Demonstrating for Love in Berlin
(July 1999)
A murder at the so called "Love Parade" has cast a deep shadow over an event that was already beginning to generate deep conflicts. The consequences of having one toilet per 13,000 people; 150 tons of left-over rubbish, which the organisers deny responsibility for, on the grounds that the Love Parade is a demonstration; the conflicts over lucrative licences to sell drinks; and court proceedings over publishing rights about the history of the Love Parade, have little to do with love.
For Berliners, however, the Love Parade is serious business. The threat that the Love Parade might be moved by its organisers to Paris caused a loss of media comment. Anyone who watches German television regularly knows that it is now almost a national obligation, a new duty, "to have fun" . Special sections were set up in the department stores where one could buy the appropriate fashions and accessories for the event - plastic or paper flowers, synthetic fabric dresses in strident colours, or skimpy lace, big platform shoes - together with whistles and water pistols.
The politicians have not only been reluctant to interfere in the Berlin techno scene they have wanted to tag along. After several centuries of shooting demonstrators down Berlin's new political establishment had become enthusiastic demonstrators themselves. They want to find a way to engage with the young voters who would rather build street parties than political parties. At the "Love Parade" the Christian Democrat lorry were supplied with go-go dancers by an agency.
For the last 300 years the story of Berlin has been dominated by imperial intrigues, contrasts of wealth and poverty, class conflict and the clash of murderous ideologies. According to Theodore Fontane, quoted in a recent exhibition on Berlin history "Berliners always doubt". And there have been good grounds for doubting. Suddenly, at the time of the Love Parade in the summer before the 00, everything is different. According to prize winning journalist Alexander Osang, who Berliner either love or hate, the new "Generation Berlin is without doubt". Ideological opinions and attitudes count for nothing any more. Only one thing counts, success. Are you a winner or loser?
If you're a winner - well then, the question is, are you having fun?
In just a few years the Zeitgest, the spirit of the time, has changed. It is now better described in consumer terms by market researchers than by ideologists. There was a time not so long ago in which Berlin was the place where the "alternative movement" was an integral part of the city's identity. The radicals are still there but have grown older and are much less visible and vocal. Their environment and social ideals are largely a matter of indifference to the younger generation who would prefer to dye their hair pink or green and wear synthetic clothing rather than go for the natural "eco-look". Alternatively variants of the latex and leather S and M look, relentlessly promoted by the deadly serious sex programmes on German TV, are the clothes to buy to make you feel horny.
As the government moves Bonn to Berlin the once pacifist green party, had become a respectable part of the government that has put troops into Kosovo. In the meantime reunified Berlin is in the middle of a huge property and building boom. The opposition of green activists to the redevelopment plans in former open spaces of the city centre have had little effect - or have been partly co-opted by integrating solar or energy saving features into some of the buildings. Travelling from the Zoo Garten, in the former heart of West Berlin, to Alexanderplatz in the East, the inner-city railway curves in a huge arc around a massive building site, finally passing the Reichtag, with the domed roof designed by British architect Sir Norman Foster. The building site will be the new political and commercial heart of Berlin. In glossy brochures the city government advertises exhibitions and tours to impress visitors with modern architecture and town planning.
All is not rosy. Senior Berlin politicians like to project their international metropole as having a golden future. It will be the European capital for the new growing service sector. They have critics. A half a million marks has been spent on a study over the strategy for Berlin in the next century and it has not come out as being very complimentary to the visions of the politicians. For example, although Berlin projects himself as a centre for science and knowledge, what was previously the West part of the city actually contains an above-average proportion of people without any formal job qualifications. In its housing policies the local authorities are promoting home ownership but the academics reckon that rented accommodation is, and will remain, the appropriate choice for a large part of the population. In economic policy they criticised the failure to support innovators in practice,
In working-class estates of East Berlin, unemployment has remained persistently high and many yearn for the old certainties, the discipline and welfare system of the so-called workers and farmers state. The vote for the successor to the communist party, the PDS, is still substantial. Nevertheless a return to the old times is unthinkable. Despite unemployment and occaisional zenophobic outbursts by young people against foreigners, the political situation is largely stable. When you ask you find that many people have waited in a queue for as long as two years in order to look at the state security files kept on them in the GDR times. People relate how it is both macabre, but also often quite banal, to see how neighbours or "friends" were keeping detailed and intimate notes about every aspect of their daily existence, working as unofficial helpers of the Stasi. There is no going back to times like that.
Meanwhile the members of the alternative movements of yesteryear are the potential social innovators of today. After years the people from the alternative movement know about making contracts and have experience in looking for financial support in order to relate their ideas to the city's problems. The problem for this group is that just as the city's problems are growing, the money available has been shrinking.
