I live in Berlin, I tried to cycle home yesterday past Bernauer Strasse (pictured) but the police had completely blocked off the whole region with barricades and around 20 police wagons.
I'm pretty sure the irony of commemorating the Berlin wall and its fall via people with guns stopping the public from crossing was lost on them.
~15 years ago I randomly wandered into an antifa vs police standoff in Berlin, just as it was forming. Surreal experience. Everyone knew where they were supposed to be, except for me. It felt like they had done it so many times before.
I got out of there just in time. It's the only time I've seen large scale street violence. I don't think it belongs in a civilized society.
> It's the only time I've seen large scale street violence. I don't think it belongs in a civilized society.
"...more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can't agree with your methods of direct action;" [1]
- Martin Luther King, Jr.
I wasn't there on the street with you 15 years ago. I don't know what the protestors were protesting (though "antifa", depending on how you use the term may suggest they were protesting a fascist/neo-nazi group).
But i include this quote only to say that you have to be careful to consider whether society is as civilized as those in power believe it is, and whether it can always be improved through other "civilized" manners.
That quote could be [mis]used to defend any movement, but I don't recall MLK leading people in helmets, carrying shields, to violently confront police, without even making a clear statement of what they want.
MLK was very clear about what he meant by "justice", never tried to hide his identity, and didn't respond with violence.
"Antifa", on the other hand, aren't even honest about what they want. They call themselves anti-fascist, but they are anarchists, who dishonestly label any authority "fascist".
Anarchists of that sort are only such until they acquire structural power, then they immediately become the new, organized, violently oppressive authoritarian power. It's why Antifa so resembles the fascism they claim to oppose. That exact switch happened repeatedly across the 20th century. An organized anarchist movement is something close to an oxymoron, a facade at best, for people lusting for the power to implement their own vision of how things should be (while using that particular appeal to lure followers). The people that were responsible for installing Lenin's famines and ultimately Stalin, would of course tell you they also meant well (akin to someone claiming they mean you no harm while they break your skull).
The current American Antifa movement sprung up in direct confrontation to a government that was intent on violating every norm of democratic governance, and forcing through regulations and laws that were borderline fascist.
Trump's America absolutely was heading in a fascist direction by the strict definition of the term ("a political philosophy, movement, or regime that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition").
While there is no one single organized Antifa leadership or central planning, the participants were generally united by a truly genuine goal of resistance to fascism.
And violence only broke out when instigated by the state forces, bolstered by the knowledge that local, state, and federal governments are in support of them.
I thought we were talking about "an antifa vs police standoff in Berlin" 15 years ago.
But if you insist on talking about America, let me cite a recent example of Antifa dishonestly labeling anything they oppose "fascist".
Antifa rioters attacked a protest against vaccine mandates yesterday in Los Angeles. They sprayed mace on the protestors and one protestor was stabbed. They claimed the protestors were fascists and billed their response as "no safe space for fascists".
However anyone may feel about vaccine mandates, I challenge them to justify calling opposition to vaccine mandates "fascist".
The really troubling thing about Antifa is that because they label everything they oppose "fascist", they feel justified using any measure to oppose it, like spraying mace and stabbing people.
I find your comment misleading, with your article references doing the opposite of supporting your comment, especially from the latimes article.
In the latimes article, it seemed to me the anti-vaccination group was doing the attacking - also the article does not mention antifa, the only "anti" it mentions is the anti-vaccination group, who seem violently oriented in that article.
The nbc article does mention a group against fascism, but the attacking again seems to come from the anti-vax group.
So I don't see these reports as against antifa, I only see the articles supporting the idea that anti-vaxers are prone to violence, at least in this incidence.
Out of curiosity, when? I walked down Bernauer Straße with my dog (from the Hundeplatz at Mauerpark to Nordbahnhof; I live relatively close-by) and didn't see anything unusual. I don't keep track of time well on a Friday at the dog park, but I'd guess that would have been around 20:00, give or take.
The official commemoration ceremony with all German top politicians took place at Bernauer Straße. That was probably the reason why the street was blocked by police.
There is/was a (right-wing) NPD political assembly that is being protested by the Green Party, supposedly in the area of the wall. I'm guessing this is the reason for the hordes of police.
Odd/amusing point, the Stasi referred to the wall as the "antifascist defense border". Although these days, I'm a bit torn on the term as I see rent prices jacked up across the world by whomever can borrow money at the lowest rate.
