Some demonstrators tried to get past barricades to the government district around the Reichstag parliament building and clashed with officers, police said. Four officers were injured, the Berliner Zeitung reported.

About 50 people were detained, some for assaulting officers, the force said.

The protesters, few of whom wore masks, waved banners marked with the messages “I have my own opinion” and “COVID-84” in a reference to George Orwell’s book “1984” about a totalitarian state.

The marches came a month before a federal election. The leading candidates vying to replace Chancellor Angela Merkel have pledged there will be no return to the strict lockdowns of last year and earlier this year.

The country has reported more than 3.9 million coronavirus cases and is facing a fourth wave of infections. It reported 10,303 new cases and 22 fatalities on Saturday, bringing the death toll to 92,096.

To nudge more people to get vaccinated, the government has said it will stop offering free tests from Oct. 11, except for those for whom vaccination is not recommended, such as children and pregnant women.

The government will require people to be vaccinated, test negative or have a recovery certificate to enter indoor restaurants, participate in religious ceremonies or do indoor sport.

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Source: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/police-protesters-clash-thousands-march-against-covid-curbs-berlin-2021-08-28/?rpc=401&

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Photo: Imanuel Marcus

Berlin, November 12th, 2020 (The Berlin Spectator) — In the Corona year 2020, the number of protests in Berlin did not decrease, in spite of it all. As a spokesman for the Berlin Police Department told The Berlin Spectator, as many as 5,010 rallies have taken place, as of yesterday. This year, Corona deniers and Nazis, but also the Black Lives Matter movement staged the biggest rallies. First, let’s rewind time by a hundred years.

In January, Britons demonstrated against Brexit. Photo: Imanuel Marcus

On January 13th, 1920, Germany’s most tragic and bloody protest ever took place. While the Weimar National Assembly was in session at the Reichstag, some 100,000 people demonstrated in front of the building. They were left-wingers who intended to show solidarity with workers who wanted more say in companies. Those who staged the protest opposed a new law that was being discussed in the parliament. The police shot at protesters. Dozens were killed in what is known as the Reichstag Bloodbath.

Berliners Against Rearmament

Another historic Berlin protest occurred over several days in late February and early March of 1942 in Nazi Germany. During the ‘Rosenstrasse Demonstration’, non-Jewish Germans, mostly women who were married to Jewish men, demanded their spouses’ release. Earlier, 2000 Jews who were part of what the Nazis called ‘mixed marriages’, had been arrested. With a lot of courage, the participants of the rally defied Adolf Hitler’s regime.

On May 11th, 1952, seven years after Nazi Germany’s unconditional surrender, Berliners took to the streets in order to protest against the Federal Republic’s rearmament. One participant was shot by the police. A year later, in June of 1953, the East German uprising against the communists in East Berlin was crushed by Soviet forces. Thirty-four protesters and several security officers were killed.

During the student revolution, on June 2nd, 1967, a rally against Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Persia, took place in West Berlin. A policeman shot the student Benno Ohnesorg. This deadly incident increased the tensions in West Germany’s cities.

Gulf Wars and Fukushima

On the other side of the Berlin Wall, one of the most important Berlin protests ever took place thirty-one years ago, almost to the day. On November 4th, 1989, half a million GDR citizens rallied against their country’s communist regime. Only five days later, the Wall fell.

Since then, Berliners have protested against hate, both Gulf Wars, and nuclear power. After the Japanese reactors in Fukushima blew following the tsunami, tens of thousands of Berliners were on the street, demanding the shutdown of all nuclear power plants in Germany. They will get what they wanted in 2022.

Berliners keep on staging protests today. Not all of them are big, but many are. The demonstrations the Berlin Police Department counts include those with one participant or tens of thousands of them. Individuals or organizations need to register their protests beforehand. In Corona times, the right to demonstrate was restricted in the spring of 2020 when the infection numbers skyrocketed.

Source: https://berlinspectator.com/2020/11/12/berlin-capital-of-protests-2/

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The post Germany coronavirus: Hundreds arrested in German ‘anti-corona’ protests first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

Berlin, where the only constant is change.

“If you move to Paris, chances are you want to become a Parisian. Those moving to Munich want to become Münchners. But people who move to Berlin,” says “Babylon Berlin” director Henk Handloegten, “want to subjugate the city.” Everyone declares the public space to be their own personal property and makes it clear to others: This is my city.

There are men everywhere peeing on trees like dogs marking their territory. Graffiti artists and taggers cover every free space they can find. Mothers with their twin strollers clear the sidewalks as if to say: “Get out of the way. Here comes your pension!” Aggressive bicyclists race among the pedestrians and, of course, ignore the red lights.

Like most people in this city, they have no doubt that they’re in the right, that they’re the good guys. Eco-athletes, the urban avant-garde, constantly in close combat with pedestrians who block their path. And with the cars, whose drivers have but a single goal in life: to run them over.

