Day 129: The Real Berlin Experience

eToday I did a Berlin tour. As you have have noticed from my earlier posts on Berlin, I'm getting a bit worn from all the normal European touristy stuff, and for Berlin I've been much more interested in the subculture and more authentic and unique parts of the culture instead of just more famous landmarks. Because of this, I decided to do a tour with a small independent company called Alternative Berlin, which does both a street art tour and workshop and the one I did, for which the post is named. I considered the street art one, but I suspect I've already been to 90% of the places they go, and I was more interested at getting a peek at some of the other interesting cultures and parts of the city. The tour did ultimately include a bit of street art, but it was more things in passing then a real focus.

Our guide was a woman named Penny from England who is an alternative tour guide by day and an artist by night, and the first place she took us was by subway to the Schöneberg district. One place of interest there was a sprawling immigrant housing complex where an artist has painted most of the satellite dishes with whatever was selected as "the dream" of the family living within, and which is built around an abandoned old WW2 bunker simply because after 3 attempts they were unable to demolish it.

Also in the Schöneberg area we visited the gay district, with rainbow (and other) flags hanging from virtually every building.

You can't see the 3 flags great in that picture, but our guide helpfully informed us that the blue, white and black one is for sadomasochism and the brown and yellow one with the paw print is for "bear" culture. I guess places use them both as an invitation and a warning of what to expect there, depending on the clientele.

The next stage of the tour was mostly places I'd been already on my own during my earlier explorations, such as the Afro-Carribean beach club Yupp. Even having seen them before it was interesting to hear more of the history and of how a lot of these smaller underground places and squatter communities are being pressured by city development, and how in another 5 years the city could have a very different feel to it.

One of the next places was for me the most interesting of the tour, so I'm going to go into a bit more detail on it. The story begins with a Turkish immigrant named Osman Kalin who came to Berlin in the early 1980s. Because the Berlin Wall was built inside the East Germany border, there is space of few meters on the opposite side that was technically still East Germany land, and West Germans used this few meters to dump a lot of rubbish as a way of escaping disposal fees. Kalin saw opportunity in this, and in an empty lot started constructing a treehouse home and garden out of the discarded rubbish he found along the wall. The authorities from West Germany could do nothing, because the land was actually a little bend of East Germany that was left outside the wall to save on material costs, and the East Germans, once the ensured he wasn't trying to dig a tunnel to help people escape, decided to leave him alone. He continued to add to his house and garden, but when the wall came down in 1989 it was thrown into jeopardy. The new authorities wished to build a new road that would go through the lot, and since Osman was squatting there they tried to evict him. He responded by cementing all of his possessions to the ground. As pressure increased, the church next door stepped in. They dug out land ownership papers showing that before the war the lot was part of church land, and they said that they liked Mr. Kalin and his ethics and commitment to family, and wanted him to stay - a pretty noble stance for a Christian church to take towards an immigrant Muslim family. Osman Kalin still lives there, and an apartment next door runs a hose to give him fresh water in exchange for some of his fresh fruit and vegetables every month. It's a pretty unique place, and the sort of independent, off the grid lifestyle that fascinates me in Berlin.

Next it was over to Mitte, which I mentioned before. This time I got a lot more of the history on it though. Pre-war it was mostly full of Jewish families, and after the war there was an obvious void as many of the former inhabitants were either deceased or had no desire to return to Berlin. Eventually squatters took over, and it became the most squatted in region of the city, as well as a hub for independent art and music. As time passed, it became more trendy and people were evicted from their squats. There are still a few islands of that independent, artsy lifestyle hidden among the Starbucks and boutiques though. The place we went is one I have walked by at least twice, but never really noticed. You walk in through a tunnel to an inner courtyard plastered with street art. There is a bar and a small outdoor stage that puts on theatre and live music some nights, and inside a staircase saturated in stickers and graffiti that leads up to a shop that shows off local street art in a gallery and sells prints, art books, comics and other art-related items of independent artists. It was a very cool place, and something like what I had in mind for the sort of place I'd run if I ever decided to run a store (although something a bit easier to find wouldn't hurt).

Once the tour finished I even had a chance to finally go visit the sticker museum Hatch. It is also not easy to find, and you're only going to locate it if you know exactly what you're looking for and where to go. It's very small, consisting of just 3 rooms. One is dedicated to street art stickers, one to skateboarding and more commercial stickers, and a shop selling stickers and other merchandise. As expected, the street art part was the most interesting to me. The collection isn't too extensive, but it's interesting seeing the collected works of certain artists and both the evolution and reoccuring themes that come from them.