The Russians' usage of the term antifascist certainly didn't age well, but it's worth noting that "fascists" is how all people in the world referred to certain Germans and Italians for a period of 25 years all up until 1945 (and the affected folks didn't mind that - in fact, the term was invented in Italy in 1915 and then adopted by Mussolini in 1918 and by Hitler in 1923 [0]). So for Russians to refer to Germans who didn't join them as fascists is just a continuation of how the term had been used for a long time.
By 1961, it was definitely unfair to continue using the term in its original meaning, and at this point it was certainly the Russian government pushing their agenda a lot more strongly than the general population would have on its own. But it's not like everyone was strictly opposed to it either - the horrors of the war had created in Eastern Europe such deep resentment towards Germany that it would take a lot more than 16 years to get over that. In fact, my grandpa lived until the 90s and still called every German a fascist.
Far-left and far-right ideologies have more in common than many people realize (including the people within those factions). They are both based on the principle on low tolerance, and as such they are well-aligned on the idea of strict enforcement of their ideologies.
There are some hilarious misconceptions that members of those factions have about their own ideologies. Far-left is against the police brutality, but there is a 100 year history of perfect correlation between leftist regimes and policy brutality.
Far-right is against government interventions in all economic matters, but that also has never materialized anywhere else.
The bottom line is that anything that's far-something requires suppression of the society's natural tendency to return to the center.
The Wilson and Attlee governments in the UK would be very surprised to hear there's a "100 year history of perfect correlation".
They were certainly leftist. Many would consider them far leftist today. (Of course they weren't, but that doesn't mean the label wouldn't be applied.)
Neither was legendary for police brutality. That came later, with Thatcher's response to the Miner's Strike and the poll tax riots - among others.
I have a hard time considering a government that ruled over and fought bitterly to protect a global capitalist empire as truly 'leftist,' unlike the UK's geopolitical enemies of the time.
It is also likely that subjects of certain British colonies would have a substantially different opinion on police violence.
Where is the line at to be drawn between nationalism and fascist ultra nationalism? The rise in nationalism in many countries is one thing, but as that nationalism becomes stronger it is too easy to see it as drifting into fascist territory.
I suspect that real estate prices are dragged up by fear of inflation. People in my country buy whatever has a roof, because they do not want their savings to go to waste.
Agreed. Some people/institutions have access to more money than can be productively used so they bid up anything that has the potential to make money, be it startups, Bitcoin or housing.
We had even slightly lower interest rate on mortgages in 2017 and the market was nowhere as hot as today.
I am sort-of familiar with real estate market in Prague and Ostrava, two very different cities.
Apartments in Ostrava were hard to sell even with low interest rates, because the city lost 10 per cent of its population - a typical rust belt phenomenon. Even just two years ago, an apartment put on market in Ostrava could be there for half a year before attracting a serious buyer.
They are now hot like hell and more than twice as much expensive.
Is the real estate market (esp. for renting out) actually dominated by private investors and their savings? Here in German cities, it feels like it's dominated by faceless investors and corporations but I have no data to back that up.
In March-May 2021, I was looking for an apartment or smaller house in my city of birth, Ostrava. The market was crazy, but the prospective buyers looked like regular people. Sometimes 15-20 of us met in a single location and had to be shepherded through the dwelling in groups.
99.99% for-rent apartments I’ve seen in Western Europe were owned by some huge company. That’s a stark contrast to Eastern Europe where you’re much more likely to rent a privately owned property.
This may be because of local laws or city council rules. In many cities the developer of a complex today is forced by law to have a certain percentage of the development dedicated for rental (Munich I think may be the leader here with a proposed 80% for rental). The only way to achieve this is to have the apartments owned by the developer or handed over to another management company (or investor) for rental only.
It's also why you sometimes see a development with a several rows of houses meant for sale flanked by one or more apartment buildings with a far smaller footprint but enough floors to equal roughly the same usable area in order to get the project approved.
actually in Germany 60% of the appartments are owned by private individuals 10% state/local governments, 10% coops (Genossenschaft), and the reminder corporations. (While statistics differ a bit depending on where you draw the line between some private owner and a corporation for auch a statistic)
https://www.savills.de/insight-and-opinion/savills-news/2756... is one survey with some numbers
The laws I mentioned are relatively new [0]. So for now it's hard to compete in numbers with a century of already built apartments. And eventually all "for rent" units do go on the market for sale.
