Berlin illusions — Faultline

City of jugglers. A special performance by an acrobat art bike group on Pariser Platz in front of the Brandenburg Gate on October 12, 1929

Sunday evening, September 6th, 2026. The first projection of the state elections in Saxony-Anhalt is here. The AfD sees this at 44.4 percent, but an absolute majority still seems possible. The cell phone is constantly pinging. Colleagues from Magdeburg and Halle, who hoped until the end that things wouldn't be quite as bad, are looking for encouragement. The familiar social media bubble is raging. However, the analogue world seems unmoved this evening in Berlin. There is a good mood on the U1 towards Schlesisches Tor. Young expats wearing Pali scarves chatter in English and Spanish about favorite bars and favorite drinks. In front of the vegan pizzeria, people took note of the projection, but were mainly happy about the respectable success of the Greens and the clap for the Chancellor. The Kreuzberg neighbors also remain relaxed – tenor: “These Ossis again. Luckily we live in Berlin.«

Yes, Berlin. Capital city. cosmopolitan city. "Poor but sexy," as the then governing mayor Klaus Wowereit (SPD) postulated in 2003, but above all: the epitome of left-liberal tolerance, a bit grubby and tacky, too, a true paradise for everyone who is looking for happiness in life apart from building a house, children and a career, who don't care about the origins, skin color, gender and sexuality of their fellow human beings, just like their clothing style and hairstyle, in the best sense of the word. The focus is on New York, Paris and London, not on the Marche and Börden of East Germany. Right-wing extremist resentments don't take root here as easily as elsewhere. There's something true about all of this, and yet it's an illusion. It always has been. Even in those times when the city's freedom was particularly celebrated.

In Kreuzberg, lost tourists were traditionally greeted with egg throwing and the police only dared to enter certain corners in barred, dented personnel carriers.

Just think of the 1920s, when Berlin became an international art and party metropolis, while at the same time marauding SA troops roamed the streets. Or the years of the Wall, when West Berlin first gave rise to the so-called student revolt and then, from 1979, a squatter scene, from which a dark, radical left-wing subculture blossomed in the 1980s, which is still celebrated in pop songs and books today. In Kreuzberg, lost tourists were traditionally greeted with egg throwing and the police only dared to enter certain corners in barred, dented personnel carriers.

Despite all the romanticization, one should not forget that the majority of the city always behaved differently, the changing SPD mayors of the sixties and seventies took brutal action against left-wing students and squatters and Berlin was ruled by the CDU from 1981, first by Richard von Weizsäcker and from 1984 by Eberhard Diepgen. Loyal on both sides: Interior Senator Heinrich Lummer, member (and later honorary chairman) of the right-wing extremist association “The German Conservatives” and ironclad representative of law and order. This was well received outside of Kreuzberg.

It was not until 1989 that a social democrat, Walter Momper, came to power again, whose red-green Senate revived the myth of “left-wing Berlin” in the West German press. A fitting picture of this was provided by the approximately 20,000 Berliners who, on November 10, 1989, the day after the opening of the Berlin Wall, mercilessly booed CDU Chancellor Helmut Kohl as he spoke from the balcony of Schöneberg City Hall, especially when he sang the national anthem together with Momper, Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher (FDP) and other political grandees. It seemed so enchantingly anti-nationalist that the punk band Abwärts even pressed a recording onto their maxi single “Sonderzug zur Endstation”.

Berlin romantics are less fond of remembering why a similar number of people marched from the Ku'damm to the Schöneberg town hall in a protest march at the beginning of the same year. Because the reason for this demonstration doesn't fit at all with the legend of left-wing, cosmopolitan Berlin: What cost Diepgen his re-election was, above all, the surprising success of a new party to the right of the CDU. Similar to the later AfD, these “Republicans” were formed from members of the CDU and CSU who did not yet consider Chancellor Kohl's policies xenophobic enough. Led by the right-wing extremist journalist Franz Schönhuber, they promptly won a whopping 7.5 percent in the election to the House of Representatives.

It is often forgotten that the so-called baseball bat years took place not only in the East German provinces, but also in Berlin.

