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June 25, 2007
Streets of Istanbul
We spent a fair amount of our visit hanging out on stairways or in cafes or hookah bars or restaurants, talking politics among ourselves or with our friends and contacts in Istanbul.
This great hangout place was one of the few where you can safely drink in public... but it wasn't the Cartier-Bresson photo location we tried to find...
This was the view from the stairs, right at dusk as we sat enjoying some Turkish red wine:
The “moderate Islamic” party that has governed Turkey for the past few years has dissolved the parliament is a new election is scheduled for early July. Local lefties are banding together outside of party structures (to enhance their chances of gaining seats, due to some arcane election rules) and there’s some hope that they might win as many as 25 seats in the coming election, out of a parliament of 550, which will be dominated either by the AKP (current Islamic party) or the pro-secular, pro-military right wing party coalition. Lurking behind all political activity in Turkey is the military, which still absorbs a large portion of the national budget (it is the 2nd largest military in NATO after the U.S.), was threatening to invade northern Iraq while we were in town, and always holds out the threat of another coup d’etat if Islamic politics “goes too far.” In fact, its previous interventions have been to ensure the implementation of IMF structural adjustment policies and to ensure the conditions for capitalist accumulation. The foot-dragging and apparent refusal of the EU to give Turkey a path to full membership is fueling nationalist paranoia, even though most on the left are at best skeptical of EU membership, if not openly opposed.
Our time in Istanbul was mostly spent among these lovely cafes and in appealing neighborhoods that it was easy to imagine living in. Here are a couple of shots of this neighborhood Beyoğlu.
On Saturday it was over 100 degrees so we didn't get moving until around 3 pm. Francesca and I headed over to see a church/museum called Kariye or St. Savior in Chora, which has amazing mosaic murals dating to the 1300s. Luckily it was at the far end of the "western neighborhoods" which gave us our first direct experience of older, poorer, more popular Istanbul, and we felt very lucky for the chance to walk through it. First we took the Metro out to the old wall, climbing up amidst the crumbling, partially repaired ramparts for the view. Funny how completely open it is to walk up and on these historic walls, and it's definitely at your own risk!
Here's a shot of one of the mosaics:
and here are some of the street scenes we caught on our walk:
There are lots of these old wooden buildings around Istanbul, often with bay windows and vaguely like San Francisco victorians... but not!
Our walk took us back over Ataturk Bridge, across the Golden Horn, to Galanta Tower, an impressive tower built by the Byzantines originally and reinforced in the middle 1300s by a Genovese merchant, just below the Beyoglu neighborhood, north of the old city. It has fantastic views over the Golden Horn, especially at sunset. Here's the tower, and then the sunset:
There was a smattering of anarchist graffiti in certain parts of town, especially around Cihangir and Beyoġlu, where there are also incredible outdoor café and restaurant scenes. We presume there is a lot of political discussion going on there too… Here are some images of graffiti, stencils and a poster we found on the walls, but it would be a stretch to say this is in anyway meaningfully representative…
We weren't quite sure how Malcolm X came to Istanbul, and it only became more confusing after the next one...
A punk-Islamic fusion gang?
The Turkish part of this says something "go back home" or "go back where you came from" and it turns out it was a marketing ploy by someone starting a new magazine!
Transit in Istanbul
I think I saw about 4 bicycles in 7 days, the most memorable being an old guy in a white robe, white beard, on a mountain bike with the red Turkish flag flapping from the back of his rack… Otherwise, this is a town based on taxis, indecipherable private and public bus routes (some people figure it out, but there were no maps or reliable explanatory systems to be found for us non-Turkish speakers) and some modern Metro and Tram systems. The city is so sprawling, 16 million in about 150 square kilometers on both sides of the Bosphorus, so we can hardly claim to have experienced a significant portion of the whole metro area.
We did have fun riding on the ubiquitous and vital ferries (I suppose the SF bay once had this kind of ferry traffic), as well as the taxis and buses. On the way out to the airport this morning we rode 50 km on a small bus on an 8-lane ultra-modern tollroad, crossing the bridge we watched turn colors every night. The charm of the city's streets was lost in the hideous, sprawl of 8-20 story apartments that went for mile after mile as we sped along the freeway. This is a glimpse of the scene that was unbroken for 45 minutes:
Here I am before going to the concert on our last night in Istanbul, standing on the balcony at our place:
Well if you've made it this far, you might enjoy some images of our social lives this past week:
Francesca and Ali playing "exquisite corpse" at the hookah bar.
Dessert after a fantastic fish dinner on the Asian side of the Bosphorus:
One of our post-3 a.m. drinking nights with a gang of Ali's friends:
Dinner and dessert with E.A. Tonak, Ali's dad, a chance to talk Marxist politics...
of course you can't come to Istanbul and not visit the Grand Bazaar...
and even better, the spice market!
As we walked past this display, the guy hawked it our way as the sign reads, but a man standing near him asked sub rosa, "only five times?"
Posted by ccarlsson at 01:38 PM | Comments (1)
Turkish Multiculturalism
I am in London now, in transit on my way back to San Francisco early tomorrow morning, but thought this would be a good chance to summarize some of the wonders I experienced in Istanbul. Turkey is a city of so many layers, historical and social, that no one week visit can possibly plumb them in any kind of adequate depth. Still, my interest was continually piqued by the good luck to be hosted by Ali and his mother Fatima, her beau Uner, and the window they provided on a new culture that seems to be flourishing beneath the surface, at least in Istanbul.
Our visit to Istanbul was bracketed by two concerts, the first I described in my first Istanbul post (briefly) and last night was an incredible tour de force of some 60+ performers under the name Kardeş Tűrkűler. At any given moment there were upwards of 40 performers on stage, a large chorus plus virtuoso tabla and drummers, saxophone or clarinet or other Arabic flutes, accordion, bass guitar, electric guitars, pig bladders… you name it! A half dozen times during amazing, inspiring musical numbers, dance troupes poured onto the stage. The one I was most inspired by was a Kurdish troupe who performed to a very rousing number, huddling together shoulder to shoulder dancing in hip-swaying rhythm, individuals at the ends of the line occasionally breaking out to do some wild additional moves, then rejoining the group. The audience went wild, many circling up as Turks do to dance together in beautiful rhythms, swaying and stepping back and forth, in and out, so easy and friendly and communal, unlike any dancing we do in the U.S.
This concert, like the one last Monday, featured a number of Kurdish songs and performers, but this one also referenced the assassinated Armenian-Turkish newspaper editor Hrant Dink, and featured a classic Armenian song and dance, very mournful.
This week in Istanbul introduced me to a great deal. I knew very little about modern Turkey or the historic Ottoman Empire. Now I know a tiny bit. Being with Ali and his family and friends was a great window into the left/progressive minority in Istanbul. The concerts both invoked a strong multi-ethnic, diverse culture that celebrates and honors the very minorities that Turkish nationalism denies, suppresses and treats as terrorism—the Armenians and the Kurds especially. Several times we watched crowds get very emotional about the Kurds, the music of Aynura stirring great passion last Monday, and the wild ensemble last night bringing it out again. It brought the house down and sent chills up my spine.
It’s odd to have this cultural experience juxtaposed to the egregiously paranoid Turkish state and its nationalist partisans. Big red flags everywhere (many only put up in the last year I heard), repression against writers like Pamuk and others, plus the endless military operations in eastern Turkey against the Kurds, Ataturk still staring down from everywhere, still total official denial of the Armenian genocide… The Turks are 100% on board with the “war on terror,” made easier by the fact that there actually IS an armed Kurdish resistance here, and it HAS bombed and killed often enough (nothing compared to the ongoing Turkish military operations in southeast Turkey).
