I was sitting on a railing at the bottom of Wilhelmstrasse. And as I was sitting there I got a strong whiff of rocket, rocula. I looked round, but I couldn’t see anyone nearby with a bag or a rucksack that could be holding a big bunch of the stuff. I moved along the railing, people were chaining up their bikes, but again, or still, rocket, and I realised it was growing their under my feet, on the scrubby grass verge along the pavement on Wilhelmstrasse, in 2004, rocket growing wild or gone wild.
I was diagonally opposite Willy Brandt Haus, the headquarters of the Social Democratic Party, which occupies the triangular plot of land where Stresemannstrasse, forks off Wilhelmstrasse. The Wilhelmstrasse, the street of ministries, once as famous as Whitehall or the Quai d’Orsay. And at my feet the wild or the gone wild rocket. The Willy Brandt Haus, completed in 1996, is a six or seven floor grey steel and glass building. Approached from the south, looking towards the apex of the triangle, it doesn’t correspond to the “slice of cake” nickname it’s been given, rather it has something of a nautical appearance. With the flagpole at the top, leaning away over the street, and the big red flag with the letters SPD in white, it reminds me of the stern of a ship.
Further along from where I’m sitting, on the other, west side of Wilhelmstrasse, almost up to the painted red dotted line which marks the line of the Wall – it’s a few hundred yards – blocks of social housing dating from the 1970′s. Four and five storey buildings of greying concrete, built when re-unification of the city was paid no more than lip-service or anyway no one knew what else to do with the spaces and ruins of an area that had been on the edge of the city centre and was now uncomfortably close to the East-West frontier. Furthermore new construction in West-Berlin was heavily subsidised. To my left, on my side of the road, more social housing from the 1960′s(?) and 1970′s stretching almost to the little bit of park before the Landwehr Canal and the elevated railway (actually Line 1 of the underground) running above it.
Just behind me to the right (and at my feet the wild rocket) is a big battered tenement house, the only survivor, on this part of the street, of the pre-Second World War buildings. Difficult to say what it once looked like, there’s only the bare shape, all plasterwork and decoration gone, no courtyard or back buildings. Foot high letters declare this hulk to be Tommy Weissbecker Haus, the name it was given when it was squatted at the end of the 1970′s. Saved from demolition as a result, the squat was legalised long ago. Tommy Weissbecker may not be as famous as Willy Brandt, who is commemorated across the road, but he, too, was a political figure. Weissbecker was part of the urban guerilla group which called itself the June the Second Movement – the 2nd June 1967 was the date of the shooting by police of the student Benno Ohnesorg during a demonstration against a visit to west Berlin of the Shah of Iran. The group made a progression typical of the period, from provocation as the Zentralrat der umherschweifenden Haschrebellen – The Central Council of Roving Hash Rebels – to armed struggle. In March 1972 Weissbecker was the third member of the 2nd June Movement to be killed by the police. Perhaps the best-known member of the group, Georg von Rauch, had already been shot in a brief exchange of fire with police in Berlin in December 1971, and its his name that heads the list of martyrs of police violence that runs down the front of the building. On the sides of Tommy Weissbecker Haus are murals, of some age by now, of riot scenes, displaying that mixture of the petty and the universal which characterised the old West Berlin street fighting Anarchist Left.
There’s a big gateway on one side of the building, now leading nowhere, through which there is more social housing to be seen, green space, children’s play areas, as far as Lindenstrasse and Libeskind’s Jewish Museum. On the upper ground floor there’s a scruffy but quite large bar called Linie 1 which puts on concerts by punk and ska groups from all over Europe. Ageing punk-hippies or hippy punks are sitting on the edge of the balcony above the bar, boots dangling. They’re waiting for the show to begin, just like me and some hundreds of others down on the street and the Turkish families on the balconies opposite.
About two thirds of the way down the side of the Willy Brandt Haus the road is blocked by police vans, there are border troops and white helmeted police in front of and behind the vehicles.
Now we can see the head of the demonstration approaching, at the front the police van with the flashing light and the organisers’ van with the loudspeakers. This is the first of the Monday Demonstrations to be held in Berlin. They began in Magdeburg three weeks ago, followed the week after by Leipzig, Dresden, Halle and so on. The model self-consciously adhered to is that of the demonstrations which preceded the crumbling of the GDR government in 1989. There are two principal sets of sponsors of the Berlin protest: the largely east German Monday Demonstration Group and Attac. In the Monday Group’s column, which is arriving first, the banners and flags are predominantly home-made or PDS or DKP (the latter representing an organisation which maintains the name of the old German Communist Party) or ver.di (the white collar and public service workers’ union) and igm (the engineering and metal workers’ union). The column dominated by Attac and the anti-globalisers has taken a different route. The speeches in front of the police cordon have already begun as the second march merges with the demonstrators already here. (And now no one can smell the wild rocket or the rocket gone wild any more.) There are perhaps 20,000 or more people altogether, not bad for a Monday evening in August, but not the human tidal wave that might cause governments to tremble or at least call cabinet members back from their holidays for emergency meetings to consider concessions.
