City of Blood [Part II]

"Power doesn't come from a badge or a weapon. Power comes from lying. Lying big and getting the whole damn world to play with you. Once everyone agrees with what they know in their hearts isn't true, you've got them by the balls."

Senator Roark – Sin City

Every city has its own personal hell. Some say there is no hell, just as there is no paradise. One may agree with the latter, perhaps even with a sigh of regret, but the existence of hell itself cannot really be disputed. The place where it exists is not precisely defined, over the years, even decades, the settings and the protagonists change, but it is always there, every single day that this city has seen. In Berlin this place is now the Kottbusser Tor, the Kotti.

It wasn't always like this, quite the opposite. When you used to arrive at Kotti on the subway, which rises from the depths at Nollendorfplatz and flows into an elevated railway line, your heart would widen. No hypocritical splendor like in the city, the last inspectors, who were still traveling in uniformed groups at the time, had given up at Gleisdreieck at the latest. That was an unwritten law. Tickets are not checked in Kreuzberg. If the other side wanted to violate this, they always had to bring a few dozen cops with them to protect the inspectors in their blue uniforms from the anger and anger of angry passengers. However, the whole thing was very labor-intensive, always caused a huge commotion and was therefore only carried out a few times a year and usually at times when the notorious fare evaders were still in bed or just downing their first coffee.

The Kottbusser Tor wasn't always ugly, but what the war had left of its old rows of houses was largely demolished in the early 1970s to make room for a motorway and soulless new buildings. The NKZ was built in the north of the square (the 'New Kreuzberg Center' is simply called 'the NKZ' by everyone in the middle of Germany without contradiction), the high-rise complex was later intended to block out the noise of the motorway. So the Kotti has never been pretty since I can remember, but it was the heart of 36. The most important demonstrations and riots by the squatters began here and when the shift had already been long on May 1st because the cops had brought everything under control, bottles were still flying towards the law enforcement officers and one or two honest fist fights were still being had with them. The Kotti was always supposed to be “pacified”, in the 80s the cops repeatedly took massive action against the people, which depended on the Kotti. This gave rise to, among other things, the legendary “Punker's Breakfast”, which of course did not begin until Sunday at 12:00 p.m. and to which not only a few hundred punks gathered but also a number of sympathizers, which then led to significant differences of opinion with the hundreds of people who had arrived.

And while Oranienstrasse and Lausitzer Platz have long since “fallen”, although this defeat can be attributed less to the cops than to the general attack of gentrification, until a few years ago the Kotti remained something of a “resistant place”. Even in the late autumn of the last decade, the clashes between locals and the cops made headlines across Berlin. The trigger was the brutal arrest of a suspected bicycle thief, which led to solidarity among a large crowd, predominantly migrant residents and owners of small shops led flower pots, bottles and all sorts of other objects flying towards the cops. I had just moved back to 36 from the sedate 61 the weekend before and witnessed the events. And even during the years of the Corona state of emergency, people smiled mischievously at each other when they crossed the square without wearing a mask, contrary to the official orders, which led to the cops positioning several police vehicles at the Kotti every evening, whose crews harassed the few passers-by who dared to take a breath of fresh air shortly before midnight without pointlessly wearing an FFP2 mask.

But Corona is over and thanks to the government's careful confinement, we survived it and now the apocalyptic riders have descended on the Kotti. Crowds of tourists, newly arrived hipsters and the party mob swarm the square, the junkies and homeless people are almost lost in the masses, everyone looks past the misery, no one is interested in anyone else and at some point they will simply step over the corpses to create the best background for their selfies. Social cannibalism in ecstasy. The Ballermann reigns supreme on any given occasion and the fact that large parts of the demo on May 1st are stuck at Heinrichplatz for hours because the TikTok PdL upgraded their boring stage show for “Labor Day” with Ikkimel almost sums up the general development well. In a world of bubbles that are no longer able to communicate with each other about the fundamentals of the world, the event replaces touch and social relationships. “We are experiencing the return of surface infatuation,” Christian Klar wrote from prison in the 1990s.

"Since then, a century of devastation has sufficiently illustrated how right Kafka was in all things, and almost alone. First and foremost, everyone must keep access to what they still feel well barricaded. And one is well advised to support one another in this laudable endeavor - which, however, in no way prevents one from leading one's life dependent on the rumors that emerge from the forbidden basement. After all, one has Mutilation has never prevented the occurrence of phantom pain. The prevailing social order is more than ever a conspiracy of the mutilated – an objective, structural, spontaneous, universal conspiracy.”

Conspiratorial manifesto

In 'City of Blood' the vampires are no longer the figments of our unacknowledged primal fears and projections, they are just a clan doing business and striving for political influence. Just as printed money no longer had any real value after the collapse of National Socialism and was traded in cigarettes, coffee and valuables, the blood in 'City of Blood' replaces the printed paper. The blood bank as Fort Knox. From there it is not a daring turn to the Marxist analysis of the commodity-like penetration of all areas of life, indeed of life itself these days – in the world in which we live and survive. The subjects themselves suspect this, if they do not even know it. This knowledge and half-knowledge produces an incredible amount of individual and collective fear. And fear, as everyone knows, has incredible power. The mature attitude confronts this fear, explores its social causes and connections, looks for resolution, and produces revolutionary thinking and action. However, in the omnipresent social regression, the overwhelming majority of subjects seek refuge in projection and delegation. The Corona state of emergency was the general staff exercise of this synthesis of paranoid fear of extinction and the delegation of salvation to an overpowering state. This also unites left-wing populism and right-wing populism: the “conquest” of the state as the goal. It doesn't really matter who is the mayor of Berlin, just as it doesn't play a strategic role that Italy has been ruled by Meloni since 2022.All center-left governments before her have passed more repressive and anti-worker laws and decrees than the leader of the MSI's successor party. Everything else is regulated by the market.

The media accompaniment to the possible takeover of government by the PdL is just as much a smokescreen as the possible takeover of government itself. It doesn't matter at all, the balance of power in the social antagonism doesn't change by a single µ, or at most to our disadvantage, because the whole participatory nonsense is becoming even more widespread. After all the mass mobilization via signature list, the last straw is the parliamentary option. We saw something similar a few years ago in France, where the “popular front” was conjured up from the mothballs of history on the horizon of a possible electoral success for Marie Le Pen’s “Rassemblement National”. It is no coincidence that the “electoral victory” of the “Popular Front” coincided with the end of the social movements that had characterized the last decade. Against the general regression, which has also reached the remnants of antagonistic voices in this country in not insignificant parts, it is important to assert oneself with a discourse that adheres to the fundamental principle of abolishing the commodification of all social relationships as a premise. In general, as in specific struggles and social conflicts.

"On the basis of capital, the whole can only be understood from the part. Knowledge is tied to the struggle. Only those who truly hate truly know."

Mario Tronti

will be continued…

https://kontrapolis.info/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/HTZ09raXIAA5bf2.jpeg...decoding="async" src="https://kontrapolis.info/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/HTZ09raXIAA5bf2-150x...width="150" height="150" alt="HTZ09raXIAA5bf2.jpeg" style="display:inline-block" />

web address: https://kontrapolis.info/18712/author/group: Sebastian LotzerTopics: Social strugglesfeed-date: Tuesday, October 6, 2026 - 08:00