The Armenian story we heard was really interesting. Fatima told us about Dink, the editor, speaking at an academic conference last year, where he told the story of an elderly Armenian woman who returned every year to her ancestral village in central Turkey even though there have not been any Armenians living there for decades. On a visit a few years ago she passed away. The local authorities didn’t know what to do with her body, and it led to a search for any distant relatives she might have in Istanbul, and one was finally found. The story that I’m telling 4th hand at this point, apparently provoked an intense emotional reaction by the folks at the conference, and then after Dink’s assassination, it was spread further in the mass media, further inspiring an emotional reconnection to the Armenian question. Because as Dink said, the Armenian-Turks are not asking to take land from the Turks, but only to be able to go down into the land, into the soil… the intensity of the story we heard, the emotions that came up simply in telling us, and those national emotions that the story referred to, show rather compellingly how much the stories that make up modern Turkey but don’t fit the heroic and paranoiac narrative of the State, are far from vanquished. On the contrary, they are capable of unveiling deep reservoirs of sentiment and political passion that are just below the surface. It seems that the oppressive and authoritarian Turkish nationalism is only obscuring the deep feelings in Anatolia and Asia Minor, the languages, songs, dances, poetry and beliefs of some dozens of ethnic minorities. Based on how these glimpses through music and story tapped such enthusiasm and deep emotion, it seems a rather different, multicultural Turkey is trying to emerge.
Posted by ccarlsson at 01:27 PM | Comments (0)
June 23, 2007
Touring Istanbul
The view from the apartment where we're staying.
Istanbul continues to be one of the most compelling cities I’ve ever visited. Last night was another late night along the famous boulevard Iskindar, in Beyoglu neighborhood, a place like nowhere I’ve ever seen. The street is a pedestrian only area, stretching some 20 blocks through a dense neighborhood, with dozens of side streets branching out, each one jammed with outdoor restaurants, cafes and bars. The main boulevard is a typical shopping street full of stores but the streets are jam-packed with strolling people. One of our friends here told me that somewhere around two million people pass through this district every Friday and Saturday night, where the bars and clubs stay open til dawn.
Hard to believe, but this area is only one relatively compact zone in sprawling Istanbul. We’ve been blessed by having Ali and his family hosting us and showing us around, without which we would have missed so much of what we’ve seen. Early in the week we went to the standard but awesome tourist sites, the Blue Mosque, the Hagiya Sofya, the Byzantine cistern, the Ottoman Topkapi Palace and its infamous harem. I don’t tend to react very strongly to religious buildings, only enjoying them at the level of architecture and art, and the Blue Mosque was something to see in that regard. A soaring dome with intricate Islamic patterns, lovely rugs and tiles everywhere (you could say that about most of the places in Istanbul actually), and an intricate ironwork suspended from the ceiling holding lights. Here are some shots of the Blue Mosque:
The Hagiya Sofya is a vast church dating back to around 300 AD, with additional construction continuing for two hundred years ending in 550 AD or so. That time span alone is awe-inspiring, especially when you consider that this is a seismically active area and there have been many devastating earthquakes over the centuries. Somehow the Sofya stands strong to this day. From outside it is not so impressive, but once inside, the grandeur of the place really hits you. It was turned into a museum in the 1930s by the ubiquitous Ataturk, and within the main area is a modern white canvas structure. While we were there they had an exhibit about the history of Sufism with an account of the rise of the Mevlana, its philosophy and structure… it took me a day to realize they were talking about Rumi, whom so many of my California pals quote so often… Around here the English translations and embrace of Rumi by new age types is considered to be a product of bad translation work and there is some resentment about the absence of Islamic fundamentals in the presentation of Rumi’s thought, since he was above all an Islamic disciple. Anyway, here are photos of the Hagiya Sofya and one photo of a photo of Sufi dervishes from the 1910s…
Francesca has been my tour guide, reading from John Freely's "Walking Around Istanbul".
The cistern was a wonderful surprise. We stepped into a small brick house to buy our tickets, about $8 each, and I feared we were falling for an overpriced tourist trap, but once we went downstairs and entered the amazing cistern we were really glad we’d come. It’s really quite vast and hard to believe that it was lost for over 1000 years before being rediscovered in the 1500s by Ottoman engineers. Under a couple of columns amidst the water there are huge Medusa heads, one upside down and one laying on its side. Not much of an explanation is offered, except that the presence of Medusa heads might be one way of warding off bad spirits who would have compromised the integrity of the water supply.
A couple of days later Francesca and I went to the Topkapi Palace, the seat of the Sultans who ran the Ottoman Empire for centuries. What an opulent and amazing place! The aesthetic delight of the architecture and décor makes wandering around a constant delight. In particular we were taken with the dozens of tiles, considered the best of the Empire during their day, and still simply gorgeous. Here are the pictures:
OK, OK, if you don't like tiles... what can I say? I love them!
The next entry will have photos of our dining and social experiences, local graffiti, and so much more! It's a bit overwhelming to be honest. A huge, amazing, impressive city. Wish I spoke Turkish, but if I decided to come and spend some real time here I'd make the effort, because so much about this city and this culture is really appealing... (not the military!)...
Posted by ccarlsson at 03:47 AM | Comments (0)
June 20, 2007
Istanbul!
We arrived in Istanbul on Monday morning after an overnight train ride from Sofia, Bulgaria. I loved the rickety train ride but couldn't help but think that it was an experience whose days are numbered. The train was delapidated, the bed a joke (lumpy wood with itchy fabric stretched over it??), and the food and drink... none! We came prepared with our favorite Hungarian drink Palinka, and bought some Black Ram Bulgarian whisky in the station, plus our usual bag of cheese and salami and bread and goodies, so we were fine. We got a good introduction to Turkish music along the way thanks to a host of weird electronic equipment we have with us. Ali has quite the collection, not surprisingly, and one band, Baba Zula really caught our ears. We even got to see them the first night in town! How's that for good timing??
Here are some shots from the train first, then a lot of images in my pipeline for Istanbul. We got a beautiful sunset on Sunday night as we whizzed across the Bulgarian countryside...
Then we got stuck for a while in some godforsaken station, and while lounging around on the platform, Ali took this great, eerie shot:
We got into Istanbul not well rested, but very happy to be here. On arrival, and upon entering most stores and businesses, you are met by the glare of the Big Brother of Turkey, Attaturk, the founding father of modern Turkey. Here he was to greet us at the train station:
This is a world-class, front-line city in every respect. It's thriving, dynamic, extremely wealthy, absolutely sprawling, 16 million inhabitants, hundreds of hills spreading over several land masses surrounded by water: to the far north, the Black Sea, cutting the urban area in half is the famous Bosphorous, and the Golden Horn is a smaller bay that drains a river and separates the old Byzantine Constantinople from the newer part of Istanbul to its north... Ali is an amazing host and our first task after dropping our stuff and showering was to head back to the Bosphorous for a hour and a half ferry ride to the northern end at Anadolu Kavagi where there is a centuries-old Genovese castle ruin overlooking the touristy village (it is still part of greater Istanbul though)... here are some shots of our trip there, starting with our gang sitting on the boat enjoying being here after an arduous night, then Francesca enjoying a much needed Turkish coffee:
The whole shoreline of the Bosphorous is full of Ottoman palaces and Roman and Byzantine fortifications that predate the Ottoman's by centuries... and of course Turkey is quite modern and well developed, at least here in Istanbul, so this is a typical juxtaposition:
Here are some shots of the castle we visited and climbed around on, including one of me doing by Evita impersonation with the Black Sea in the distance behind me...(don't cry for me Crimea??)...
And more shots from along the Bosphorous:
By pure coincidence and great luck we arrived in town the same day as the local lefty newspaper was celebrating its 4th birthday. It's called Bir Gun (with diacritics) which means "One Day" and some of Ali's friends and his father write for it. Several wonderful bands were scheduled to play at the new Bosphorous-side open-air amphitheater and we saw Aynura with the unforgettable Kurdish Voice, and the aforementioned Baba Zula, as well as some well-loved Turkish folk singers who led some rounds of singalongs, as well as one pretty awful rock band. Here are some photos of us waiting for the concert to start, and then some pics of the show:
Aynura in action.