Just an industrial accident? In the new elections that were necessary in November 1990 (the Alternative List, as the Greens in Berlin were still called at the time, had called off the coalition because of the brutal evacuation of the squatted houses on Mainzer Strasse), the Republicans did not manage to get back into the House of Representatives. In return, Diepgen returned as Governing Mayor for another nine years and brought with him a worthy successor to Lummer in Dieter Heckelmann (CDU) in the interior department. The lawyer Heckelmann, until then President of the Free University of Berlin, was an ardent anti-communist and was so closely linked to right-wing extremists that he was stripped of responsibility for the Berlin Office for the Protection of the Constitution in 1994 and left office two years later.

Nevertheless: When you think of Berlin in the 1990s, most people first think of the wild days of illegal techno clubs in the ruins of the historic city center, the constant parties, the drugs, the seemingly endless fun. It is often forgotten that the so-called baseball bat years took place not only in the East German provinces, but also in Berlin. That Nazis marched in SA costumes in Lichtenberger Weitlingkiez and that large parts of East Berlin were a no-go area for leftists, queer people and people of other skin colors for years. In Friedrichshain there were repeated street battles between Nazis and leftists, and even in Prenzlauer Berg, which was more left-wing, there were right-wing extremist bars within the S-Bahn ring.

As in the rest of East Germany, the violent excesses only subsided around the turn of the millennium, when the first generation of perpetrators founded families and began to occupy positions in civil society, thereby creating the right-wing breeding ground without which the rapid triumph of the AfD from 2013 would not have been possible. But Berlin was able to feel cosmopolitan and liberal again under the first avowedly gay mayor Wowereit, first in a red-green coalition and then in a red-red coalition. The city was only sexy in the tourist marketing of its long-zombified club and cultural scene, but it was actually so poor that the Senate sold off masses of municipal apartments and land at far below value, thus ushering in the golden age of the real estate industry.

Nowadays, the last remnants of the morbid charm that Berlin once had have disappeared. The cityscape is dominated by profit-oriented uniform buildings, against which even the architectural crimes of the 1990s still seem ambitious. A countless number of new hotels are directing the flow of tourists right into the last trendy neighborhood. The city is no longer poor, only its residents, who are plagued by horrendous rents, are poor.

In Kreuzberg, which continues to be decried as left-wing, the right-wing populist medium “Nius” doesn’t even need police protection. The left-wing Israel solidarity bar “Bajszel” in Neukölln needs that instead.

The right-wing populist media Nius and Apollo News have settled in Kreuzberg, which is still decried as left-wing, and they don't even need continuous police protection. Instead, the left-wing Israel-solidarity bar “Bajszel” in Neukölln needs it because of recurring attacks from the left-wing authoritarian and Islamist camp. The AfD, whose electoral success in Saxony-Anhalt leaves many here so strangely cold, is already at 18 percent in surveys in Berlin - that would be double its result in 2023. This is hardly discussed. People have long since gotten used to the fact that a cosmopolitan, liberal Berlin only exists within the S-Bahn ring, while outside of it lie the AfD's strongholds - in Marzahn-Hellersdorf, Treptow-Köpenick or Spandau. A dangerous ignorance when you consider that the CDU traditionally hardly scores points in the inner-city districts and yet still governs the city, because 70 percent of Berlin's population lives outside the S-Bahn ring.

It is doubtful whether the election on September 20th will change this ignorance. The Left Party's lead in the opinion polls had temporarily shrunk again, and if the CDU does end up in the lead, the potential coalition partners SPD and Greens will probably serve there rather than get involved with a party that cannot get its anti-Semitic district associations in Neukölln and Mitte under control and whose youth organization is more interested in the freedom of Palestine (whatever you mean by that) than in a change of power in Berlin. If that were to happen, everything would continue as usual: no serious regulation of the rental housing market, ghettoization of poverty, growing homelessness, internationalization only through the influx of high-earning expats while at the same time provincialization through cultural marketing buoyed by anthemic German pop and a bit of law and order so that tourists from AfD-led federal states also feel comfortable in their capital, even if it will still be a few years before their favorite party takes part in governing here.

To conclude on a positive note: You can now also go out to eat very well in Kreuzberg and Neukölln. At least if you can afford the fine dining restaurants that open there every week. If not: Curry 36 now has branches everywhere, the sausage is now organic and English is spoken.