Friedrichshain: Berlin’s backstreet exotica
One of the delights of the Berlin is just wandering the streets. Today it’s Friedrichshain, which is quashed between Karl Marx Allee and the Spree river and one of many sub-centres of this diffuse city. Berlin feels like an ever-shifting urban canvas, and leaving the new style bars behind in the avenues, we find esoteric treasure in the side streets and alleyways.
Like a plane crash survivor, Berlin is city embraces the now and all the possibilities of existence that brings, yet can never escape the memory of its trauma. Pasted on a garage wall, a riot of CMYK announces another rendezvous of the colourful-but-cool in a venue which will enjoy its moment in the sun, before returning to the tumbledown obscurity from whence it came. This is the city of the Geheimtip, the nod and the wink about a bar, cellar or even someone’s front room which is temporarily the focus of the fickle and fashionable.
But underneath the posters, where yet another team of spray painters have left their mark, a mural depicts a Zeppelin. Immediately recognisable, its shape speaks of a dark past but is somehow softened by a loss of edge that the passage of time gives to memories that cut less deeply the further back they are. From the pre-Hitler era, before Friedrichshain was renamed Horst Wessel Stadt in honour of the Nazi anthem writer, it belongs to a conflict that is less offensive than its successor.
Across the street is a yard full of Volkswagen T25 camper vans. Appropriately VW’s spiritual home Wolfsburg is a short drive to the west. Two African men load a lorry with parts, before approaching us to see what we’re staring at. The vans are not for sale but only for export they tell us. Import/export: the people involved in this business never seem to welcome scrutiny. Presumably, given Berlin’s low costs and the popularity of these vans abroad, they’re being sold overseas. “Das ist Kultauto” we manage to say – a cult car. Unimpressed but satisified we pose no threat, they amble away. Berlin is one of those places where you can sense things happening underground, in hidden places. For good and bad.
Turning another corner onto Modersohnstrasse, one of the many open spaces you find in Berlin (bomb damage or communist lack of care?) is gated with a sign which appears to announce something defiantly to the world. Inside, it is packed with a collection of those distinctive two-axle trailers that you only see in this part of the world. Like the T25, they have a certain boxiness; but unlike the camper vans in the yard, there are heat shimmers denoting working stoves – they are occupied. A gypsy encampment? A travelling circus? An artistic paradise? We’re seized with a need to know.Then a paramilitary figure, clad all in black, emerges on one of those sit-up-and-beg bikes that are fantastic for stately patrols of the flat Berlin cyclepaths, but would be useless in London. He stops to adjust his phone; such an opportunity is not to be wasted.
His clothes are actually Carhartt rather than military fatigues, the only war he is fighting is the annual one against the bitter Berlin cold. This, he tells us, is a community of squatters. Rather than travellers, they are stay-putters who spied an opportunity in this empty patch of land and took it. Our pragmatic new friend tells us how it is: “This land was empty so we decided to squat. The government said ‘Ok, no problem, we don’t need this right now so you can have it. But when we are ready to build our sports development, you will have to move on.’ But, this is Berlin, so they have no money, so they cannot build it and we are still here.” Ah this city, such a cheap date for the decadent but destitute. “If you look carefully,” a friend once said, “you’ll notice people nursing the same beer for a long time.”
But being Berlin, this cosmopolitan community of squatters are very much in touch with the modern world. “She works in IT,” he says as woman in a hooded top and baggy jeans slouches past, “So we have very fast internet. Another guy is a businessman and he owns several companies.” Anarchists, alternatives, entrepreneurs and IT specialists – all living cheek by jowl in this soon-to-be-gentrified quarter. But how long can this coexistence last, as capitalism spreads its polarising wealth and business also spies an opportunity. Are the anti-yuppy car burners of Friedrichshain fighting a losing battle?