Babazula:
This band also features a woman on a laptop drawing images for the background, which was vaguely reminiscent of a show we caught at the recent SF Film Festival that claimed to be the first ever "live cinema"....and clearly wasn't. It didn't knock my socks off, but here's a glimpse:
Lastly the evening was so magical that we figured the Turkish military arranged to put this star next to the moon as it sank in the west, just to further their nationalist fervor... they only failed to paint the sky red behind it (check out the Turkish flag to get this joke):
Posted by ccarlsson at 03:34 PM | Comments (1)
June 17, 2007
Sofia, Bulgaria
We had a great meal in a kitschy but apparently authentic Bulgarian restaurant last night. I had a veal dish, which I rarely order for obvious reasons, so it was a treat to have it in a clay pot prepared in the local style with peppers and onions, very rich, really delicious. Also sampled a Traminer white Bulgarian wine and another red one whose name I forget... lots of local wines here and in Hungary (one of our Budapest hosts, Krista, is a wine writer and had a lot of advice that we had no chance to take advantage of... next time!). After dinner we went to a super modern hole-in-the-wall bar and the bartender was a woman who had lived in the U.S. for six years so spoke perfect English. We chatted with her a bit, and when we queried her on local politics or protests, she looked a bit nonplussed. I don't think most tourists come here and ask about such things. She eventually told us about her uncle, who had been a dissident spraypainting poet, writing satirical poems on the walls to impress his girlfriend. As our bartender put it, "every other" Bulgarian was an informer, so the police knew it was him, and he was shot by them at the foot of her building, wounding him in ways that took him a very long time to recover from...
The hangover of anti-politics that the failure and fall of "really-existing socialism" left behind is pretty palpable, both here and in Hungary. Not much graffiti here even, just a tiny bit of nazi skinhead swastikas and a Stop Bush stencil ... mostly everything is in Cyrillic so we can't read it at all... here are some shots I grabbed as we walked around today. Nothing particularly revealing, but they do show the charming, crumbly old capital of Sofia in a good light I think...
Here's an image of a huge statue looming in the center of the city, a statue to Sofia, the goddess of knowledge or wisdom... and behind her shoulder looms the trump card of modern capitalism over any kind of intelligence: a bank!
Here's a big old communist government building in the distance, but in front of it, gazing at me and the big intersection is a whole phalanx of closed circuit tv cameras...
Around Sofia there are a lot of beautiful old Eastern Orthodox churches. Here's one that we strolled by, though we didn't go in...
This part of the world takes full advantage of underground springs and water sources. There's a huge beautiful old bathhouse here that's been shuttered for some time.
Across the street is a cluster of open water spigots and on this Sunday morning a lot of folks were coming to get the piping hot water in their own containers... presumably it has some medicinal value..
A tiny, superficial glimpse of Sofia, Bulgaria... we thought it was a lovely place. It is easy to imagine returning here for a more lengthy visit, but hopefully with a translator in tow!
Posted by ccarlsson at 07:45 AM | Comments (1)
Romance of the Train
A very short entry, mostly photos, of our trip from Budapest to Sofia... we slept through the night to the rhythmic clackety-clack of the train, a great sensation. It was very hot so we kept the windows open, amplifying the sound but cooling us down. By morning we were well into Serbia, and stopped at the Belgrade station for about 45 minutes before continuing on east/southeast. Here are pictures of the trip during the day yesterday:
Lots of time for socializing and hanging out on the train, one of its best features... Here's Tina explaining to me her project on the RAF, a comparative history of how the hard left of the 70s is presented in various media forms... gonna be great!
I particularly love passing through small town stations in Serbia. Here's a shot of a train approaching the next platform, an old man making his way across the tracks to get on board with the rest of the waiting passengers:
Eastern Serbia and western Bulgaria are surprisingly prosperous to my eye. Mostly agricultural, and some times very modern looking. We sped along (or dawdled along actually) next to some modern freeways a few times too. But in the old eastern bloc, one passes abandoned industrial factories all the time. If you're a fan of rust belt aesthetics, this is a great trip!
OK, today we explore Sofia before getting on the train tonight to Istanbul... That's going to be amazing!
Posted by ccarlsson at 01:19 AM | Comments (0)
48 Hours in Budapest!
Wow! What can I say about two dawns in 48 hours, a ridiculous amount of drinking, walking, bicycling, and making great connections with new Hungarian friends? Great, simply great! These are the kinds of serendipitous and enthralling moments we travel to find. Big thanks to Reka and Krista for their amazing hospitality. Here they are with Rob on day two at one of the numerous drinking spots they took us to:
Reka answered my plaintive email (via Justin Hyatt: Thanks Justin!) and met us at the station as we arrived. She took us on a bus ride to an outer neighborhood of the Pest part of Budapest (we stayed mostly on the Pest side, flatter, more popular, lots to do) where we were given an empty apartment on the 14th floor of an old housing tower, from which I took this photo:
Not super glamorous for sure, but a great gift. We arrived at 11 pm and by the time we'd dropped out stuff and enthusiastically went back to the city for drinks, it was about 1:30. Reka took us to the top of the old socialist department store, now converted to regular supermarket and on the roof is a brand new open air bar, with dancing and other hang-out spaces scattered around on the top floor just beneath it.
This is the building on which sits Corvinteto, the latest in a string of huge open air bars dotting the old Budapest...
After a couple of drinks here, and a short burst of dancing in their disco-balled hip-hop parlor, we walked a few blocks into the old Jewish quarter. There we walked through a nondescript door and a couple of hallways and rooms of an abandoned building to find a gorgeous inner courtyard bar, really quite large. I wish I'd had the camera for it, but anyway, it was called Simple Garden, and there Reka turned us on to the local specialty, Palinka, a grappa-like firewater made from a variety of fruits, distilled to a clear white burn... we all really loved it and drank about 10 shots of different ones together: plum, pear, apple, sour cherries, peach, raspberry... and we bought some to take with us. It has quite a special high, so when in Budapest, don't miss Palinka... and when you drink it say "Egeszsegedre" (diacritics missing)... It's a great new way to say "Skol!"...
We got back to our digs at dawn, crashed until about 11 and then went downstairs to Krista's apartment and she fed us a huge wonderful breakfast. Then we spent the day wandering around in Budapest, so here are pretty pictures of buildings and places around town. The city is an odd amalgamation of gorgeous Beaux Artes fin de siecle architecture and drab socialist functionality, with a healthy smattering of garish 21st century postmodern capitalist chrome thrown in now... here are some images I thought worthy:
Here's the gang crossing the bridge back from the Castle on the hill, where took the next picture:
Taking buses around during the first day of our time we kept seeing this tantalizing sign on the bus... what *else* might happen if you push this button?
At 6 we met Reka at her office, which she later graciously gave us the run of when we needed a place to work. We had failed to find a bike rental place during the day, so we scrambled to find one and did, which led to a magic evening of bicycling around Budapest until dawn. Once equipped with bikes we went to a bar where I met Sinya, one of the main organizers of Critical Mass here in Budapest (it was thanks to the aforementioned Justin Hyatt that we had the contacts in Budapest, he also a big organizer of CM here, but he just moved away before we arrived). We hung out for a while, went to a great dinner at a place called Paprika where everyone else had the famous Fish Soup, but I had mixed grill "Transylvanian style"... delicious! Here's an image around 3 a.m. from the evening, as we tried to visit Tuz Tate, another crumbling ruin with an open air club/bar in its midsts:
But before we got there we went to a curious place in the center, a park over a shallow fountain that is also the roof of an art gallery with a big bar/restaurant at its opening. We met Istvan and Sinya there, along with a crowd of young cyclists, and had a lovely time hanging out in the balmy evening. Here I am, well inebriated at the edge of the pond:
There are SO many places to hang out til the wee hours drinking and talking in Budapest. Quite amazing in comparison to our cramped possibilities in SF... and between Berlin and Budapest I had a lot of experiences in bars where I could actually hear well enough to have real conversations! Yowza! We really have to find a place in SF to make our own where we can find our friends and have some drinks and not have to compete with blaring, crappy music... Anyway, try as I might, I don't stay up til dawn very well... here I am at our 6th or 7th stop, the others are off drinking (more) and dancing a bit, but I fell asleep:
As it was dawn soon after, we finally headed back to our apartment, a half hour bike ride away. We went past this amazing monument circle on the way, and it was just dawning... worth being away just for this moment!