For a time shortly after reunification serious money was available for job creation and training schemes. Mass unemployment in East Germany needed a response. Then, as occurred in the UK, the terms and conditions on which job creation and training money was available, were cut back and changed, undermining the social and environmental aims of the organisations that used them. The generation of 1968 and after came to Berlin to avoid the army and settled in districts like Kreuzberg, living alongside the Turkish immigrant community. They battled with the police and squatted the tenement blocks. Then, in a modus vivendi with the authorities, many of the former radicals took to renovating the squatted buildings, pioneering approaches to ecological architecture, and seeking to draw in the rest of the population. Organisations like Atlantis trained socially disadvantaged young people in new ecological technologies and evolved to become the largest employer in Kreuzberg with numerous overseas partners. It was very successful in gaining European money but was nevertheless heavily dependent on job creation programmes and state funding. Then came the governmen that contained the Green Party for the first time and severe financial cut backs. The dreams of combining ecological and social renovation finance by the state have all but collapsed. The Zeitgeist has changed.
In the neighbourhood where once Atlantis had its headquarters and workshop spaces youth unemployment is now estimated at 30 per cent. The population is falling. Not only the Germans but also, to a degree, the better off young Turkish people are moving out. Nevertheless it is the migrant community who are the chief losers. Five years ago the ethnic balance at the local school was 60 per cent children of immigrants. It is now 80 per cent. Reports commissioned by Berlin's government and written by urban sociologists prophesy that in neighbourhoods like Kreuzberg in the former western sector, and PrenzlauerBerg in the former east, there is of a downward escalator of poverty, disaffection and crime. Local people fear violence from angry, bored and disaffected young people and complain of refrigerators, car batteries and other rubbish dumped on the streets.
The politicians have had to find a new idea, a new approach to maintain the hope that things will get better. The new fashion in urban regeneration is called "Quartier Management" In 15 neighbourhoods local " managers" have been given budgets and the task of bringing together individuals, community groups, small shopkeepers and businesses, youth workers and people from schools, to work with each other to care for and "therapise" their patch.
This idea, which is not particularly new, has run up against inevitable scepticism. Some local people complain about the failure of the managers to meet with them. It is too "top down". Existing groups and community activists do not necessarily want to be bit players in the successful urban regeneration strategies of political parties they do not adhere to. There are already some very experienced community activists around who know as much as is to be known about locality regeneration and techniques for drawing in local people. For example in Kreuzberg Guenther and Anna Lorenz are working together with local people using ideas devised in Britain by Dr Tony Gibson from the Neighbourhood Initiatives Foundation. Dr Lorenz is part of a group at the Technical University which has surveyed European experience of building up local economic and self-help projects and has played a major role in building up a European network to exchange experiences.
People like Guenther Lorenz are already old hands at locality regeneration. They understand that if you want to develop a response to poverty, environmental degradation and community disintegration, you have to do it yourself using theories and models derived from other people's successful experience elsewhere and adapting it to your local circumstances. If you are lucky you can use locally available money and if you are not then you have to do as best you can with socially adapted financing arrangements or with like local economic trading systems.(Enhnced barter). Dr Lorenz thinks that in Germany people tend to be too rigid in their approaches. They do not let ideas for projects devised elsewhere evolve, not improvising to on-the-spot conditions enough. Sometimes people trained to follow instructions exactly in the old industrial labour system are too insecure to experiment with new approaches. Or perhaps, in truth, the lack of local improvisation lies more in the lack of commitment. Social innovators often make things work because they are committed. They keep on trying because they believe in what they are doing. But when they formulate their ideas into theoretical models, and turn these models into job creation programmes, run by temporary employees chosen and sent by the employment office, the ideas just do not work anymore. The temporary emploees whose job is to get the models up and running are simply not as interested. They do not really worry whether the model ideas for urban regeneration work or not.. They just want the take home pay.
The issue comes back to how far people will really commit themselves. What is happening today is that, given the new techno and commercial success orientated Zeitgeist of Berlin, there are not so many committed people around. In part those that are committed have lost their way. Commitment is, after all, to a degree based on a clear sense of how to approach things and this has been lost.
One should not overstate. In the "downward escalator neighbourhoods" people still can be found who want to do something even though many others are moving out. Against the scale of the problems their efforts sometimes seem tiny but they keep on looking for different approaches. As Berlin becomes like any other capital city in the world, these remaining searchers and doubters are its strength. Those who are without doubt look only in single directions - and so can get hit from another. The original problems that gave rise to the social and ecological radicalism that created Berlin's alternative culture have not gone away. What has gone away is only the sense that people know what to do about these problems, a sense of direction and orientation. This orientation may come back as the outline of new problems becomes starker and the choices of direction clearer.