But it's also easy to see why for someone looking for rent in many big cities today it looks like most apartments are owned by big management companies. New developments in "hot" cities with high demand and such laws are owned by a management company because that's the only way it works. You'd see entire buildings owned by the developer. It will take decades for those new apartments to go into private ownership.
IIRC west germany did end up welcoming some nazis back into government positions so from their standpoint it probably seemed fairly reasonable. There were still Nazis everywhere in postwar berlin.
They did. Same with the US inviting Third Reich scientists. Or BND, CIA, MI5 and others inviting HVA (Stasi foreign spy agency) people into their ranks.
What, except maybe that states are immoral and opportunistic, does these things tell us?
I am not sure. Maybe I am missing net positive things as outcomes from these behaviors. But to me neither example is good.
The idea that the bombs on Hiroshima and/or Nagasaki shortened the war in a significant way is in historic sciences at least contested.
I remember my professor at University arguing against the fact that this idea was presented as proven fact, when there were many question in the scientific community.
Not sure how maybe newer evidence might have changed it. I would need to dive into the actual scientific literature to update my knowledge of the topic.
East Germany did that too in the early years for building up their "inofficial army" (called "Kasernierte Volkspolizei") before the "official" NVA (National People's Army) was founded in 1956. After that they mostly got rid of old Nazis in the army though, at least the high-ranking ones. In general, the more specialist and "valuable" an old Nazi was, the more it was likely that his history was quickly forgotten, also in the East.
Exactly. Both sides did this as it’s hard to defeat a country then build it back up when you exclude everyone who who was in the old govt (many who joined the Nazi party for non-ideological reasons).
If you dig into the history it’s pretty interesting. The USSR and France I believe were adamant about de-Nazification, but petered out quickly when they realized it was holding up rebuilding the country. The US and UK weren’t too worried about lower level Nazi’s once the leaders and major war criminals were handled.
In that were the real concern, the DDR would have restricted travel from the West to the East by residents of the West, but not travel by its own residents to the West and return journeys—yet it prohibited the latter.
Moreover the DDR cannot seriously have had such concerns, since it too e.g. employed former Nazi officers in its army.
>"The Turkish army has built a barrier on the zone's northern side, consisting mainly of barbed-wire fencing, concrete wall segments, watchtowers, anti-tank ditches, and minefields. The zone cuts through the centre of Nicosia, separating the city into southern and northern sections. In total, it spans an area of 346 square kilometres (134 sq mi), varying in width from less than 20 metres (66 ft) to more than 7 kilometres (4.3 mi).[2][3][4] Because of this, after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Nicosia remains the last divided capital in Europe.[5][6]"
Big difference between Berlin and Nicosia/Lefkoşa. I lived for 2 years (2010-2012) in the North as a westerner and while the division certainly affects the Island, it is nothing like Berlin in the Cold War.
Healing and forgiveness, on both sides, must occur before reunification.
'Fallacy' ? Take two opposing Counterparts, teached by history. 'Farmers and the church were the first, who thought something like welfare, the farmer were "addicted" to the help of others to bring in the harvest, often village people to construct and harvest...historical the church seemed to be addicted to grace -which the people had to obey [turns-in-a-circle] to fulfill the will of "god" (abstract: a 3rd person). So it today those two (farmers and the church) seem to be the first who drag money out of it (the social).'
A few post above someone wrote something that "'fascist' refer to Germans who didn't join communism"
And that one may say, extremists are 'well-aligned on the idea of strict enforcement of their ideologies' (Quoting).
And add that Wilhelm II (Germany) was an grandchild of the british Queen Victoria. And, that socialdemocracy as domestic policy was concerned the biggest threat of his time (under his politics)
Bismarck (his predecessor) for example whereas is considered
as the father of the 'modern' welfare state.
Maybe a try to show how easy it was to distract me, with a simple 'governments pushing their agenda a lot more strongly than the general population would have on its own'. (-;
Healing and forgiveness, on both sides, must occur before reunification.
Along with massive repatriations for lost property; compensation to the families of the hundreds who disappeared; and criminal investigations of those responsible for -- and who profited from -- the orgy of plunder and mayhem that ensued after the partition.
I don't know about that, trying to cross the border had/has a high chance of being shot to death, both in the GDR and (AFAIK) in North Korea. East Germany even had automated the whole killing part:
I know that. But there was always some travelling over the Inner-German border. Not convenient at all for those wanting to travel from the East, could lead to losing your job and even imprisonment until the West paid to get you free years later. But possible for those who were persistent enough and accepted the sometimes severe consequences. In Korea even that is not enough.