Slept about 4.5 hours before going back to have a soak in the amazing City Park bathhouse. Rob and Ali had decided to stay in the park for an hour before the place opened, so they spent about 7 hours in this place. Here are some images of what is easily the most impressive bathhouse/public pool place I've ever seen. Then there are close-ups of the monuments in daylight from the dawn picture just above:
After all this, I went scorching across Budapest, darting like a courier among gridlocked traffic (and there's no room on the sides here, so it was back and forth from sidewalk to middle of traffic and back again), and made it to the place with Sinya has a big thriving courier business, and it's also the home to Critical Mass organizing. I was given a shitload of schwag for my ongoing archives, and had a fun brief moment at their place...Here I am with Sinya and another guy whose name I didn't write down, but he's on the cover of a local newspaper during Critical Mass holding his bike aloft...
Then, after a frantic couple of hours of reorganizing ourselves and doing some online work, we made it to our 11:30 train to Sofia, Bulgaria... here's the fab four on the train as we departed at midnight...
A spectacular visit to Budapest, with a bit of everything!... next, Sofia, Bulgaria...
Posted by ccarlsson at 12:38 AM | Comments (1)
June 12, 2007
Sachsenhausen and bikelanes
Weird combination of topics for this final Berlin dispatch. Want to show a bunch of photos at the end of the lovely bike lanes that are normal parts of the streets here in Berlin. Some are side-paths and some are pink marked lanes in the streets. So those photos come up at the end.
First, today we went off to see the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp, thanks to Jessica Loof, our co-host here, who is just learning how to conduct the tour of the place. It's unrelentingly bleak, even though we had the strange juxtaposition of visiting the sprawling site where the Nazis really figured out how to industrialize their death camps during a very warm, summer day among chirping birds and calm 21st century tourists. The fear of course is that people visit a place like this and leave comforted that "this will never happen again," but of course it is. Though not under the rigid German organization of the Nazis, there have been slave labor camps continuously since the days of WWII.
While this place in Orianenberg just north of Berlin was in the hands of the Soviet Union, and then the German Democratic Republic, they emphasized the role of this camp in imprisoning and liquidating German communists. There are many explanatory displays and memorials around the huge facility, many quite interesting and informative. But towering over the whole place is this ridiculous monument, which has a statue at the bottom with a Red Army soldier and a Communist partisan freeing an altogether too healthy looking communist prisoner. Apparently the sculptor had to re-do it several times to beef up the characters and make the powerful socialist men look more socialist-realist and awe-inspiring than historic truth might have allowed for...
The tour mostly focuses on the facts and figures, the panopticon design of the place, and the episodes surrounding its expansion in 1938, its fall in 1945 to the Soviets, and then its use by them into the early 1950s with the additional death and starvation that happened under their control... I wanted more stories about moments of solidarity and resistance, but they are hard to get to. Here's Jessica in mid-explanation with Francesca and an Aussie, Beth, who was learning the tour too...
One of the Nazi "innovations" designed to reduce the connection between the executioners and the murdered was this shooting trench. The rest of the horrific techniques of mass murder I will leave you to discover on your own visit.
On our way out of Orianenberg we came up on this bike parking lot at the train station... not a particularly remarkable site here in Northern Europe.
In fact, bikes are well integrated into the train system here. You can bring your bike on any train or subway anytime. While I was in the new main train station in Berlin yesterday (Hauptbahnhof) I saw these four folks in their fifties coming down an escalator with their bikes and given the stupid BART policy on bikes I had to try to shoot them... but only got this shot from behind:
In the big transparent building with a half dozen floors and soaring escalators and air shafts everywhere I had a glimpse of a woman waiting for a train upstairs with her bike:
and here's a sequence of pictures showing various pink, marked bike lane intersections, plus a couple of shots from our window on Brunnenstrasse:
Since they're once again re-designing Valencia Street I am really frustrated that they're not taking the opportunity to implement some version of these kinds of bike lanes. We are long overdue for this in San Francisco, and if we had such side paths, I am sure bicycling would triple in six months! Dammit!
Posted by ccarlsson at 10:04 AM | Comments (4)
June 11, 2007
Berlin, art mecca
As we've noted for some time in San Francisco, without cheap rent it's hard to sustain a thriving art (or dance, or music, or political) scene... Berlin, full of ghosts, is also full of amazing amounts of space, both in terms of its lovely parklands, its still empty swaths of former Wall zones, and the apartments all over the city that are just huge, airy, sunny, warm, cozy...
"If you will suck my sticky soul, I will lick your funky emotions"... words to live by!
When I was here 17 years ago the eastern part of Berlin was full of squatted buildings and there were early efforts to create cafes and bars in the bleak, decrepit East. Some of what we've been doing is revisiting those same buildings, now refurbished and prosperous, which is ironic of course, but the neighborhoods are really fantastic (it doesn't hurt that it's glorious summer!) and extremely livable. Yesterday we went to this place, KA86, to the cafe just below and to the right of this photo, where they have a really great Sunday morning all you can eat brunch with great northern European cheeses, jams, spreads, and especially the BREADS! Yum!
Today we hung out with our host Jess C., and he took us by Ka77, one of the many squatted buildings on Kastianenalle just a few blocks away. Jess was around back in the early 1990s when the building was first squatted (it's also the oldest building in the area, and actually consists of 4 separate structures going back in a row from the street front, separated by lovely courtyards). Hundreds of people helped make it an amazing place, and it's still home to 25 adults and about 10 children, who still live collectively, have shared meals 6 nights a week, and are encouraged to bathe together in a big bathroom with two bathtubs and two showers all adjacent... The culture of collective living is considerably healthier here than in the U.S. as far as I can tell after a very cursory visit. Collective spaces still exist and actually seem to be thriving. They contribute a lot to what's left of the radical political culture, though it's far from what it was during the street-fighting times before the Wall fell. Rather, following the "natural" life-cycle of urban environments, Berlin was animated by the squatter scene and its attendant radical politics two and three decades ago. Following the fall of the Wall and German reunification, the next phase of city life ensues when the artists pour in and find lots of cheap space and easy living without huge incomes.
Here's me and Jess enjoying a leisurely Monday afternoon in summertime Berlin:
As we've enjoyed staying at Jess's place on Brunnenstrasse just in the eastern sector near where the Wall was, we're close to Mitte (the center) and the place is chock full of art spaces! Galleries and buildings, cafes and bars, outdoors in balmy June Berlin... just fantastic place to be without cares or responsibilities. On Sunday Francesca and I re-found the place I visited in 1990, now known as Tacheles. Here's some photos of it:
You can see already around Tacheles on Friedrichstrasse and Orianenbergstrasse the booming rise of commercial gentrification. The other neighborhoods nearby, currently home to many art galleries, will likely succumb to boutiquization as things proceed, assuming the pattern holds. Here are some more Tacheles shots:
This window is where the previous picture is taken from:
Tomorrow our new pal Jessica is going to give us a private tour of the prison camp Sachsenhausen. At the door is the famous maxim "Arbeit Macht Frei" (Works Makes You Free)... right around the corner from Tacheles I found this poster, with the additional ironic aside "Vive la bourgeoisie!"...
In general the art culture is moving to a gallery world here, but there are some places that straddle between street and gallery. One of them is the place Tina took me to on my first day in Berlin, Bethanienhaus. The huge part of the building is art galleries and workshops, but one corner of the one wing housed one of the Convergence Centers for the anti-G8 protests. Apparently the artists who occupy the bulk of the place would like to see the last bit of anarchist culture evicted from their place... sad. Anyway, Francesca and I went back to see some art there over the weekend and this photo was taken in one of the more entertaining modern art installations there:
There is a lot of graffiti and stenciling here too. Here are some murals we found in a squatted courtyard, rather clean and modern compared to what I was used to in the past...
I like to end with a nice picture of me and Francesca so here's one of my recent favorites... we'll be leaving for Budapest on Wednesday and stay there until late Friday night... not sure if there'll be another Berlin entry but probably. Ought to post a bunch of pictures of how a civilized city accommodates bicycles!