As Berlin gets more crowded, the mood in the German capital has grown more aggressive. Heedlessness and violence have increased in the city, says Karlheinz Gaertner, a retired policeman who spent over 40 years patrolling the streets of Berlin. These days, he writes books about Berlin, including his most recent one, “They No Longer Know Any Limits.”

Gaertner, who has the physique of a wrestler, is walking along Sonnenallee, a broad boulevard in the city’s Neukölln district, the area he used to patrol. Every now and then, he runs into men he once arrested. He offers guided tours through the neighborhood to groups of visitors interested in learning what a troubled neighborhood in Germany looks like.

A few years back, Neukölln served as a symbol for everything that had gone wrong in a Germany that largely ignored its immigrants and didn’t seem to care that they lived in isolated, almost ghetto-like neighborhoods separated from the rest of society. Chaos was the rule in some schools. Arab clans waged war against each other on the streets and the police seemed helpless.

The share of residents with an immigrant background in Neukölln is over 40 percent, with many coming from Turkey and Arab countries. It is the Berlin district with the lowest level of education, the highest dependency on social benefits and the greatest risk of poverty. The unemployment rate in some parts of the district is as high as 25 percent, and the proportion of migrants in some schools is around 90 percent.

Neukölln’s former district mayor, Heinz Buschkowsky of the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), became a media star with his dramatic, boisterous descriptions of the state of his district in countless talk shows. Some fellow SPD members even wanted to expel him from the party, accusing him of resorting to “right-wing populism” in the debate over immigrants and migration.

For years, Gaertner has been campaigning for action against the knife attacks that are becoming rampant in Berlin. And it’s true: In the Berlin of today, there are many more people than there used to be from cultures where knives are frequently carried as an everyday item by young men.

“But you can only grab for your knife if you have one on you,” says Gaertner, who has witnessed the suffering of knife-attack victims countless times. The development prompted him to organize initiatives like football tournaments where players are required to disarm if they want to participate. It provides a venue where they can play against the cops and show their true abilities.

In southern Neukölln in September, an Arab repeat offender named Nidal R. was literally executed in broad daylight on the street, sprayed with eight gunshots. Around 2,000 mourners, mostly Muslims, attended his funeral, where they were separated by gender. Some told the television cameras at the event that the 36-year-old had actually been a good guy, despite the fact that Nidal R. had committed over 90 crimes and spent 14 years in prison.

On a concrete wall near the scene of the crime, someone daubed graffiti celebrating the victim as a hero. Meanwhile, the rest of Germany was forced to realize the existence of a parallel society in the country, one that apparently has its own ideas of heroism and masculinity — and perhaps even of law and order.

The Berlin chapter of the Free Democratic Party, a business-friendly party that isn’t opposed to a bit of populism should the situation call for it, quickly put up a poster at the wall: “It’s the law of the state that counts, not that of the street.” The city of Berlin sent painters to cover up the graffiti.

‘Security Guards Are Everywhere’

Berlin frequently whitewashes problems. But sometimes, paint isn’t enough. “Look over there,” Gaertner says, pointing across the street. A security guard is standing in front of Campus Rütli, which used to be called the Rütli School and became notorious throughout the country for its violence and problems. There are few other industries in Berlin, says Gaertner, that are growing as rapidly as the one for security personnel.

“Security guards are everywhere in the city these days. Several are posted at each outdoor public pool in the summer and, despite their presence, there are constantly fights.” Some emergency rooms at hospitals in Berlin are also having to hire security now. There have been numerous cases of assaults on nurses and care providers.

It’s no surprise that the Babylonian diversity of cultures and lifestyles in Berlin can lead to conflicts. Often, they’re just weird — such as when a Turkish couple doesn’t want their children to go to school with Romanians and opts to send them to a Catholic private school instead. Sometimes, though, the conflicts turn violent.

The Paradox of Integration

Take a jog through Hasenheide, a park nestled between the Neukölln, Kreuzberg and Tempelhof districts, and you’ll find yourself slaloming through the myriad drug dealers, most of them of African descent. The Tunisian Anis Amri was one of those Berlin dealers. At one point, he was arrested for such activity, but later released. The security authorities continued monitoring him, taking a wait-and-see approach. But they waited too long: On Dec. 19, 2016, he plowed a semi-truck into the Christmas market next to Berlin’s Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church and killed 12 people.

Those who sell drugs day after day, night after night to partiers and hipsters, those who are released over and over again despite repeated run-ins with the police, can be forgiven for concluding that they have ended up in a rather decadent society, a den of sin, a lawless quagmire.

It is an erroneous conclusion, though widespread — on both the right-wing periphery of the political spectrum and among the secret fellow-travelers of global terrorism.

