Living and Voting in Berlin: The City, the Garbage and the Neighborhood

The individual is a crossroads, the ethnologist Claude Lévi-Strauss once said, not a fixed entity, but an event, a framework in which different movements meet. The spirit of a city, what defines it, is perhaps that: a crossroads.

Now there are very different intersections in Berlin. There are these mobility dreams cast in concrete and asphalt in which Berlin recreates Los Angeles (West) or has prepared for the marches of the working class (East). But there are also these cozy, quaint corners, often just a turn away, where you can watch people squinting in the sun.

It always gets interesting when the two collide. For example, along the main streets on which people who live on the outskirts go to the center, to the doctor, to the office or to the theater, and there meet the city center residents with cargo bikes or beer. Some just want to get somewhere quickly, while others want to live here, chat, and raise children. At an intersection like this you can watch life's ideas collide. Living in the countryside, but with the possibilities of the metropolis, versus living in the middle of it, but with quality of life - they just don't fit together.

You can see it in the electoral districts: green and red in the middle, black and blue around it. Elections in Berlin are always about who can enforce their life plan - the outer districts (free travel, multi-lane, development of Tempelhofer Feld) or the inner city residents (30 speed limit, play streets, pedestrian lights).

But recently there was a burst water pipe at the corner of Kolonnenstrasse and Crellestrasse, which is the intersection of a thoroughfare and a neighborhood street. The fountain sprayed ten meters high. Cars stopped, passers-by stopped, everyone looked. And when the onrushing fireman turned off the pipe with a huge hydrant wrench, everyone applauded together and was in a good mood - that is also part of the spirit of this city.

To a certain extent - or at least you can imagine it that way - it was also Comic Relief after the AfD vote increase. Sometimes things actually happen at intersections. Then things get lost again. Dirk Knipphals

Berlin, you old shithole. City of littered green spaces, overflowing trash cans, pigeon-covered bridges and pee-filled corners. Unhygienic, neglected, uncultivated. Nobody cares, everyone does what they want and there is no money either.

The lament about a mangy, ungovernable Berlin is always also about urbanity as such. Kästner's "Fabian" mapped the city in 1931 as follows: "Crime resides in the east, racketeering in the center, misery in the north, fornication in the west, and ruin in all directions." The contemporary decline of this moral suffering in the city remains: garbage. He is omnipresent in the election campaign. A clean and safe city is not only promised in the law-and-order milieu (“There is something clean in every beginning,” CDU). The Greens (“Is this art, or who will get rid of it?”) and even the Left (“End the garbage chaos”) are also joining in on the big cleanup.

Is it really just rubbish lying around that is meant here? Paris, San Francisco and Naples are dirtier in many places. You can get closer to the matter with a famous quote from CDU clean man Klaus Landowsky: "Where there is garbage, there are rats, and where there is neglect, there is rabble. This must be eliminated in the city." This bluntness is no longer appropriate.

But the school of thought is not dead: Johanna Adorján, who recently wrote a Philippika against the neglect of Berlin in the Süddeutsche, significantly attributes her disgust to stinking homeless people, run-down drug addicts and worn-out nightlife figures. They are the cause of the puddles of urine in the subway car, the puddles of vomit in the entrance to the building, and the syringes. They are people and they live here. After the downfall comes stupidity, says Kästner. Nina Apin

Two police officers stand guard in front of the New Synagogue on Oranienburger Strasse in Berlin-Mitte. The restored two-tower facade with the dome, visible from afar and glittering in the sunlight, is one of the landmarks in the eastern part of the city. Built in the 19th century, the synagogue was desecrated and largely destroyed by the SA in 1938. It was only in 1988 that the GDR, in its final phase, decided through the New Synagogue Berlin - Centrum Judaicum Foundation to reconstruct parts of the building in order to make Jewish culture visible here again. The work was completed in the Federal Republic in the mid-1990s and the site was made publicly accessible again with a permanent exhibition on history that was revised in 2018.

After the attack by an Islamist Syrian in 2019, security measures were strengthened. However, since October 7, 2023, the attack on Israel by Hamas and other jihadists and the resulting Gaza war, there has also been an increasing threat in Berlin. Since September 8th, proceedings against a seven-member Hamas cell, some of whose members lived in Berlin, have been taking place before the State Security Senate of the Chamber Court in Berlin. They had built extensive weapons caches and were said to have planned far-reaching attacks against Jewish, Israeli and pro-Israel people and institutions.

The New Synagogue in Berlin appears to be relatively well protected thanks to additional bollards and the entrance lock. Two additional temporary exhibitions are currently on view there: “Forms of Alignment,” conceptual art by Jason Hendrik Hansma, Michaela Meise, Katja Pilipenko, Ariel Schlesinger and Claudia Wieser; as well as the video and sound installation “Pride and Prejudice,” curated by Jonathan Guggenberger, which presents “miniatures of the Jewish present in Europe.”