Posted by ccarlsson at 04:56 AM | Comments (0)
June 09, 2007
Ghosts of Berlin
Summer is upon us here in Berlin, sweltering heat during the day, but gloriously balmy all night long. Francesca and I have been touring around on rental bikes, enjoying the great bike lanes and normalized bicycle transit accommodations (you can take your bike on any train or tram, there are dedicated separate sidepaths on countless streets, even left turn lanes and signals at complicated intersections--photos to come in a later post).
There is a palpable sense of ghosts lurking in every part of Berlin, but especially here where we are a short distance from the old Wall. Berlin has replaced most of the Wall with a two-cobblestone inlaid marker in the ground along the entire original path. We are at 44 Brunnenstrasse and next door, at 45 Brunnenstr., there was a tunnel dug from West Berlin under the wall to its basement in 1963. Unfortunately Stasi informants betrayed it and the diggers and aspiring escapees were caught and imprisoned. We are outside the Bernauerstrasse U-bahn station and just a half block away was the wall; where we are was for many years the edge of East Berlin, a scary, heavily militarized place.
The yellow arrow at the right edge of this aerial photo points to where we're staying and more or less corresponds to the route of the tunnel dug back in 1963 (one of several, only the first one succeeded in freeing a couple of dozen people).
Yesterday I took a lovely ride through Berlin's famous urban park, the Tiergarten, a world-class park. Of course one of the main ghosts haunting any urban environment, including this one, is nature itself. In the Tiergarten I found this statue of a fox hunt and thought it illustrated well the lost nature of this area, which in turn reminded me of the Grimm Brothers (who apparently once studied at Humboldt University in the heart of Berlin) and their sagas set in heavily forested medieval Europe, Germany's Black Forest among the most storied. Here's the fox hunt statue:
Ghosts lie layer upon layer here... Marx and Engels were here for a while too, and then heavily honored by the East German state during its reign. Marx-Engelsplatz features a giant bronze statue of Engels standing slightly behind and to the side of a seated Marx. We joined countless tourists in snapping our photos on the statue, but had to remember the oddity that an astrologer friend told us when Francesca was born that she has the exact same astrological chart at Marx! Go figure...
The ghosts of Berlin are well marked by numerous historic displays and statues, without which I'd probably only have a queasy feeling that I was missing an awful lot (I am, anyway, I'm sure!)... Here's Bismarck, the Prussian leader who presided over the founding of the modern Germany back in the 19th century, and is famous for his geo-political machinations of the time. Somehow appropro that part of his monument towers over a character bearing the burden of the entire globe...esp. after the G8's pretensions to plan the world's future!
A new monument near the Brandenberger Gate, apparently built in spite of some serious controversy, honors the Jewish dead from WWII (conspicuously, it is not a memorial to the Holocaust more generally, which doubles the number of dead to take into account). It consists of a field of giant gray slabs and seems unremarkable until you walk into it and suddenly descend among the quiet, towering stones. It's an awesome experience and really invokes a lot of feelings and thoughts about absences, ghosts, death and denial, and much more...here's a couple of shots:
On a lighter note is the weird affection one gets for the walk/don't walk signs that still denote whether you're in old East Berlin or West Berlin. Somehow there is a growing nostalgia for aspects of the East, but the only real marker for this amnesiac nostalgia are these curious signs:
And whenever you start to forget about the Wall, you come upon another spot where a memorial sits and displays explain what happened there from 1961 to 1989... And sometimes you just come to a piece of the Wall still standing. I found this lonely chunk today:
Here's a historical marker for a former Wall crossing by a canal and Invalidenstrasse:
Lastly, though by no means exhaustively since there are way more ghosts and histories here than I've discovered in my cursory tourism, we went out drinking last night at Schliemenstrasse 22, which is where I went as a part of the Anti-Economy League of San Francisco in April 1990 when it was a big squatted apartment amidst a sea of squats in this part of East Berlin. Now the neighborhood is quiet, prosperous and bourgeois, but the bar that was just opening back in 1990 is still there and the bartender confirmed that it was the same place as that old squat... here we are having our drinks at 2:30 a.m. on a balmy Berlin summer evening, surrounded by ghosts and layers of history...
Posted by ccarlsson at 04:02 AM | Comments (0)
Effective Politics or Feeling Effective
This is an essay I wrote, which may end up published somewhere, but anyway, I just want to share it with my friends and readers...
“We fought the police with words, dances, clown-armies, yoga, laughs, music... they tried to stop us with gas, batons, water cannons, bulldozers, helicopters, stop and search actions, blockades, riot gear and intimidation… We are happy. Any action is better than none. We're having fun.” —From Germany and Portugal and the rest of the world, Voluntari@s IMC-PT, June 8, 2007, Rostock, Germany
Capitalism is not smashed, contrary to the dozens of beautifully designed posters all around Germany calling people to come and blockade the G8 meeting and “smash capitalism.” But the week-long protests still feel like a success to most of the participants, as the quote above indicates. Thousands of people converged in Rostock to partake in marches, discussions, meetings, and symposia, and some 6,000-10,000 marched to the security fence (erected by the German state at great expense) to “blockade” the G8 summit. Snaking through fields and overwhelming thousands of heavily armored police, the protesters were able to blockade one entry and tie up the other with two days of persistent efforts to occupy the roads and pierce the perimeter. Real courage and creativity buoyed the blockaders and kept the security forces in an exhausting round-the-clock state of alert, while the politicians wined and dined in monarchical splendor behind the formidable barriers. Their vapid pronouncements were dutifully reported by the world’s media, but always a few paragraphs down, the presence of thousands of blockading protesters had to be mentioned too. Little coverage was offered of the multiple critical views and myriad of alternatives presented to “business-as-usual” by the assembled protesters, but the “global war” hysteria whipped up in the past few years clearly has failed to silence the growing global chorus of people who insist “another world is possible.”
The anti-G8 protests have to be seen against the background of a steadily increasing delegitimization of representative democracy. Politics has become an empty ritual in most western democracies. People are expected to “participate” by casting a vote every so often, preferably for the candidates that spend the most money trying to win their vote with slick advertising campaigns that appear on TV, radio, and on the walls of cities. Historic political movements that struggled mightily for suffrage would be flabbergasted to see how hollow their conquest of the vote has become. Moreover, political formations based on class and community have also dissipated in the past two generations to the point that most formal politics is more a habit than a living, breathing engagement.
Oddly, this demise of formal politics coincides with increased polarization of wealth both inside nations and between nations. Leaders of the wealthiest countries that meet in the G8 summit every year are managers of an ever more brutal world system that keeps billions living in catastrophic, intolerable misery, and many millions more just a step or two away from immiseration themselves. The imposition of this global barbarism has gone largely uncontested by the broad population in Europe, Japan, Canada, and the United States. But not entirely. Political systems drained of meaningful choices, combined with a fragmented and largely numb polity has pushed those seeking change to seek new forms of doing politics. Crucial to these forms is a need to feel effective in ways that regular politics have prevented. For many there is a need to engage the body, to come fully alive mentally and physically. This can run the gamut from marching through the streets to dancing and drumming, from nonviolent direct action to rioting.
At the beginning of June, 2007, anti-G8 summit protesters from around the world descended on northern Germany, united in their determination to “shut down” the summit through direct action. Beyond the attempt to blockade the meetings in Bad Heilingendam, there were also four separate marches on different related themes from June 1-4 in the city of Rostock, an alternative summit, nightly music concerts, and an unknown number of decentralized actions around the vicinity. Thousands of protesters set up tents in camps and held meetings, ate meals together, staged concerts, showed films, and carried on debates and discussions in many languages. Remarkable global villages took root in the German countryside, but these were no ordinary villages. Everyone there was trying in their own way to “smash capitalism.”
Capitalism was never threatened directly by these protests, to no one’s surprise. At this point in history, we are creating the foundations for a challenge to capitalism, rather than taking it on directly. The anti-G8 protests were successful on many levels. The individuals who animated the camps and the marches and blockades contributed to a process of political re-invention and re-engagement. No one protesting the G8 would have been satisfied to merely write a letter to a politician or a newspaper (though some of them undoubtedly did that too), let alone accept that the proper way to respond to this self-designated global elite was to await the next election in their home country. It is precisely against the impotent rituals of modern democracy that these folks are in motion. For those 10,000+ who hiked miles across open fields to sit on roads and rails to blockade the summit, their direct action was a far more potent act than any of the activities that preceded it during the days prior, even if the politicians and supplies were flown over the blockades by helicopter.