But perhaps the opposite is true. Sociologist Aladin El-Mafaalani believes conflicts are often a sign not of the failure of a multicultural society, but of its success. “Successful integration increases the potential for conflict,” he writes in his book “The Integration Paradox.” And he asks: “Why do people think that now, suddenly, things are supposed to be harmonious?”

El-Mafaalani, who works in the North Rhine-Westphalian Ministry for Children, the Family, Refugees and Integration, believes ongoing conflicts should be viewed as the basis for a new collective consciousness. But what should be done when values and moral concepts collide?

He believes the best approach is to foster a culture of debate, but says the goal should not be an anything-goes attitude. “If everything is equally valid, then people become indifferent,” he says. For decades, though, he adds, Germany avoided engaging in serious discussion about how to deal with the country’s history of immigration.

“A lack of language courses, no work permits, the threat of being deported every six months, no enforcement of mandatory schooling and catastrophic housing conditions: Those aren’t just problems that migrants faced for the first five or 10 years. It is still the reality for many Lebanese who arrived in the 1980s,” says El-Mafaalani “The fact that we have a problem with organized crime today doesn’t just come out of nowhere. It’s the legacy of past mistakes.”

How, though, does one go about establishing the culture of debate demanded by El-Mafaalani? It’s an illusion to imagine that the different immigrant groups in Berlin will somehow establish an intercultural dialogue of their own accord. People in the city often talk about each other, but not to each other. Multicultural idealism and monocultural nostalgia are often cut from the same cloth of impracticality.

The German television series “4 Blocks,” now in its second season, describes the culture clash between long-established members of Arab clans and the students and hipsters who represent a new generation of Neukölln residents. The influx has left many Arabs in Neukölln feeling like they are the original Berliners.

Indeed, diversity can also lead to its own kind of delineation. Many Muslim girls in some neighborhoods of Berlin, for example, are reluctant to leave their districts. They have deep roots in Berlin quarters like Kreuzberg or Neukölln, but they feel uncomfortable in some of the more well-healed districts of the city, like Zehlendorf in the southwest, which is home to the upper middle class and the wealthy. They say they are disparaged in such places for wearing the headscarf and don’t really feel like they are even in Germany anymore. Why not? “Because only Germans live there.”

On its surface, this may seem like a bizarre statement, but there’s also a kernel of truth to it. Terms like “immigration background” suggest a sense of uniformity that doesn’t really exist. The inhabitants of Neukölln, for example, hail from more than 160 countries and often share neither language nor religion nor much else — except the neighborhood where they live, the underfunded schools their children attend and poor job prospects.

Berlin’s ‘Strategy 2030’

In the popular recent television series “Babylon Berlin,” the stenographer Charlotte Ritter, played by the actress Liv Lisa Fries, moves through many different neighborhoods, milieus and social strata. The series’ three directors are convinced it is this permeability that has made Berlin special and distinguishes it from other big cities.

“But in the last several years, a phenomenon of prosperity emigration has become established, and that has led to a situation in which the neighborhoods hardly mix anymore,” says Handloegten. “People take over a neighborhood and eventually start defending it against change.”

The pressure on the real estate market means that those who signed favorable leases years ago now stay in their apartments. This can produce absurd situations, like that of a 60-year-old couple, whose children have long since moved out, living in a 150 square meter (1,615 square foot) apartment. But if they were to move to an apartment half that size, they might have to pay twice the rent.

As such, Berlin’s dynamism can lead to stasis, change to intractability. Might there be a danger of the city reverting back to its neighborhoods, back into the seven cities, 59 municipalities and 72 county jurisdictions that were merged a hundred years ago to create Berlin?

The city-state’s government is currently developing a strategy called “Berlin 2030” in order to rein the rampant metropolis back in. The plan is to be adopted in 2020. The growing city, according to the internal strategy paper, “is not perceived by large sections of the population as an advantage, but increasingly as a threat … above all through the rental developments and the gentrification associated with them.”

The plan is “to involve society in as representative a way as possible” in the process through workshops with “100 stakeholders,” “20 representatives of organized society” and “30 randomly chosen, representative citizens.” It certainly sounds nice, but to critics it is little more than empty verbiage. They say the plan is far too narrowly focused on housing construction.

“The Berlin Strategy 2030 in its current form doesn’t work,” says city researcher Klaus Brake. He argues that the strategy paper puts the city government in the driver’s seat and jumps to the second step before taking the first. It immediately wades into the urban development issue before the fundamental question has been clarified: How do we want to live together in Berlin?

In an open letter, critics have called for a “mobilization of urban society” in a manner that is free of “divided and selfish lobbyist groups.” At first hearing, that sounds like out of touch idealism. How, after all, are 3 million mavericks supposed to communicate with each other in this behemoth of a city?

