Berlin Wants to Silence the Potse Before It Even Gives It a Home

On 16 September 2026, the lease on the Zollgarage in Berlin-Tempelhof runs out. That is where Potse, Berlin's self-managed youth centre, has camped since 2021, after it was pushed out of its home of nearly fifty years on Potsdamer Straße. No replacement space is on the table. The district promised months ago to sort out an extension. It didn't. Now the collective is told, informally, that it doesn't have to leave on the 16th — but nobody will put that in writing, and the eviction-waiver clause the Potse was forced to sign to move into the Zollgarage means that if they stay past the lease without a new contract, the district doesn't even need a court order to throw them out. It can happen immediately.

This is not incompetence. It is how Berlin's housing and youth-services bureaucracy manages any project it would rather not deal with: starve it of certainty, let panic do the work, and if the project survives anyway, quietly make sure the next version of it is smaller and quieter. A new purpose-built "Haus der Jugend" for Potse and its sister project Drugstore is technically approved and under construction at Werner-Voß-Damm — for 2030. That's four to five years of limbo the collective has to survive first, on month-to-month promises from officials who won't answer phone calls.

And even the future they're dangling comes with strings. CDU district politician Frank Luhmann campaigned this year on posters reading "Gartenstadt statt Punkrock" — garden city instead of punk rock — explicitly against housing Potse and Drugstore at the new site. The district itself, per the youth centre's own account, wants the collective to stay "silenced" even once it has a permanent building: no loud events, nothing that disturbs the neighbours who'd rather these kids weren't visible at all. Potse's own members describe what's actually at stake in plain terms: a space where queer teenagers and kids who don't fit anywhere else can exist without being managed by paid social workers, run instead by the young people themselves — from booking bands to filing the collective's own tax return.

This is the same mechanism that hollowed out Rigaer94, Liebig34, and a dozen other self-organised Berlin spaces before it: not always a police raid with cameras rolling, but a slow procedural squeeze — no lease, no clarity, no obligation on the state's part, total precarity on the project's side. It is gentrification wearing a clipboard. A self-governed youth space that gives queer and marginalised kids room to organise themselves is, to a district administration optimised for property value and quiet streets, a problem to be managed out of existence by attrition rather than force.

Solidarity here isn't abstract. Berlin district assemblies respond to public pressure faster than they respond to their own promises — that's precisely why the Bezirksamt keeps stalling instead of just saying no outright. The fight over four or five years of a youth centre's survival is not a side issue to the antifascist project; it's the same fight, fought in a different register — over who gets to take up space in this city, and on whose terms.

Sources

nd-aktuell: Jugendzentrum Potse muss weiter kämpfen

rbb24: Jury kürt Architektenentwurf für neues Jugendzentrum in Tempelhof-Schöneberg

Potse (selbstverwaltetes Jugendzentrum) — Raumkampf updates