Among the people who took time out of their normal lives to camp and march and argue and blockade, there are more differences than commonalities. But they represent a continuum of subjective choices, refusals of the limits of politics, and an embrace of “action,” defined in a variety of ways. There are sharp differences on what kinds of tactics and behaviors are appropriate. For some, showing up in Rostock and walking in legal marches and attending workshops is already a break from the atomized lives most of their compatriots accept as normal. For many others, participating in a legally approved political demonstration is to affirm one’s own passivity in the face of a system that demands acquiescence. Some of them want to make music, to dance and sing together, to make wild and marvelous artistic floats and puppets with subversive messages. For them, drumming and dancing is to throw their bodies into another level of engagement, to feel their own participation in a visceral and sometimes powerful way. By introducing a Dionysian element of pleasure and even celebration, they are refusing the somber, obedient, sheep-like behavior acceptable to both the state and to leftist organizers. At its most extreme, they are creating the beginnings of a new post-capitalist culture, filling the streets with art and music in the here and now. For those who want to connect through pleasure and joy, the passivity and quietude of many demonstrators is what they’re trying to break through.
Others who want to emphasize the dire condition of the planet see a Dionysian celebration as inappropriately celebratory. Then there are those who see the drummers and wildly costumed as mere “hippies,” people who aren’t willing or able to face up to the enormity of the barbarism being contested by political radicalism. Those who follow the legacy of the 20th century Left fall into this category to a great extent, preferring repetitious chanting and recycled slogans from revolutions of the past to experiments in cultural expression.
Somewhere at this end of the spectrum the drama of force and counter-force takes center stage. It is not enough to go along with anything permitted, no matter how active or open-ended one’s own participation might be. If it is permitted it is not sufficiently contestational and its adherents aren’t really fully engaged. Illegal, violent, mobile, unpredictable, militant…these are the words that begin to describe the direct politics that finally make their protagonists feel fully alive.
At the end of the first day’s protest, on Saturday June 2, a riot erupted and eventually 250 protesters and 250 police were injured, some seriously. A sea of words has already splashed across the internet and the world’s newspapers, a remarkably large proportion of them dedicated to reporting on and talking about the infamous Black Bloc, a subset of the protesters who are ready and willing to fight with police, break windows and set cars on fire.
One black bloc’er claimed their own joy and passion on the Indymedia site a couple of days after the June 2 riot:
… under every black mask was a smile, in every stone thrown against the common enemy there was joy, in every body revolting against oppression there was desire. We don't harbor sad passions and resentments, if that had been the case we wouldn't have fought and resisted for so long. … Joyful passions placed in common and joined to the assault on command—such is the secret of the battles waged in the heart of the asymmetrical conflict which opposes us to the sadness of the weapons and bodies of power. Individually we are nothing, together we are a power. Together we are a commune: the commune of Rostock. —International Brigades
The Theater of Authority projected by the police in Germany was quite impressive—matched on June 2nd by the Theater of Rebellion projected by the black bloc. At least 2000-3000 dedicated, hardcore “bloc’ers” showed up, most intent on having a serious fight with the 13,000 police who have been deployed to keep the protests under control.
How have young anarchists come to assemble themselves into a huge undifferentiated mass of black-clad soldiers seeking a military confrontation with the police? What could be stranger than several thousand young radicals who profess to want “anarchy,” who come to protest at a summit of big-shot politicians, who choose to conform to a rigid dress code that disguises their individuality, and who constitute themselves as a small army ready to initiate hostilities with the superior armed forces of the state?
Seen from outside the black bloc seem like a Calvinist nightmare, all color and individuality expunged from their ranks, while their hostility to the limits of legal marches or the “hippies” who are drumming and dancing is notable. The exuberance that I associate with anarchist youth was hard to detect in the closed ranks that huddle-marched by on June 2 in Rostock, several thousand strong. The militaristic black bloc reminded me a bit of the Zapatistas when they marched through Aguascalientes, Mexico in August 1994—a makeshift and irregular unarmed militia—but without the built-in sympathy the indigenous inspired in the Lacandon forest of southern Mexico.
At its best the role of the black bloc can be to protect protests from police assault. But it can also happen that their enthusiasm for fighting police can inadvertently trap other demonstrators in the crossfire, as it happened to some on June 2. (Nevertheless, few demonstrators repudiated the bloc, at least publicly, and solidarity prevailed.) In a real way black bloc’ers are “throwing down”—throwing their bodies on the gears of the machine as best they can (to echo Mario Savio’s epochal call in Berkeley’s 1964 Free Speech Movement). It’s a romantic and ultimately doomed approach—fighting military with military will lose even if the insurgents “win.” And though the “machine” may use police as its first line of defense, the cops are replaceable parts too, and underneath the ninja turtle suits, much to the dismay of those who have demonized them in their symbolic roles, they are people who we need to join us instead of fighting us. (An aside: I enjoyed a walking tour of Berlin after returning from Rostock that ended with a stirring account of the revolt that finally brought down the wall—in Leipzig in October/November 1989 hundreds and then thousands of demonstrators turned out until a crucial evening when the mobilized armed forces of the East German state were sent to crush them—but the soldiers refused to fire on the crowds. Weeks later the iron curtain was kaput! Mass demonstrations were crucial, but the subversion of the police and army was equally crucial, not their military defeat per se.)
It must also be noted that this new generation of militants has a legitimate claim to urgency when it comes to trying to stop the capitalist juggernaut before it irreversibly wrecks the planet. On the other hand, it’s impossible to see how riots and fighting police have anything to do with transforming social relations towards a decommodified world of mutual aid, free association, and ecological/biological sanity. To the contrary, close-up living next to a lot of these young radicals is to endure a culture of obsessive narcissism, again mirroring the society at large in its endless calls for unaccountable “freedom”… like the “freedom” to get very drunk and yell and sing amidst a thousand tents full of people trying to sleep! OK, so any camping experience faces the problem of different relationships to night, but there was a definite attitude of “Fuck you, I can do anything I want!” underlying the partying at the Camp over the weekend.
Black bloc “anarchists” got most of the press here Saturday-Tuesday at the expense of the other 75,000 protesters and their respective messages because of the riot at the end of Saturday’s big anti-G8 march. This obsessive press angle led eleven U.S. protesters to write an open letter in which they argued: “Summit after summit, we have seen the same pattern in the media. The images of black clad protestors hurling rocks at police, the stories of senseless hooligans—those whom the government says should be punished and locked away. These stories and images of street fighting do nothing but spread fear, criminalize protests, divide social movements, and distract the public from the story of the G8 and their unaccountable polices that are spreading militarism, poverty, violence, environmental destruction and climate change.” Only Americans can be surprised that the media does not communicate their message properly! Few have commented on the strange psy-ops perpetrated by the police as they continuously made bizarre claims about nonexistent weapons (potatoes spiked with nails?!?) and nonexistent combatants, filling the air with disturbingly unverifiable claims that went unchallenged by the media.
There is actually a striking parallel in the mirror-like behavior of the mainstream press and many protesters in their mutual obsession and focus on the black bloc and violence. At one point I was peering into an internet tent of ten computers (there was great telecommunications provided in Camp Rostock). Half of them were being used to browse images of Saturday’s fight between black bloc and police. At a breakfast table Monday morning, everyone was reading about Saturday’s demonstration. In the Indymedia Center (IMC), most of the internationals uploading pictures and stories were working on images of the riot. My friend browsed English language Indymedia sites and there wasn’t much mention of any other aspect of the protests in Rostock beyond the riot during the first few days. In this sad way, the anti-G8 protesters perfectly mirror the mainstream: if it bleeds, it leads. Conflict and violence are much easier to capture and communicate, and resonate much louder, than any of the dozens of other messages, groups, creative expressions, etc.