Nico Beyer's non-folkloristic short films illustrate in a stimulating way that there is no one “typically Jewish” background in life. The commonality is formed through historical experience and culture from the many diverse individuals. And through dark humor. As the baker Zeevi (“best pita in Berlin”) puts it in one of the short videos: There is a solution for every problem - every solution was initially a problem. This is true even though Zeevi talks about changes in Neukölln that meant he could no longer really feel comfortable there.

Oh, Neukölln, you district in which neo-Stalinists, Islamists and anti-Semites took over the Die Linke party and, together with the rapper Dahabflex, combined the “fight against capitalism” with calls for terrorism at an election party: “Yalla, yalla Intifada, West Bank, Palestine, Gaza”, “Death to the IDF” - an anti-Semitism that brought prominent left-wing politicians such as Klaus Lederer and Elke Breitenbach out of the party. And yet the left-wing activists are supposed to be concerned about affordable housing? The bollards in front of Jewish institutions are unlikely to decrease in the near future. Andreas Fanizadeh

Why is it cool to ride a bike in Paris and not in Berlin? Why is there something sublime about gliding past the Louvre on your bike in a flow with the many others on Rue de Rivoli? It feels smoothly metropolitan, even with a child seat, on a cargo bike, with a helmet, i.e. with the generally more staid attributes of the bike.

In Berlin, on the other hand, you struggle quite alone, even with the best bike, on the broken paths, squeeze yourself sideways onto the huge street axes that are only sparsely used by cars, past a castle that is also fat, but unfortunately not as truly baroque as the Louvre. Still, you can't argue that the harsh backdrop of Berlin is any less cool for cycling than the splendor of Paris.

What makes the difference in Paris is that the city under Mayor Anne Hidalgo has simply turned its entire inner-city street system, which has been pressed into the asphalt for ages, so that cyclists, pedestrians and drivers have to get along together.

Of course, this is not always peaceful, even in Paris there is a battle of right versus left, car versus bike. But floating on your bike in the middle of the streets of this picture-postcard city center is a kind of universal right there.

In Berlin, on the other hand, it is more the right of the individual, i.e. the individual districts, and abruptly stops at their borders. How you cycle in Berlin, whether in a car-free neighborhood next to flower meadows or in a slalom around double-parked SUVs, is above all an expression of the political coloring of a district.

Even the most neutral cyclists are forced to take a political stance by Berlin's small-state transport planning system. Especially in a front that has been heated up by the election campaign: Are you also “green”? Yes or no? How relaxed. Sophie Jung

Voting decisions are often made due to dissatisfaction and bad moods. Can one demand more personal responsibility from the sovereign than to let one's gut feeling guide them to the ballot box when casting a vote? When it comes to making jokes, Berlin has a long tradition, as evidenced by the anecdote of the writer Heinrich Heine, who, while visiting Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in Berlin around 1821, expressed enthusiasm about the constellation of stars outside the window, whereupon the philosopher dismissed it with the words that stars were just “a shining leprous in the sky”.

My assessment of the Berlin Left Party is similarly poor, whose electoral incentives remain closed to me despite the appeals of various players in the music business. Whenever I am on the verge of classifying Die Linke as a social democratic party of the old style, it reliably shoots me in the face (as with the appearance of the rapper Dahabflex at an election campaign event).

Their supporters stubbornly stick to their uncritical stance towards the party, and every volte, no matter how ludicrous, is forgiven: I was told that anyone – like me – who considers the anti-Semitism of the Neukölln district association to be unacceptable is “aligning with the right-wingers” and pursuing “their agenda”! As if there were no left-wing form of criticism of anti-Semitism. As if there were no lessons from German history that apply to leftists. Middle East politics played a major role in the election to the Berlin House of Representatives.

For me, democracy means self-determination.

Then someone texted me saying that anyone who doesn’t vote for the Left Party is “playing into the hands of the CDU.” I want to prevent the development of Tempelhofer Feld and want the traffic policy of the current black-red Senate and its lobby for SUV speeders to be reversed as quickly as possible. I don't have to vote for the Left Party to do that. Julian Weber

“What do you mean by crisis, Spatzl?” This saying from the 80s television series “Monaco Franze” has adorned my living room wall for quite some time. What was once just a cult saying can now be related to a real problem: the Berlin rental market. Because crisis has long since become part of everyday life for many Berliners. Anyone looking for an affordable apartment today knows the feeling: dozens of applications, waiting lists, no response or a basic rent that eats up your monthly wages. Between 2010 and today, rents have doubled in some cases, while new buildings can hardly keep up.

The rent cap failed in court, the rent cap is barely effective, and investors are buying up entire rows of houses in order to renovate them and then rent them out at a higher price. What remains is a city that is becoming alien to itself: where shared apartments, artists and families once lived, today only those who can afford it often move in. The crisis is most visible where it can no longer be explained away: the number of homeless people in Berlin has been rising for years.

The saying from “Monaco Franze” almost sounds like quiet defiance; a smile against the circumstances. But unlike the Frenchman on the sofa, many in Berlin have no choice as to whether they want to take the crisis seriously. You must. Sophia Zessnik