A closer look reveals a hodge-podge of hundreds of individual initiatives. Take, for example, the “Lause,” an alternative housing project in Lausitzer Strasse in the Kreuzberg district with studios and handicraft businesses. It is in danger of becoming a target of real estate speculators. Among those demonstrating at a recent protest against the complex’s owner, a Danish real estate mogul, was the popular ice cream seller Mauro Luongo, who stores his supplies in the building. He even handed out free gelato at the event — from the very same ice cream truck that was struck by five bullets during the execution of clan member Nidal R., as children waited in line for their ice cream in front of the vehicle.

Google had planned to build a new campus on a neighboring street, and demonstrations by those opposed to the project regularly went late into the night. “Google is not a good neighbor,” the protest signs read. “Google off to Adlershof,” read another, referring to a technology center located far out in the city’s eastern outskirts. But precisely that kind of spatial separation of living and working is the opposite of the mix that characterizes life in Berlin.

Google finally gave up in late October and announced the building would be made available to nonprofit organizations. “It’s the city government’s job to mediate here and to communicate all of the advantages projects like this bring to the local community,” says Florian Nöll, the head of German Startups Association. Kreuzberg, he predicts, “will now immediately become known as a no-go area for tech companies.”

The Holzmarkt development along the Spree River in the city’s Friedrichshain district also has its own story to tell. If you walk from Alexanderplatz, Berlin’s eastern center, to the Spree River, you wind up at Holzmarkt. Here, where the Berlin Wall and the death strip once cut through the city, a village of wooden shacks with a restaurant, salon, day care center, campfire, nightclub, theater and bakery have been thrown together. Delegations from as far away as Tel Aviv and New York come here to marvel at the model project.

It’s creators once ran Berlin’s legendary Bar 25 club across the river until they were driven out. Then, they used a run-down building on the other side. Now, they’ve changed sides again. They are constantly finding ways to navigate through the inertia and ignorance of various government authorities who can’t fit the urban activists neatly into their Excel tables and who would rather do things by the book with a traditional investor.

The municipal administration’s helplessness creates a lot of freedom in the city. But that can then also be taken away just as arbitrarily. No matter, the Holzmarkt people will continue partying at their club for as long as they can — all night long, from Fridays to Mondays, often in the form of themed costume balls dedicated to the “golden gangster era of the 1920s: dark and glamorous.” Holzmarkt’s logo encapsulates this hard-partying metropolis’ disposition: a tomcat (a play on the German word for “hangover”) with a black eye and a broad grin.

Such extemporaneous facilities have something of a tradition in the city. If the series “Babylon Berlin” has a center of gravity, then it’s the devilish club Moka Efti, where different languages and social strata form a cocktail of Russian revolutionaries, German nobles, crooks, police and night owls.

A Culture Clash in the Garden

Chaos creates problems today, but it also points the way toward possible solutions. Immigration may be a strain on the city, but the scars of World War II and its Cold War division also provide some relief in the form of fallow land and open spaces, of which Berlin has far more than other metropolises. They are now being rediscovered, but they are also coming under economic pressure.

Berlin has a long tradition of allotment gardens, known as Schrebergärten, many of which contain small shacks for spending the night. They are the most German of all small German escapes — but they have an uncertain future. Berlin is home to almost 900 allotment garden colonies, which make up around 3 percent of the city’s total area. Demand for these gardens is huge and candidates often have to spend several years on a waiting list to secure one.

Some garden colonies have even appointed integration officers, an apparently necessary step. A garden with the rather ironic name of “Peace,” for example, has been a frequent site of dispute because members sought to reject applicants of Turkish origin by saying “they can’t be integrated.” That’s nonsense, of course. If there’s anything that can contribute to integration, it is spending time together among the carrot beds and fruit trees, a truth lived at other communal gardens in the city.

Such as the Allmende-Kontor at the vast Tempelhofer Feld park, an expanse established on the site of the now-closed Tempelhof Airport in the heart of the city. Students and creative types from the neighborhood started the urban gardening project here and were later joined by neighbors with Turkish roots as well as immigrants from some of the 190 other nationalities present in Berlin. In addition to kohlrabi and sunflowers, arguments are also cultivated here, a proclivity among nature lovers. Some gardeners with Turkish roots at times feel stifled by the aesthetic preconceptions of their ethnic German neighbors. They, in turn, sometimes find their foreign neighbors to be a blight on the garden because they “drag all their stuff out of the basement” and clutter the flower beds with old bicycle frames, kitchen cabinets and plastic furniture.

But once they get everything off their chest, they meet again and chat over shisha or beer and share watering duties. These delicate green shoots of a cultivated debate culture are currently under immense pressure, because Berliners not only have the need to hang out in gardens, but an urgent need for thousands of apartments in a city that has been hit with a housing shortage. Several allotment gardens are slated to be bulldozed soon to make way for new apartment buildings.