Only pensioners got an exception and could travel from East to West to visit family. Everybody else had to try their luck digging tunnels (mostly in Berlin in the 60s), over the Baltic Sea or make it through the "Death Strip" alive, all ending very likely in death or if they're lucky, imprisonment (one of my uncles and his wife ended up with a 10-year prison sentence for trying to flee over the Hungarian border, and were eventually "bought out" by the West).
Travel from West to East was unrestricted of course.
We had working age relatives visiting us from the East in the West in the 1980s. But visa were not easily granted, not at all for people in many positions. And only for one person of a family at a time. I'm sure the Stasi checked in advance that the risk of not returning to their family was low.
Traveling from the West to the East was not free either. Officially it was only allowed to visit relatives and for cultural exchange. Individual tourist journeys were not allowed, only day visits to East-Berlin. But nobody checked very carefully whether the "relatives" were real. I had a friend of mine visit distant relatives of myself in the 1980s. They just filled in that the relationship would be cousin or something like that and nobody asked or checked. The East was interested in the money from the West. For every visiting day there was a mandatory exchange. From a Western point burning money because you could not buy anything of equivalent value for money in the East. I bought a big series of math books translated from Russian once. I fear I still haven't read them all. Maybe when I retire...
You could buy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bronshtein_and_Semendyayev in bad paper quality. I probably still have mine somewhere... But it costed probably something like 2 day rates. So if you visited weeks over a couple of years that did not solve the problem of the burnt money.
(on most wiki pages you can find matching articles in other languages near the bottom of the column of links under the wikipedia logo on the far left of the desktop version)
> The idea of a city split into two by ideologically opposing factions, and the split being marked by a big wall, sounds like sci-fi now.
Say welcome to the "Peace lines" or "Peace walls" [0] in Belfast and other cities in North Ireland. There's also Jerusalem, Nicosia and more places with walls around certain areas.
Sci-fi is usually about future. With 8 billion people in the world and growing, I can definitely see some other places divided by walls so that hostile factions do not mix.
There are "peace lines" in contemporary Belfast and Derry still in existence.
> physical barrier could affect the spread of information
Don't you think that there is a component of physical barrier in today's internet? while this may sound odd for the Americans, this is very typical in many parts of the world (East Europe, Asia and parts of Africa and Latin America)
> Also, the idea that a physical barrier could affect the spread of information.
It didn't, radio waves didn't stop at the wall ;)
My dad told stories of communist youths tearing down people's "west antennas" and there were also attempts to jam western TV and radio stations, but this was in the early 60's or so. Later it was more or less tolerated (to watch western TV and listen to western radio), even though officially a taboo.
Slightly off topic but the German band Rammstein, whose members prodominately grew up in East Berlin, have a great song called "Radio" about how the information leakage from the west to the east over radio helped encourage the cultural changes required to unify Germany. It's interesting to me to hear from the source how valuable it was/is.
You mean all 700 miles of it along 2000 miles of border? I would guess nothing at all would change. No comparison to the German wall with minefields, self shooting devices, etc.
On the topic of a city divided in two, I highly recommend the novel ‘The City & The City’ by China Mieville. It’s an excelllent detective thriller that reminds you that the strongest and tallest walls are always in our minds.
* The wall was not between East and West Berlin, but between West Berlin and the GDR, entirely enclosing West Berlin, naturally. (45 km bordered East Berlin, 113 km Potsdam, the state around Berlin.)
* Just two months before the wall was built, at a press conference, Walter Ulbricht, then head of the GDR, said that nobody had the intention of building a wall. "Niemand hat die Absicht, eine Mauer zu errichten."
* It wasn't just a wall, but an entire corridor 50m to several hundred metres wide (on the "Eastern" side), consisting of a smaller wall ("Hinterlandmauer"), sometimes corridors for K-9s (German shepherds, naturally), anti-tank obstacles ("Czech hedgehog"), observation towers (302 by the time the wall came down), control strips "Kontrollstreifen" of freshly harrowed sand so trespassers would leave tracks, then "the wall", then a few more metres GDR, then the actual legal border. (However, no "Selbstschussanlagen SM-70", shotguns rigged to fire automatically - those were only deployed at the border to West Germany.)
* There were 2300 border troops deployed at any time, mostly in pairs to control each other, but rotating, so that they couldn't form a bond. They were under an order to shoot trespassers, the infamous "Schiessbefehl".
