berliners were relieved that the violence was minimal - almost perfuntory, really - tells you something about the history of their city.
But, like I said, I missed that part. Like a good little capitalist, I was home early, mending my sweater.
My original plan for that day was to lie low and avoid the area. However, when I was talking to a long-term resident of Berlin early Tuesday, she told me that the May 1st chaos has calmed down in recent years, since the residents of the street most involved, Oranienstrasse, decided to try to avoid the worst of the bother by throwing a street party. "Besides," she said, "if there is trouble, it probably won't happen until after dark."
I was wearing (purely coincidentally) a red sweater with a hole in the back of the collar that I hadn't noticed until I left the apartment. The sweater was the deciding factor, I think; I figured that I was wearing a properly communist color and looking scruffy enough to pass as a member of the proletariat. So, off I went.
Most of the street was, in fact, taken up with stands selling food and drinks. The Turkish population of the neighborhood was heavily represented, but there were also people selling samosas and burritos. Interspersed with the food stands were people handing out information on various political causes; the main liberal party in Germany had a stand, as did the Turkish Communist Party. It was a gloriously sunny day, not too hot, and people were strolling along the street or sitting and having picnics. I spent a really nice hour there, where everything that people like about Kreuzberg seemed to be on display: its multiculturalism, its liberalism, and its laid-back air (I bought a soda out of a green garbage bin that someone had filled with ice).
A little later, I wandered down to the big sqaure where a communist demonstration was taking place. The demonstrators had stretched an enormous banner over the street announcing, in Turkish and German, that there would be no end to global exploitation and oppression of workers without a revolution. As I got there, a young man with an extremely shrill voice was lining people up for their march and denouncing American imperialism. Some of the demostrators were carrying flags with the hammer and sickle or pictures of Mao. Even here, though, people didn't seem to be all that worked up; there was a lot of playful shoving and people taking pictures of their friends with cell phone cameras. The whole demonstration seemed somehow quaint, in a weird way. As a member of the post-Cold War generation, I'm used to thinking of communism as consigned to history's pile of Good Ideas That Don't Work, so the sight of people proposing it as a solution for the world's evils was oddly old-fashioned, as if a modern physician were to suddenly start talking about putting a sick person's humors back into balance.
I left soon after the demonstrators started their march. I did, however, check in with the radio from time to time during the afternoon, and the reporters there kept saying that the demonstration was "still" going peacefully. It wasn't until after sunset that a few stones were thrown and a few trash cans set on fire, but all the violence seems to have been pretty quickly contained by the police. The attitude of the news I head the next day was a quiet sigh of relief that things hadn't been worse - although, as the newspaper I read rather dryly pointed out, most other Western cities would be freaking out at the idea of flaming trash cans and battles between demonstrators and police. The fact that Berliners were relieved that the violence was minimal - almost perfuntory, really - tells you something about the history of their city.
But, like I said, I missed that part. Like a good little capitalist, I was home early, mending my sweater.
posted by Q at
10:33 AM
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