All of these are individual projects that, at most, will affect a few thousand residents. The search for a larger debate on strategy invariably ends up sooner or later in a discussion with a Catholic priest.

In 2006, Leo Penta founded the German Institute for Community Organizing at the Catholic University of Applied Sciences in Berlin. On Sundays, the priest, a charismatic man with a full beard, celebrates the Holy Mass in English. He was born in New York in 1952 and became a priest at the age of 27, going on to fight misery in the slums in keeping with Catholic social teachings.

“When I started as a community organizer in Brooklyn in the 1970s, things there looked a lot worse than anything you could imagine here in Berlin,” Penta says. “The area called Brownsville and East New York was completely rundown and destroyed, almost like Dresden after the war.”

Penta has lived in Berlin for 22 years and he has been striving to establish methods of grassroots community organizing here as well.

When asked what he thinks about the inclusion of “stakeholders” in projects such as “Strategy 2030” in Berlin, he says: not much. “Citizen participation at the government’s initiative is usually either citizen participation light or an elite event,” he says.

Penta’s German is perfect and almost accent-free, making him an example of the integration paradox. Penta has made Berlin his home, and he wants to change things here. He may be a foreigner, but he’s here to stay — and establish new local traditions along the way.

His services are idiosyncratic. An altar server with a pony tail dressed in sneakers and a T-shirt assists him. People arriving a half-hour late are still welcome because the grassroots priest is perfectly aware that 10:30 a.m. is an ungodly hour on weekends in Berlin. It’s only at around 11 a.m. that his chapel fills up, and he affably points latecomers to empty seats. After communion, the high point of the service comes when, rather than a sermon, everyone talks about the Bible — or simply about their personal experiences — with their Slavic, German or Italian accents.

Penta listens, talks, prods, and he believes the gospels are also about a kind of “counterculture.” His interpretation of the Bible is less about pure doctrine than about misunderstandings and squabbling between Jesus and his disciples. Penta asks his congregation over and over again: What do you think? “Yes” and “amen” don’t seem to be his thing. Can what he’s doing still even be counted as Roman-Catholic? Or is it more Berlin-Catholic?

Penta is also rather unorthodox in his approach to his second job as community organizer. In stark contrast to the city government’s vision of citizen participation, he wants organic participation from below and within rather than ordered from the top and outside. When industry went into decline in the Schöneweide district of eastern Berlin, the area was threatened with decay and unemployment. Snotty residents of central Berlin thumbed their noses at the district, acting as if it were a hopeless case. But Penta was familiar with the symptoms of crisis there from his years in Brooklyn. In 2000, he set about coordinating Germany’s first civic platform: an alliance of 23 civil society groups, associations and church congregations.

Pentas’ platform has helped shape the former industrial wasteland by, for example, successfully fighting for the establishment of part of the University of Applied Sciences (HTW) in the area. Today, Schöneweide is teeming with thousands of students. Of course, citizen’s groups can also have smaller goals — for example, his group’s efforts to keep Berlin’s oldest ferry connection in operation, the F11. While the Silicon Valley is turning to platform capitalism, Penta is banking on platform communitarianism.

He has already initiated four citizen alliances in the city — in Schöneweide, Neukölln, Wedding-Moabit and Spandau — which together incorporate around 80 groups that claim to represent a combined 100,000 people. And they don’t see themselves as just harmless clubs for discussion, but aim to negotiate at eye level with district leaders and city officials.

Can the chaotic, rudderless Babylonia of Berlin become a laboratory for a new form of citizen involvement? All coordinated by a Catholic priest in the diaspora of a godless city where 60 percent of the residents are unaffiliated with any religion?

That, too, might be part of this city’s laissez-faire approach — that in addition to all the other whackos, a Catholic priest can go ahead and do his thing in helping the deeply apostate Berlin society reinvent itself.

Penta’s skepticism of big top-down visions seems to have hit a nerve — as exemplified by Tempelhofer Feld, the vast empty field right in the heart of the city. Once an airport, the city proposed turning it into a new city quarter once it was closed down in 2008. But what did Berliners want? It’s not so easy to say. To approach an answer, it’s best to visit the place.

Freedom

Up until a decade ago, you could still fly from downtown Berlin to places like Vienna or Brussels. But in the 10 years that have passed since the last flight took off, not much has happened at the site. It is pretty much completely empty and it is so big that New York’s Central Park could fit inside with plenty of room to spare. It is a huge luxury in a city where housing is becoming increasingly tight.

But in a 2014 referendum, voters decided to keep it as it is. They elected to change nothing. No apartment buildings on the edges, no international garden exhibition, no lake, no mountain, no rocks. Critics complain that the city isn’t even allowed to put in bathrooms and park benches.

