Landwehrkanal 2

Bad neighborhoods

Reflections on the Landwehrkanal, winter afternoon (Photo: M. Seadle)

We were out walking on New Year’s Day, when Berlin looks its worst. Big (very big) private fireworks are legal here, unlike the US, and people set them off everywhere, though by preference along the waterways. The weather was so mild this year, it was even more tempting than usual to stand out on the bridges, shooting off large fireworks and getting sozzled on Little Red Riding Hood* all through the small hours, ending up too drunk to pick up after yourself.

So on New Year’s Day, always, the city is heaped with firework-litter and bottles; and because it is a holiday, no one will start picking up the trash until the next day. The cafes are open on New Year’s Day, it’s a good day for a family walk, and people pick their way placidly through the mess, content to wait until tomorrow for the cleanup, grumbling only mildly.

**

The day that Archangel and I walked the Kreuzberg (eastern) stretch of the Landwehrkanal, we could hardly get along the path, it was so packed with people out for a walk in the fine winter afternoon. At Urbanhafen, where the canal widens out a bit (and there was once an industrial harbor) the swans were begging shamelessly, fluffing their feathers in the sun and wagging their tails.

Swan on the Landwehrkanal, Urbanhafen, December 2013.  (Photo, M. Seadle)

East Kreuzberg is, by Berlin standards, a bad neighborhood. During the Cold War it was the bit of West Berlin that stuck out farthest into the east; it was a peninsula with the Wall glowering around it on three sides, and thus not regarded as an attractive place to live. (Also, in the late 60s and 70s, the city planned to bulldoze portions of east Kreuzberg to put in a freeway, which made the housing even less desirable.) The undesirable space filled up with squatters, artists, Turkish immigrants, homegrown political radicals, poor students, welfare recipients, and so on. It became a center of what the Germans call “the alternative scene:” the site of anarchist communes, quirky bars, famous battles with the police over occupied houses.

The neighborhood has quieted down a bit since the 70s and 80s—since, for example, an armed group called Commando Against the Terrorism of Consumption robbed the till of one of the popular clubs as a protest against the management’s taste in music and the rising entrance prices. But all sorts of people live here still. Disproportionately young, disproportionately Middle Eastern, disproportionately social-welfare recipients; but also prosperous older professionals who are unlikely to be frequenters of clubs like the one that was robbed years ago (and has been very successfully run by a collective for the last twenty years, partly as a concert and dance venue, partly as a home for political and social movement work). On the sidewalk we run into one of Archangel’s colleagues, with his wife, who live in East Kreuzberg and are of the prosperous older professional type.

Their living here does not mean what it would mean in the US. They are not urban pioneers in a quasi-hazardous neighborhood, rehabbing an old place on which they will eventually make a killing in the real estate market. The neighborhood is not particularly hazardous, and the German residential real estate market is not a place where you are likely to make a killing by selling your own home. (German housing prices went down about 2% in the financial crisis and back up 2% afterwards, according to The Economist.) The place you live is the place you live, not a speculative asset. [Gentrification is a problem here, however; more on this in a later post.]

**

I remember a long summer evening under the trees at a Middle Eastern restaurant in some mildly scruffy corner of Kreuzberg a few years ago (no clue where, I have a terrible sense of direction), with a couple of young German friends: she in publishing, he in big-time corporate sales.  One of these endless, drifting summer evenings, when it’s still light at half-past ten, and people linger at the tables under the trees until the small summer dark comes down. The young friends live down the street from the restaurant; they are very late, they are not used to organizing around their (still fairly new) baby.

Eventually they arrive, everything stops while the restaurant owner and staff coo over the baby. Everyone at the restaurant knows the couple—she waits tables there occasionally if she’s short on cash, or to help out the owner if he is short-handed on a busy weekend.

We talk about the neighborhood. The corporate salesman does not live in Berlin, he comes here when he can. His company (like many champion German exporters) is headquartered in a small city in the south, and he lives mostly in the business-class section of airplanes between Europe and China and India. She would like him to move to Berlin, he would like her to move to the south.

He, campaigning against Berlin, says something about what a bad neighborhood Kreuzberg is. She, who is a small, slight woman, says, “There’s nowhere here that I wouldn’t walk alone. There were neighborhoods in English cities where I wouldn’t go [she lived in England for a number of years], but it isn’t like that here.”

He says, “But I thought you told me it wasn’t a good idea to go to X-strasse,” nearby. He is a big imposing confident man in the classic corporate-salesman mode.

She smiles sweetly up at him.  “I said, it wasn’t a good idea for you to go there, love. It’s fine for me to go there.”

Insofar as there is a potential for violence here, much of it comes from young men wanting to prove their manliness. And knocking down small women does not count as Class I evidence of manliness in these parts.  Or even Class II or Class III evidence. Knocking down Mr. Business Class, on the other hand, would count.

Along the Landwehrkanal, Kreuzberg (Photo, M. Seadle)