In political discussions in many countries there is a new recognition of community disintegration and its effects. There is a new interest in rebuilding communities. This is often seen as unproblematic for the big institutions and the trend towards globalisation. Actually, however, rebuilding communities is to a largely necessary to protect people against the destructive effects of globalisation on their locality and it requires that people redevelop the fundamentals of everyday life - food, water, shelter, so that they are less reliant on the global players. In Berlin and Germany, as elsewhere, some radicals are increasingly looking at organising around consumption. There is no difference in Berlin from those other places where people fear techno futures in the hands of giant multinational corporations and institutions - because these institutions and corporations cannot be held accountable anymore, with consequences to health, society and environment. There is a sense that one cannot rely and trust the big economic players and that one one must begin again. One must become actively involved in securing the basics of existence like food and water. This means, practically, for example, developing contacts and supply for oneself and own personal network organisedthough food co-ops directly with ecological farmers. Such straws in the wind for a very dfferent kind of radicalism can be found throughout Europe..There reflect a fear of what will happen f the basics of life are left to the big institutions to secure and supply. People do not believe that the big supermarkets chains can respond to their fears. They are not trusted. What if you trusted them and then they are taken over? If the supermarkets developed mass market responses to the demand for safe food production would this food still be safe?
In the year before the year zero zero "Generation Berlin", celebrate a techno-future and have fun. They leave behind mountains of rubbish and a murder victim. The slogan of the demonstration for love is "music is the key" - and the musical key is fast, synthetic, loud, relentless, driving. Although the mainstream politicians tag along - this kind of driven techno future is doubted still by a small number and with good reason. When one ceases to doubt a civilisation which is characterised by an addiction to speed then the acceleration will continue until loss of control and a crash. When one is addicted to loudness one will grow deaf and therefore vulnerable - not noticing the first warnings and danger signals. The synthetic future can be manufactured into saleable products but it cannot evolve and the products themselves will not decay without poisoning their environment. When one's life is regulated by rhythms which are unrelentingly repetitive then one is not only a consumer of technology one has become a prisoner of it, one is driven and can no more drive, except on the same permitted highways at the regulated speed. Or is this too middle aged and puritan? Some friends would say so. Each generation must define itself and it is in any case futile to write moral lectures disguised as cultural commentary - this kind of thing usually provokes ironic mockery, a defence against sublte condescension. Isn't it understandable if those who do not have access to the routines of satisfying and challenging employment, should need to work off their frustrations. At 180 beats a minute the job is done very effectively cooling off with water pistols makes sense.
Technology advances so fast that it gives an opportunity to beat up one's parents with their old fashionedness, the way they have fallen behind the times. As in other countries it gives many German young people an opportunity to be one up on the previous generations who perhaps seem naive, earnest and romantic at times. But the generation of 68 in Germany had good reason to be as they were - there was and is an inevitable guilt and a sense that the Holocaust must never be repeated, that the bomb must not be allowed to fall. This older generation have searched for how they could save the world and there is to my mind a sadness that they are not being followed by any movement of young people who could be said to be continuing or developing their values. Dr Motte, the DJ who started the Love Parade, sums up how times have changed. In New York, he says, Berlin is better known for the Love Parade than for Adolf Hitler. The younger generation sees more starkly that it is their ability to stay up with technology that will determine what kind of future you will have. The fact remains though, in the global market many young Germans are still unable to offer a high enough megahertz rating.
Nothing stays the same. The seeds of decay in the techno love jamboree were already visible in the rows preceding the event. The murder during it may accelerate the process. The techno faith may soon fade and be replaced by a new Zeitgeist. The fear about contaminated food is the likely precursor of a wider process of renewed doubting. Perhaps just because the new Germany and the new Berlin has so enthusiastically taken new technology to itself, so also has it looked the other way in relation to problems like the Millennium computer bug. Although it is too early to see yet what will happen to Germany in the so-called Millennim Computer crisis not long ago it was criticised as being less prepared than many Third World countries. Perhaps this will help create the kind of shock that will prove to be, in the long run, the beginnings of a sea change in opinion - and, if the data chaos has considerable effects on day to day life, a renewed recognition that people need to rely on people, that local communities are important and that by rebuilding them around the basics of existence, very different kinds of futures are possible.
Brian Davey
13th July 1999The author, who is a development worker in the voluntary sector mental health services in Nottingham, has been a regular visitor to Berlin since 1991 and in 1996 worked for 6 months at the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation in Dessau, East Germany.
© BRIAN DAVEY