The vote was essentially the people of Berlin thumbing their noses at turbo-capitalism, which was threatening to chew up the city’s open spaces after having already transformed the real estate market into an El Dorado for speculators. It was a huge, loud rejection of change.

And it was fueled by the dream of creating a vast oasis, perhaps the biggest in the world located right in the center of a metropolis, a place where everyone can come together and relax, long-time Berliners and recent newcomers alike. A place where everyone can do more or less as they please.

The only things in the park are the two runways through the middle, a few trees here and there and a six-kilometer-long strip of pavement around the outside, with a string of red dots marking the best route for those biking or running the loop.

It has become a utopia for the stressed-out residents of the capital who yearn for the outdoors, for peace and quiet, for expansiveness, for a view of something other than the gray buildings and dour faces that otherwise dominate the cityscape. It has turned into an unregulated place of myriad possibilities in a constantly growing city — right where Adolf Hitler held a massive demonstration of his power on May 1, 1933, a place where warplanes were assembled underground during World War II. And a place where American planes landed during the Berlin Airlift, saving West Berlin from the Soviet blockade.

“That is the fascinating thing about Berlin,” says the Oscar-winning British actress Helen Mirren as she looks out over the field. “This city continually redefines historical places.” For the episodic feature film “Berlin, I Love You,” which will hit the theaters next year, Mirren filmed a part about the refugees who are sheltered at the old airport. “It is fantastic to have such a space where everyone can be themselves. It would be unthinkable in London.”

In fact, a kind of mini-Germany has taken shape at Tempelhofer Feld. It seems just as compartmentalized as the country at large, despite the referendum. It seems that every segment of the population has carved out a section of their own and lives their own reality there, separated from the rest of the world.

In one corner is the dog exercise area, essentially a vast kennel where men and women throw balls for their pets and stand at the edge smoking and watching the action. Then there are the small parcels set aside for the urban gardeners, so small that tears of sympathy well up when you think of the older rental-gardens elsewhere in the city, rejected for their uncoolness by many newer Berliners.

In the southwestern corner of Tempelhofer Feld, a Segway rental company has cordoned off its own section, a necessary measure to teach the lurching tourists how to ride the things. Next door is a go-kart rental. And a place to rent tiny electric cars. Each recreational-vehicle collection behind its own fence.

There is also a piece of asphalt for the oddballs with their drones and remote-control cars. Signs denote where the area for skate-sailing begins and ends. Toward one side of the field is an area reserved for barbecuing, though it isn’t fenced off — nor does it need to be. In the summer, the smoke creates its own kind of barrier.

For a good portion of the year, a huge chunk of the field is blocked off for skylarks, with signs noting that it is the only place left for them to breed. And this fall, a shepherd drove his sheep through the dried out, brown landscape for a week, with two dogs keeping the herd together and not a single fence to block their path. There were only the two runways — the shepherd calling to make sure it was okay before crossing them.

There is one, slightly larger clump of trees that has been taken over by mountain bikers — and it is generally frowned upon when lovers wander into the copse of trees. It is one of the few areas in the park that offers a bit of privacy. It’s for riding, not romance.

There’s also an area for pot smokers, though it isn’t fenced off. In the evenings, the clouds of cannabis smoke are almost as thick as the ones over in the barbecue corner.

There is a small rise that offers the kind of sunset view that you can’t find anywhere else in the city. In the evenings, everyone lies in the grass and watches as the sharply divided areas of the park slowly disappear into the gathering darkness.

Far away, on the other side of the field, are a bunch of white containers, a small village for the refugees. They, too, are behind a fence. But to ensure that residents don’t have to look through the mesh, a one-meter-high catwalk has been built along the fence around the village, allowing for an unobstructed view.

Tempelhof freedom. Berlin’s utopia. Berlin’s empty center. Everyone together, but to each their own.

Source: http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/berlin-seeks-to-redefine-its-present-and-future-a-1243198.html#ref=rss

The post The German Capital at a Crossroads first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

The world was watching on Nov. 9, 1989, when east Berliners climbed over the Berlin Wall in front of the Brandenburg Gate, reuniting a country long divided. But it was about a year later, on Oct. 3, that Germany officially became one again.

On Wednesday, the 28th anniversary of German Unity Day was celebrated with the unveiling of a large-scale photo collage installed by the French street artist known as JR.

The images depict Germans celebrating atop the wall, the word “freedom” scrawled below them, while border guards look on, helpless to act. The gate is the backdrop of the city’s annual Unity Day celebration, which features food and entertainment in the heart of the city, and draws an average of a million visitors a year.

Although this year marks the first year where the wall has been gone for longer than it stood, the country’s divisions are not a thing of the past. Just a few blocks away from the main celebration, a right-wing demonstration with the motto, “Day of the nation,” drew at least several hundred participants while a counter-demonstration nearby attracted a larger crowd, complete with musical performances and plenty of peace flags.