A thoughtful letter appeared on Indymedia, arguing for a nuanced and specific analysis of the events that happened on June 2:
The one violence, so far as everyone can see, came from a scattered minority, measured against the number of demonstrators. The other violence was carried out by thousands and had behind it the organized violence of orders radioed in from above – orders to go forward, to charge, to attack with riot sticks, to spray, to arrest; orders to fall back, to withdraw, to wait and then to go back into action. The other side, insofar as they actually belonged to the demonstration, acted in the immediate chaos, mostly without any coordination, running in and out of side streets, dangerously throwing things in a totally shitty way from the back ranks of the demonstrators, some people stupidly acting in isolation or merely out of reflex instead of reflection – reaction and counter-reaction, captured and arrested in cool images for Spiegel-online and the Minister of the Interior who finally has a chance to really deploy his apparatus as well as the permission to do so. (Still, it’s not the fault of the “Autonomen” that they let themselves be instrumentalized in the name of Law and Order; it’s Law and Order that has already instrumentalized in advance everything that will happen.) … The media with its autistic obsession with images of violence reduced the demonstration to a spectacle that was partly an orgy of violence and the rest a carnival. According to this fantasy, without the riots and police special command, the colorful party would [have] dominated the news. And now the weather. --autorin 06.06.2007 00:43
Author John Holloway was in Camp Rostock for an open forum on previous summits, what worked and what didn’t. Some black bloc’ers showed up and he told me they were utterly unconcerned about anyone else’s opinions or actions. Reminiscent of the Bolsheviks in revolutionary Russia, as far as they’re concerned, they’re the enlightened elite who are truly revolutionary and what they do is therefore necessary and the most radical. The angry urgency of youth is a key part of such a grandiose self-importance. As they do not constitute a party or even a unified organization, their Bolshevik-style arrogance is more show than substance. Beneath all the bluster, though, is a real passion to change the world.
Waiting for politicians or legal protest to bring about radical change is hopeless. But as people “take action,” there are curious questions about how feeling effective is not the same as effective politics. Obviously the people in motion are an evolving social and political movement, and Rostock is another important chapter in that evolution. Just as obviously capitalism is not directly threatened by dancing in the streets or brawling with police, though it may someday be challenged by the culture that these activities help nurture. If anything we might note that security bureaucracies are responsive and evolving too, learning lessons and making adjustments in response to the endless creativity of its opponents. And as protests grow larger, so too do the resources dedicated to repressing them.
How will the movement escape the cycle of predictability and a politics of ineffective self-gratification? Is it more of the same, bigger and better? Or might there be a lesson in the disobedience of the Eastern bloc soldiers back in 1989? A new world, beyond borders and capitalism, is in formation. Will it burst forth one day, inspiring even those who are employed to suppress it to join in? Our protests and creative alternatives have to inspire even our enemies to join us. That’s a big challenge, to be sure. Revolution is not something to be imposed but rather, an inviting process of increasing inclusivity in which we all get to feel and taste and know things we’ve only dreamed about.
--Chris Carlsson
June 9, 2007, Berlin
Posted by ccarlsson at 03:48 AM | Comments (2)
June 06, 2007
June 3 and 4 Rostock demonstrations
Time is flying by and already there are more events from Rostock and surroundings, but I'm back in Berlin and wanting to post my thoughts on the two other demos on Sunday and Monday... the structure of the week of protests is quite complex, with hundreds of affinity groups intersecting with an equal number of NGOs and somewhat fewer political parties. Issues that usually get balkanized and kept apart are continually put together in summits like this, one of the better aspects of the whole thing. So after the big opening anti-G8 demo, using again the slogan "Another World is Possible," the 2nd day had a big demo against GMO agriculture and for food sovereignty and local farmers under the slogan "Resistance is Fruitful." It was a spirited march of several thousand, very well decorated and quite mellow in terms of police response, as they only put some dozens of "anti-konflikt team" cops in windbreakers around the march. Here's my favorite prop of the day:
One of the focal points at the G8 is their unfulfilled promises vis-a-vis Africa, and this float got right to the point:
A great rebel clown army brigade has been keeping the (groucho) marxist spirit going here too. They have been marching around mocking cops and commies alike, staging some delightful charges at lines of riot cops when appropriate. After the Fruitful march they entered a McDonalds and all got arrested there. In order to leave they had to pay 150 euro fine for the whole dozen or so of them... I imagined they were first offered multiple Supersized Big Meals as an alternative fine, but I understand they chose to pay the money to get released from McDonalds... is this the first time McDonalds has also served as a temporary jail? Won't be the last!
These images are actually from the next day's demo on the "Right to Movement" where the clowns were one of the few groups who kept the energy up during interminable police-imposed delays...
This is a shot of the clowns just before they charged across into the faces of heavily armed riot police, just visible to the right.
Here I am, as usual lurking near a drumming contingent. These sambistas have been a bright spot in the marches, bringing some of our favorite San Francisco spirit of good drumming...so much better than chanting or just walking along grimly...
Here's an anti-GMO float with a sign that reads: What it's really all About: 1. Money
2. Money
3. Money
The June 4 demo was called "The Right to Movement" and the police turned it into an exercise in patience and attrition. The route was to be the same as the Agriculture march the day before and at the gathering point there were a lot more of us, several thousand. Before too long hundreds of heavily armored riot police had spread out in the forests surrounding us completely. As the march started it stopped. From the soundtruck came the news that the police had detected 500 protesters who had infiltrated the march and evaded their control who they were sure were going to be violent. After an hour and a half of negotiations, the march organizers and police agreed that we could proceed only if no one wore a mask, no one wore a hoody + sunglasses, or any kind of face-obscuring clothing. It's officially illegal to hide your face in Germany during demonstrations, though that had been flaunted by 2000 black bloc'ers on Saturday.
So we finally moved a bit, only to be stopped again after a few hundred yards. Now the police insisted on lining the route of the march with riot cops 3 deep on each side. The organizers refused to proceed under those conditions, so another hour went by as they negotiated. Finally we got to go without that level of police accompaniment, though there were thousands of riot cops all around, along with giant water cannon vehicles. Here are some images:
This last image barely gives you a sense of the incredible fleets of police vans that are constantly moving around Rostock. This is the backbone of the police infantry, their 21st century horses, and at times they park them three and four rows deep, crisscrossing the road to serve as barricades.
The plight of immigrants in Germany and Fortress Europe in general, is just as bad, or worse, than in the United States. Here in Germany an immigrant is placed in a certain district, usually rural and poor, and while they await processing (which can take years) it is illegal for them to leave that district. Later, if they get legal residency status, and if they are still on welfare, it is illegal for them to leave that district UNLESS they have a job outside of it. Of course, it might be tricky to arrange a job somewhere else in a country that you are banned from visiting! The Kafka-esque nightmare of migration stands in sharp contrast to the ever-easier movement of capital, whipping to and fro in a frenzy of speculation across the planet.
Here are some more images of the "Right to Movement" march. After many stoppages and constant police harassment, it finally made it to the harbor in Rostock.
"Lager" is the name for the concentration camps that arriving immigrants are put in across Europe.
During one of the many long delays imposed by the police.
The last picture to share of the June 4 demo was this big contingent that unfurled a giant pink banner, beneath which many of them disrobed... their message was that deportation is brute (naked) force... but it was funny to see in the midst of a sea of cops...
Today was supposed to be the blockade of the airport to prevent the various G8 leaders from arriving, though I heard Bush came early and avoided the whole thing. Should be reports on Indymedia later today.
I was hanging with Tina and Rob, doing those Indybay dispatches together. Here we are after the food march and after doing our "job", enjoying a "Voku" meal at the Rostock Indymedia center's "people's kitchen"...
Posted by ccarlsson at 02:29 AM | Comments (1)
June 05, 2007
June 2 protest against G8
It was great to see a big demo, 80,000 at least, lots of different people, many different factions, organizations and parties. Mostly it was a pleasant walk through Rostock but since it ended with the riot, that got all the attention since then. Here, instead, are a medley of photos from the big June 2 march:
I was curious about this odd group that went by under the flag of “Fuck”. They had brass instruments and discarded military surplus uniforms, walked in formation, and towed this puzzling flag and sculpture behind them.
