City of Blood Part [Part IV] – Special Edition: Gen Z Rules – Phase 2

“I'm so homesick for the Kurfürstendamm, Berlin's pace, activity and fanfare. If only I had an apartment, even if it were so new, I'll stay in Berlin, true to my old love.” Hildegard Knef Homesick

“I’m so homesick for Kurfürstendamm

Berlin pace, activity and fanfare

If I had an apartment somewhere, even if it were still so new

I stay Berlin, true to my old love”

Hildegard Knef – Homesick for the Kurfürstendamm

"The question is who in the group of proletarian tenants has even less to lose than others, that is, who are already fed up with enough, are so impoverished that they have no choice but to take up the fight. These are the families with large children, these are the families threatened by expulsion, these are the young people belonging to the proletariat and subproletariat."

Ulrike Meinhof and others – Preliminary strategy paper Märkischesviertel¹ (1970)

Well then, the class struggle is back in the city. After the “housing question”, which for decades represented the most direct expression of social antagonism in the form of “housing fights”, was put through the meat grinder by the eternal participation circus of “tenant activists” from “Kotti and Co” to “DW expropriate” and the identitarian behavior of the Berlin scene until in the end everyone was just running to the ballot box to bring the PdL into government Vague antagonism again on the streets.

The events when the GenZ revolt first hit German soil, the clashes with the cops in Prenzlberg, the riots in Hamburg's Bahnhofsviertel and on Frankfurt's noble mile, the various nationwide Halloween skirmishes with the cops cannot be understood without at least a vague idea of the new composition of the class and the social devastation of the Corona state of emergency. As the anonymous authors of the Conspiracy Manifesto² wrote: “We want revenge!”. The riots³ that spread across the entire Berlin city area at the turn of the year 22/23 and demonstrated the police apparatus were exactly that: a need for revenge from the bottom of our hearts. Enjoyed immediately, suddenly and cold. The fact that the German left and anarchists largely did not understand these actions or reinterpreted them as a purely 'anti-racist' response has to do with both their unmaterialistic understanding of "doing politics" and their unresolved involvement in the orchestral staging of the Corona state of emergency.

So now they are building Molotovs again in the Märkischesviertel [4] and are taking on the cops. And a touch of France wafts through the cold, gray streets of Berlin, where the luxury shops on Kurfürstendamm were holed up behind plywood panels on Halloween. But the ghost hasn't passed them by yet. Under the motto 'Gen Z rules – Phase 2' is now called for a gathering at Charlottenburg's Savignyplatz at 5:00 p.m. on November 14th; the elevator will move from there over the eastern Kurfürstendamm to the Halensee S-Bahn station.

“J’ai deux passions

La fanfare, la revolution

Vive les blocages, les sabotages

Les ZAD and les manifs sauvages”

So they are currently singing in tear gas in France and of course it would be presumptuous to compare the pre-revolutionary mood in the motherland of the uprisings with the situation here, but in view of the two options that are currently on the table: a right-wing populist/fascist conquest of state power or the defense of the status quo in the broad "anti-fascist front" extending very far into the bourgeois camp – Every social irritation that breaks with this dichotomy and creates a space beyond it should not be underestimated. The real misery is that everything just goes on like this, even the spokesman for the climate collapse prep bubble, who is either an anarchist or a Marxist, is now calling for active support of the real political power option of a PdL-led state government and this is exactly where all the talk about the “unstoppable catastrophe” is reduced to absurdity. Not because we are not heading towards a climatic catastrophe, but because the only perspective to stop this catastrophe is the reconstruction of a revolutionary imaginary and its material implementation. Not the real setting up in the conditions, no matter what radical coat of paint you give your personal survival kit.

"We cannot ignore this epochal step and what is at stake - of which the States and the ruling classes are fully aware -: war is the ripe fruit of the contradictions of imperialism, which, however, manifest themselves as opposites, as subjectively adopted and constructed strategies. It is not possible to turn one's back on war - an illusion that perpetuates the naivety of an exodus that never happened - but one can instead begin to reflect on the possible end of capitalism, that will not come about through internal contradictions, but only through the political will of those who are organizing to overthrow it. This will actually overcome the idiocy spread by many, including Fisher and Žižek, according to which ‘it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.’ Capitalism is crumbling before our eyes, but it will only be overthrown by a political initiative.”

Maurizio Lazzarato – From interstate war to class war [5]

The ‘city Indians’ and the revolting children from Zurich and Berlin in “Concrete that doesn’t burn” wrote on the walls and in their angry pamphlets at the end of the 70s and beginning of the 80s “It’s always war in the cities”. They had inherited an imagination that had lost and abandoned the revolutionary perspective, however carelessly. They had no historical horizon to draw, they only had their anger at this broken world and the irrepressible will not to go down without a fight. Now a new, angry generation is entering the stage of history. In the midst of the exploitation crisis, the debt bubbles that are the engines of the current and future wars (not some crazy or monstrous individuals or mafia structures with however much power, as the dominant left-wing narrative wants to sell us), they set up their barricades, take revenge for their brothers shot by the cops, they loot the stores of luxury brands and put class war back on the agenda. Hence the extreme brutality of the police against young people, even children, even by French standards. Hence the agitation against the protagonists of Halloween night in Frankfurt and beyond. The politics of preventive traumatization, as the companions of the Invisible Committee say in a new interview [6]. A war on bodies. A war against souls. They continue to stand on the abyss of history, they know that, we know that. There will be no escape capsules to a Mars colony. And it takes someone to plunge them into this historical abyss. An organized force.

In the titular film adaptation of the story 'City of Blood', people already live in the dystopia that awaits us if we fail. The bed of the Spree has dried up, there is a dull, life-threatening heat, the city is ruled as an “emancipatory island” in dark brown-blue Germany by a kind of red-red-green coalition. But while cheap “progressive” slogans are intended to appease the sweating, suffering poor masses, an urban elite is having a good time under a protective heat dome that extends just above the part of Charlottenburg in which the Kurfürstendamm is also located. What a fitting script these days! Either way, we are currently experiencing neither “the end of history” nor the “end of days”. No matter who wants to foist this on us for whatever motives. In reality, we are experiencing deeply turbulent times in which everything, absolutely everything, seems to be drifting towards instability, what an opportunity.

“Optimism is the most extreme form of audacity.” – Anatole France

See you on November 14th on the Kudamm.

Sebastian Lotzer – Berlin Kreuzberg, November 7, 2026

Footnotes

1 Preliminary strategy paper Märkischesviertel

https://socialhistoryportal.org/raf/308381

2 Conspiratorial Manifesto

https://we.riseup.net/assets/820944/manifest.pdf

3 Berlin greets Athena – S. Lotzer