With the repercussions of violent, anti-migrant demonstrations in the East German city of Chemnitz last month still playing out in the highest levels of government, such demonstrations serve as a reminder that Germany, despite its history, is not immune to the social and political fragmentation that many of its European neighbors — and the US — are also experiencing right now.

The far-right nationalist Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) became the first far-right party to enter Parliament in more than half a century last September. It is especially popular in former East Germany — above all, in Saxony — where it garnered more votes than Chancellor Angela Merkel’s ruling party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU).

Its popularity is on the rise: a poll released on Monday indicated that across the country, the AfD is now the country’s second most popular party, albeit by a single point — 18 percent compared to the Social Democratic Party’s 17 percent. The party ran on an anti-Islam platform and its politicians have sparked outrage with anti-Semitic statements — elements that do not bode well for those in Germany who strive for social unification.

Reuters, FILE  In this file photo, East Berlin border guards stand atop the Berlin Wall in front of the Brandenburg Gate, Nov. 11, 1989.

(MORE: 6 arrested for allegedly forming right-wing terror cell in Germany, planning armed attack on foreigners)

Right-wing protests and a counter-demonstration highlight division in Berlin

At around 2 p.m. on Unity Day, a far-right nationalist group called “We are for Germany,” an offshoot of the anti-Islam citizen’s movement, PEGIDA, gathered in front of Berlin’s central train station to march for border controls and a referendum on Germany leaving the EU, among other demands, according to the Facebook event page.

When ABC News arrived on the scene, several hundred mostly male demonstrators had gathered in an area cordoned off by police. Many held German flags, while some had signs attacking Chancellor Angela Merkel, who is a primary target of many right-wing groups that criticize her migration policy. “Chemnitz is everywhere in Germany,” read one sign, perhaps a reference to the anti-immigrant sentiment present during last month’s events in the eastern German city.

Across the police barrier, a small group of counter-protestors held up handmade signs, occasionally chanting “We lost the war” and “There is no right to Nazi propaganda.” At a certain point, the country’s divisions seemed on full display as right-wing demonstrators turned to face the protestors, chanting, “We are many.” Both sides were equally impassioned.

A much larger counterdemonstration showed its own display of strength a short walk to the east, where protesters outnumbered their right-wing counterparts. A diverse range of participants had gathered, many holding rainbow-colored peace flags and “Refugees Welcome” signs, taking in a schedule of performances and speakers before the march began. The demonstration was organized by the Neighborhood Initiative for Civil Courage Against Right-Wing Extremism and “Berlin against Nazis,” and it’s one of several anti-right-wing extremism demonstrations slated to take place in Berlin over the next few weeks.

Jorg Carstensen/dpa Photo via Newscom

(MORE: Right-wing protests fueled by anti-immigrant sentiment continue in Germany)

The memory of Chemnitz

In the east German town in Chemnitz last month, tens of thousands of right-wing demonstrators, from the AfD and various extremist citizen’s groups, such as “Pro Chemnitz,” took to the streets to protest Chancellor Merkel’s handling of immigration policy after the death of a German man at the hands of an Iraqi and Syrian. Large-scale protests — met with equally formidable counter-protests — came after several days of violent protests earlier in the week, where right-wing extremists, mobilized by rumors circulating online, chased after foreigners and hurled xenophobic insults. The events were strongly condemned by Chancellor Merkel.

The demonstrations in Chemnitz revealed divisions at the highest level of government. Hans-Georg Maassen, then the chief of Germany’s federal domestic security agency, challenged the chancellor’s position on Chemnitz in the German newspaper, BILD. In an interview, he questioned the veracity of a video circulating on social media that showed men attacking foreigners, suggesting it may have been fake. While the comments ultimately cost him his position, German media speculated that it had sent a clear message of support to right-wing extremists. Maassen’s motives came under further suspicion when German public broadcaster ARD announced he had shown AfD politicians parts of an agency report before it was officially released.

Despite these divisions, on German Unity Day, JR’s work might still be seen as a reminder that despite having different views, a country can still come together as one.

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Source: https://abcnews.go.com/International/protest-counter-demonstrations-german-unity-day-highlight-countrys/story?id=58254881

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The post German Unity Day marked by divisions as protests take place in Berlin first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

It is incredibly instructive and fascinating to see the lengths to which the Europeans go to take care of their cities. They know that their cities are not merely urban habitats but remnants and living symbols of their nation’s history and heritage. The past is cherished and protected with a passion that is quite alien to us.

Unlike South Asia and the Middle East, where history is taken for granted and forever abused, no landmarks and monuments are abandoned or allowed to go to seed in Europe. Every slice of history is preserved for posterity with great care.

This may explain why European cities like Berlin and London proudly live and breathe the past whereas in a country like India, which is steeped in 5,000 years of history, old Delhi are falling apart and cheap, partisan politics is rampant over globally celebrated icons like the Taj Mahal.