The Monday Group’s aim is to prevent implementation of the “reform” package known as Hartz IV, as well as the cancellation of earlier measures passed by the Social Democrat-Green Party coalition government. (Peter Hartz, formerly a Volkswagen executive, was the head of the commission that proposed the reforms.) A central plank of Hartz IV is the reduction of unemployment benefit to British levels, more or less, and it’s accompanied by provisions limiting house benefit, compelling the unemployed to take low paid jobs and so on. Attac wanted to link opposition to the cuts to a wider critique of globalisation and neo-liberal economics.
Hostility to Hartz IV is particularly strong in former East Germany. After years of high unemployment (after much of East Germany’s industry was shut down or collapsed) there’s a widespread feeling that the unification process has been a betrayal. One can understand the Monday demonstrations as one manifestation – another is to leave: the population of the old East Germany has fallen by two million since the Wall came down and yet official unemployment figures still stand at only a little under 20% – of the disillusion common in post-Communist Central Europe in the new millennium. What was hoped for, expected, wanted was the extension eastwards of the Western European social democracy of the post-Second World War decades; what the ‘new Europeans’ got was more or less rigorously and comprehensively applied neo-liberalism. The brutal dialectic was this: There was no need for social democratic or welfare state concessions any more, the Communist threat was gone.
But back to the demonstration: The ‘old’ or ‘oldest’ Left took charge of the microphones here in the Wilhelmstrasse, and almost immediately showed why Attac had wanted to keep a certain distance (they had spoken at the start of the double march at Alexanderplatz). There was an attempt to get the ‘masses’ to sing “Auf, auf zum Kampf” (On, on to the struggle) with its famous refrain “Dem Karl Liebknecht haben wir geschworen, der Rosa Luxemburg reichen wir die Hand… Wir fürchten nicht, ja nicht, die Donner der Kanonen” (We swore to Karl Liebknecht, our hands reach out to Rosa Luxemburg… We do not, do not fear the thunder of the cannon). The crowd was good-natured and a little excited by the small success of the march, but no more than a handful sang along with the hoarse voice coming out of the speakers and the singing faded away before the second chorus. This was before the Attac column arrived, their feet and music keeping time to a different rhythm.
There were a number of speakers. I didn’t pay much attention to who they were. They represented tendencies at once opaque to me and all too familiar and in any case speeches through microphones at demonstrations by speakers whom one cannot even see don’t allow for nuanced argument. The messages were altogether traditional: workers of hand and brain without whom… and who should… go into the workplaces and the unemployment offices… My ears pricked up, however, as Käthe Reichel was announced: a young member of the Berliner Ensemble in the 1950′s, she had been one of the last of Bert Brecht’s mistresses or affairs. She spoke at greater length than the others, I think, in that sub-Brecht, Berliner Ensemble harsh rolling r kind of a way. She said: “capitalism with a human face is impossible” and “we want to be able to afford to go to the theatre again” and “In the German Democratic Republic we never needed to make use of the right to demonstrate because we were never unemployed.” There were cheers and clapping.
And who was demonstrating on that evening in late summer? A lot of middle-aged and some elderly former East Germans, most not with the look of ex-functionaries, but a lot of young people too, not many Turks, but some, otherwise a cross-section of plebian and radical Berlin, east and west. And, as always in Berlin, there were hundreds of cyclists, arriving, leaving, pausing before going on. I thought of the spinning bicycle wheels in ‘Kuhle Wampe’, the Brecht/Slatan Dudow film about the unemployed in Berlin in 1931. It wasn’t really surprising. How many time zones could one have walked into or through in a few hundred yards on the one line of longitude of Wilhelmstrasse that evening? Three, perhaps even four?
*
That was in August 2004. The human waves of protest did not materialise, the pattern of 1989 was not to be repeated. For better and worse the demonstrators were protesting against an elected government, demonstrations in western cities remained small, and after a few weeks the marches were called off, although regular Monday protests against cuts in benefits and social and welfare provisions have continued.
What is evident in retrospect is that the Monday demonstrations were the prelude to the formation of a new national left wing party in Germany – Die Linken, the Left. Whether, in the longer term, the new party will be able to transform the interests of dissident trade unionists, ex-SPD members, the former Communists of East Germany, and homeless Marxists into an effective political force remains to be seen. If it is able to do so, then the formation of the new party (in 2006) could turn out to have been at least as momentous for radical politics in Europe as the entry of the Greens into the West German parliament more than two decades ago.