Another excellent piece on Saturday at the start—a bunch of © symbols, music symbols, paragraph symbols (to indicate the paragraphs in trade treaties seeking greater rights for intellectual property), DNA molecules, etc., were arranged in a cordoned-off roundabout at the gathering place near the main train station. Lab-coated “scientists” “worked” among them. Another performer repeatedly tries to enter the “commons” but is kept out by the scientists—demonstrating the privatization and sequestering of expert knowledge. Quite beautiful.
These guys came in on a big sailing ship from Denmark. They've been at all the demonstration marches so far, monarchical and poised, and they also have a lovely poster/brochure they're distributing...
And here's a smattering of other participants that caught my eye:
These guys are bringing this to all events to dramatize the "settling" of the bombing range where these kinds of triangles are supposed to serve as bombing targets. There's a place in former eastern Germany that NATO has designated a bombing range and activists are trying to demilitarize.
These red ballons are calling for debt cancellation.
Posted by ccarlsson at 03:53 PM | Comments (0)
Journey to Camp Rostock
Friday June 1 on the train from Berlin I was jammed in with hundreds of 18-23 year olds—standing room only though I luckily scored a seat amidst the backpacks. Sweet, friendly crowd, all in their private groups talking and laughing. A couple of guys come on the train’s PA system and tell jokes, make statements and then launch into a German rap made up for the G8, later someone sings a folk song in English against the G8 and still later a raucous punk rock song is played that gets a lot of the kids in my car singing along… feels like a crowd going to a concert or a big camping jamboree—and I suppose it is!
After I rolled in to Rostock I spent 2.5 hours trying to find my way to the Convergence Center and then to the Camp, but luckily Tina and Rob were waiting at the bustling gate for me, so after some trepidation I found my temporary “home.”
Hundreds of people were pouring in every hour all night Friday and continuing throughout the weekend, leading to a population over 5,000. Here are two shots of the camp from different heights but a similar angle, one on Saturday morning and the right-hand one about 24 hours later on Sunday, to give you an idea of how densely crowded it became. And Camp Rostock is only one of three campsites set up to accommodate G8 protesters.
To the east across the river loomed a nuclear plant, steaming day and night. Several times I emerged from tents to catch a glimpse of this dark machine silently dominating the skyline several miles north of Rostock city in the former East Germany.
Once a bustling port city in the Soviet economic block, the city is now tidy and westernized but has 15%+ unemployment and the port is pretty dead compared to its storied past. The old socialist apartment blocks have been prettified too. What used to be an unbroken expanse of gray is now painted to liven it up a bit. Combined with the well-tended parks in the open spaces beneath these behemoths, it made for a fairly pleasant neighborhood compared to the former bleakness.
In preparation for the G8 summit starting tomorrow, June 6, thousands of protesters are converging on Rostock as a staging area for the direct action attempt to blockade Bad Heilingendam, the small luxury resort on the Baltic Sea where the leaders are going to meet. Like summit battles in past years in Seattle, Washington, Genoa, Quebec, Gleneagles, etc., protesters are inventing a new culture in the camps, workshops, and protest marches, or at least many are trying to. (There are also the old tired leftists with their red flags and old-style communist barking and chanting too.) In Camp Rostock where I stayed from Friday night through Monday night, the whole camp was jumping nearly 24 hours a day. Impromptu stages featured hiphoppers, beatboxers, speeches, bands, djs, and movies while bars in many group camps poured an endless sea of beer (the local pilsner, Rostocker, is quite good).
Camp Rostock became quite Burning Man-ish—wall-to-wall tents made it quite cozy, even too cozy! A hundred porta-potties dot the perimeter, a big communal kitchen, meeting tents, “streets” (mud paths) called Durruti Blvd., via Guiliani, rue de Arundhati Roy, Kurt Eisner Platz, Rosa Luxembourg Allee, Leiselotte Meyer Weg.
We had speed tweakers next to us the first night but they thankfully slept through the next day and night. On Sunday night there was an absolute roar surrounding us until at least 3 a.m. The nearest stage had beatbox and rap performances in German, English, French, Spanish, terrible quality speakers make it pretty loud and bad from our distance. In the furthest away corner of the “Hedonist Barrio” (“nice and noisy”) by the river is a rave disco keeping a few dozen dancing to the wee hours under the long sunset/dusk of northern Germany’s summer nights.
On Monday morning I stayed in camp for a few hours, and jotted this note while sitting at a picnic table:
Another affinity group departs the camp. A solitary drum strikes an irregular beat as they practice huddling behind their banner as though it were a shield [I saw them later at the “Right to Move” demo]. Here at Camp Rostock, a liberated—or at least tolerated—zone, people are hanging out, slowly composing themselves for the day’s activities. This a.m. a sit-in at a refugee office. Mid-morning a variety of decentralized “actions,” followed by today’s big march for the “Right to Movement” at 1 p.m. Something of a medieval military camp here, strange collection of motley youth, dreadlocked and scruffy, unwashed, ripening… the sun suddenly pops out from the gray Baltic clouds, lightening the day, urging the laggards to get moving. A helicopter comes up from the south and circles the camp, clearly filming it. No weapons here, just stacks of newspaper, flyers, cards, homemade banners, some professional banners too for traditional socialist and communist groups, even a beautiful green one for La Via Campesina. Lots of milling about; toilets were cleaned today! Kitchen continues to function beautifully—great quantities of food passing through each camp, literally tons.
I was very excited to find a newspaper full of great articles called Turbulence. You have to go and check it out. It was by far one of the most intelligent collections of political writings I’ve seen in a while, and it’s sharply focused on the issues facing the movement, or movements, that stage these counter-summit gatherings. One article by Sandro Mazzadra and Gigi Ruggero is called “Singularization of the Common” and they do a nice job of describing the impasse facing these summits, while still endorsing them as a common place of global politics and global movement. Here’s a quote from their piece that I liked, partly because it says something I am also trying to say in my forthcoming book in slightly different language:
“The term ‘multitude’ proves to be convincing when the point is to understand the insurrection of subjectivities at the level of the common while leaving behind both the liberal religion of the individual and the socialist cult of the collective.”
I had a strange thought about the camp experience—one dark view would see it as practice for life in camps in the future, involuntarily… with much fewer resources and pleasures one would assume, but who knows? This might be as much an experiment for the state as for the “multitude”. So much in formation, so much information! It was a remarkable experience of Political Camp, a dash of boy scouts and an ample splash of Burning Man—unlike BM though, everyone here is intentionally political. Walking around the camp as an unaffiliated individual was fascinating, equally lonely and self-conscious as curious, open and glad for observer-status. Saw a lot of affinity groups meeting but didn’t think I should stay and listen—characteristically though, the meetings are in the open and undoubtedly self-consciously transparent. Overheard a Greek group, a Spanish one, a Francophone African group (Senegalese and Malian I believe), but mostly German, French, a few Danish, a smattering of Russians and Poles, a few U.S. folks, the few Latin Americans and Asians were probably already living in Germany.
The anti-G8 gathering is sprawling over three camps and two convergence centers/Indymedia centers, plus there’s an alternative summit/NGO conference I didn’t even check out, and a big music show for four straight nights (where I discovered Obrint Pas, a great ska-punk band from Valencia, Spain). At the level of infrastructure I’m impressed. Big expensive tents, 200 portable toilets that got cleaned yesterday, daily food provision for thousands, intense communications facilities, even a tent dedicated to recharging mobile phones, and another with ten open access internet computers. Then the Indymedia centers had more rooms full of open access computers plus wireless, plus 2-3 rooms each for Indymedia producers to work—most were videographers it seemed, but plenty of writers and photographers too. Fun to be a part of it, a fascinating moment in history.
Here are the three pieces I helped with posted on Indybay in the past three days... mostly my photos and captions. I didn't write the pieces, which were done by a woman Rob met and then Rob and Tina did the latter two...
June 2: Big opening anti-G8 march
June 3: Resistance is Fruitful!
June 4: Right To Movement march
I'll post more personal accounts of these with some more photos later tomorrow... until then...
Posted by ccarlsson at 11:19 AM | Comments (0)