Travelling through the German capital today, it is hard to believe that this is the same city which had been at the heart of action during World War II. Being at the head of Hitler’s unstoppable juggernaut that ravaged the whole of the continent, Berlin witnessed the most catastrophic war in human history.

Nearly 70 million people – about the size of Iran’s population – were killed, not to mention the economic and other incalculable costs of the war. The Nazi monster was eventually defanged, but not before it had wreaked havoc all across Europe and beyond. It took the collective might and firepower of the US, the Soviet Union, Britain and the rest of Europe to bring the Fuhrer to his knees.

The endless Allied bombing during the Great War totally decimated Germany, with the victors partitioning the country and even dividing Berlin right down the middle. Indeed, the wall that separated the two parts of Berlin came to define not just the division of one country but also epitomised the split of the world into two perpetually bickering blocs and a nuclear holocaust that the cold war threatened.

Not surprisingly, when the Berlin Wall came crashing down, under the weight of its own historical contradictions and a changing world, it was not just the Germans who cheered; the world celebrated with them.

The ground had truly shifted. It was the end of an era – literally. So it all began and ended here in Berlin. For decades, Germany had been humiliated and made to pay for Hitler’s appalling crimes against humanity and delusions of grandeur – just as it had happened after the First Great War.

Today, the scars of that destruction and all the evil that took place in this land are hardly visible. What is truly remarkable is the incredible pace at which Germany has managed to spring back to its feet. Like the mythical phoenix, it has risen from its ashes – just as it had risen after World War I – emerging even more powerful and clearly more mature and wiser in its new avatar.

It has not just managed to survive the last great war and the years of humiliation and punishment that followed, but has emerged as the continent’s largest economy – and not just as the leader of post-war Europe but a global power once again. Although thanks to its past, its military wings still remain clipped and, like Japan, it is still largely dependent on the US for its protection and defence, Germany has begun to come into its own slowly but surely.

With the continuing economic meltdown claiming one formidable EU economy after another, the impregnable economic fortress that Europe used to be has suddenly started wobbling slowly but unmistakably. The only port that looks safe in this economic storm is Germany. Even more so after a Britain full of hubris decided to walk out of the EU.

Barring some awfully polite protests demanding higher wages and curbs over immigration, Germany did not witness the chaos that ruled the streets of Europe after the 2008-9 market crash. Its economy remains robust. Indeed, the country has been helping others.

Germany has invested a great deal of hard work and famous German dedication over the decades to reach where it finds itself today. The Germans put in the longest working hours in Europe. The country has moved towards other fronts too. It appears to have learned from its past and is remorseful over what happened to minority groups under the Nazis. There are no attempts to gloss over the past or brush it under the carpet.

So, is the mindset that created the Nazi Frankenstein and sent millions of innocent people to their deaths dead and buried now? The answer is in the negative. It is still seen in the occasional targeting of mosques and Jewish and Muslim cemeteries. Despite the growth of far-right anti-immigrant parties like the AfD (Alternative for Germany), the Right remains in check thanks to the charismatic and powerful leadership of Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Perhaps to compensate for the Nazi crimes against humanity and religious minorities, Merkel’s Germany generously welcomed refugees from conflict zones in the Middle East and Africa, especially the victims of Syrian conflict. In 2015, at the height of the Syrian refugee crisis, Germany accepted at least a million refugees. People opened their homes and churches to accommodate the guests, winning hearts and minds around the world – especially in the Muslim world.

When it comes to safety and a general sense of security for religious and cultural minorities, Germany is perhaps far ahead of many European nations that trumpet themselves as champions of human rights and tolerance.

While the vilification of immigrants, especially Muslims, has acquired dangerous proportions in France, Austria and the Netherlands, Germany has managed to buck this growing trend of demonising the other. The country is home to nearly five million Muslims, a majority of them from Turkey (almost two-thirds); the Balkans; and the North African Arab countries, forming five percent of the 82 million-strong population. For their part, Muslims are at peace with themselves and their adopted nation even as they remain loyal to their tradition and faith. You see Middle Eastern or halal eateries all over Berlin and elsewhere with Germans queuing up for their regulation doner kebab with their characteristic discipline.

A 2009 survey by the German government together with the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) found that Muslims are far more integrated into German society than other European nations. Second-generation German Muslims, especially women, are better educated and more upwardly mobile than their parents as compared with second-generation Muslims in France and Britain. Clearly, when it comes to tolerance and cultural diversity, today’s Germany can teach a lesson or two to the rest of Europe. Adolf must be turning in his grave.

The writer is an independent writer and former newspaper editor.

Email: aijaz.syed@hotmail.com

Source: https://www.thenews.com.pk/print/275818-germany-shows-the-way

The post Germany shows the way first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.