* Some 100 to 200+ people died trying to cross the wall. It is surprisingly hard to put an exact number on it.
* There were some "enclaves" (exclaves?) like the Lenné-Dreieck (Lenné-triangle): on the "western" side of the wall, but officially belonging to the East, so effectively a no-man's land.
* One of the iconic events precipitating the fall was in Sept 1989. Many (thousands) of East Germans had traveled to Prague, Czechoslovakia (not part of the USSR, but of the Eastern Bloc), and climbed over the fence of the West German embassy there, camping on the grounds. On 30 Sept, the foreign minister of West Germany (after long negotiations with USSR foreign minister Shevardnadse), Hans-Dietrich Genscher, appeared on the balcony to tell those refugees that they could go on to West Germany. The rest of the speech was basically drowned out by cheering as soon as the crowd heard "Ausreise". See here from about 1:20. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ov9IHjX8UF4
* Then, on 9 Nov 1989, the wall fell, and it was a surprisingly silly culmination of the revolution. The East German authorities knew that they couldn't carry on, and were planning to gradually open the borders from December onwards (given that people could flee via Czechoslovakia anyway). They started working on legislation, and there was lots of discussions going back and forth (would people that left be allowed to return, etc.) On Nov 9, they sent the first secretary of the party (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands) in East Berlin, Günter Schabowski, on a press conference to talk about these plans, but he hadn't attended the deliberations and was basically reading from some notes he had been handed. An Italian reporter asked about it the border, and Schabowski announced these plans for liberalisation, live on TV. He was then asked when these would go into effect, and he shuffled around in those papers and said "as far as I know, that's applicable now, immediately". People stormed the border ("first gradually, then suddenly"), and the rest was history. See around 0:40 here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mn4VDwaV-oo
Berlin had the most memorable wall but the entire country was divided by a wall as well.
My mom's family abandoned their house and factory and fled to the west when the Russians took their property and punished them for being capitalists. Since the wall wasn't up yet they left through Berlin, which was like a porthole to the west at the time.
I grew up on the western side of the Iron curtain. Not far from the border. My father was born in East Germany and had fled with his mother, ssister and brother before the wall was up.
They could only take one suitcase to make it look like they were visiting western Germany only. So he and his family came to the west.
His life went in a way so that he got a job near the border as it was back then in north eastern Bavaria.
Not far from where I grew up there was another village divided by a wall: Little Berlin [1]
It was interesting as a child to grow up near a divided village and country. And seeing the border fall.
I still remember my dad, tears streaming down his face while watching people standing on the Berlin Wall when it fell. I remember him welcoming the trains from the West German Embassy with the GDR people shortly before that. [2]
The border between West and East Germany was already heavily fortified in 1952. So, during the nine years until 1961, West Berlin was indeed a kind of porthole to the west.
The reasons why the East German government did not close the border within Berlin are complex. For example the Sowjets first had the goal to make Berlin an independent but unified city. But there were also economical and logistical issues: The border would cut important railway transport routes for East Berlin, for which a replacement was only completed in 1961.
It was a shorter path, they would have had to travel much farther to get to West Germany than to West Berlin. At the time the commuter trains in Berlin were still going back and forth between the sectors and too busy to be checked thoroughly.
The East German authorities called the wall "Anti-Fascist Protection Border".
>The Eastern Bloc portrayed the Wall as protecting its population from fascist elements conspiring to prevent the "will of the people" from building a socialist state in East Germany.
What's your point though? That building walls is a useless endeavour or that anti-fascism is evil becay an anti-democratic state abused the term for propaganda reasons?
If it's the latter, I hope you'll never look into the historic use of terms such as democracy, freedom/liberty or "free elections".
The point of the wall was to prevent the population of the GDR from running away from socialism; Between 1959-1960 they collectivized agriculture, this means that all the independent farmers were forced to join big state owned farms; the system did not work properly and resulted in shortages. All this resulted in the flight of more than a million citizens from the GDR to the west between 1959 and 1961; about two and a half million fled between 1949 and 1961; The east german rulers stopped this flight by errecting a hightly unpopular wall; East Berlin before the wall was a very open city - for example you could live in the east and work in the western part of the city. Now they had to justify the whole project with ideology constructs - and the ultimate trick was to apply Goodwin's law, and that was done before the invention of the internet.
I'm pretty sure the irony of commemorating the Berlin wall and its fall via people with guns stopping the public from crossing was lost on them.