Or: Are Raids Increasing At the Same Rate as Actions Aimed at Saving the Club Scene?
It was a strange last minute snag to a perfect Sunday. Staub had put on a spontaneous party in about.blank. As always it featured a fantastically well selected mystery lineup of throbbing, instrumentally adept techno DJs from around the scene. These are fhe kind of acts that you'd usually pay 25 euros to see. At Staub, however, they agree to play for half that price and none of their names appear on the lineup. It's very old school, like wandering through a ramshakle factory door in the 90s and having no idea what you'll see and hear - but you just plunge in and 'ave it.
After a heated dancing session in the dark, we retired to the sunny garden to recline and relax. And at some point in the afternoon, the bouncer passed by and quietly announced that the nearby club Renate had just been raided by the police. It was rumoured that another club - I can't recall which one precisely. A few names come to mind but I don't want to embarrass anyone by getting it wrong. At any rate, it was rumoured that a second club was also targeted at the same time as Renate. Both these clubs are quite strongly linked to the A100 Stoppen movement which has been trying to block the construction of a superhighway that will annihilate the clubbing district of Hauptstrasse around Ostkreuz. It seems unnecessary to even build it, since the train service to Berlin's main airport is excellent, clean, and the trains are rarely even dull. So why build an ugly superhighway from Ostkreuz to the airport that will only remove customers from trains and lure them into more CO2 emitting vehicles - taxis and private cars - whilst lowering the life expectancy and enjoyment of all residents who remain behind in the dust?
The airport is still very quiet post COVID, and the industry is likely going to remain in a lull for a long time to come, as the European economy is still in a downturn. But Berlins club tourists are mainly budget travellers who come here no matter what the economy does.
It does seem kind of ironic that the same clubs that are threatened by the new highway, including Renate, About Blank, and various left wing music project spaces, are being threatened by the same party tourists who are landing at Berlin Airport in order to go to said clubs. Crazy. And short sighted. The club tourism thing has been doing, well, ever since the Berlin Wall came down.
So. The funny thing is that both of these raided clubs had participated in a demonstration just 36 hours earlier to block that superhighway route with Soundsystems and music stages - it was the latest in a long series of actions to stop the A100 highway, that went down over the past few years.
Is this a continuation of the trend that we saw beginning with the raid on the (now defunct) night club Mensch Meier in 2018? That raid coincided, almost TOO coincidentally, with a huge demonstration to support Seawatch that had been partly organized by Mensch Meier. That demonstration had happened on the same day and hour as the police raid on our club. (I say "our" because I was an employee who was working there at the time, not because I was a shareholder).
Just as a reminder, Seebrücke and Sea watch were refugee rescue operations that had been deemed some kind of existential legal threat to the sovereignty of EU nations by various right-leaning German politicians. At the time, if I recall correctly, some of the politicians were calling for refugee rescue boats to be criminalized and prosecuted.
You could say it was an issue that was equally as contentious as the building of this new highway, politically.
Isn't the timing of these raids on clubs, which stand up for what is right and good for all Berlin, all getting a bit suspicious? 🤔
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