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Red Flag: Disgraceful cowardice at Berlinale (and a few brave artists)

In his weekly column, Nathaniel Flakin looks at filmmakers kowtowing to German imperialism.

Nathaniel Flakin
18/02/2026

Berlinale, Berlin’s international film festival, opened last week with a display of cowardice that will surely go down in history.

When the journalist Tilo Jung asked about the jury’s selective solidarity with people in Ukraine or Iran but not in Palestine, Ewa Puszczyńska declared: “Films are not political,” and wondered why no one is talking about the genocide in Senegal. (Is there a genocide in Senegal? Did she mean Sudan?) Wim Wenders added: “We are the opposite of politics.”

In response, Arundhati Roy pulled out of Berlinale with a bold statement. While Neil Patrick Harris said he avoids political roles, numerous other filmmakers used their platform to speak out against the German government’s support for genocide.

On Saturday, Berlinale director Trisha Tuttle issued a long, defensive statement reassuring us that no one at the festival is “indifferent to… the immense suffering of people in Gaza and the West Bank, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, in Sudan, in Iran, in Ukraine, in Minneapolis, and in a terrifying number of places.”

In other words: Berlinale is political—they just don’t want to talk about Palestine.

Everyone sees what’s going on. Berlinale gets about a third of its funding from the German state. Far-right culture warrior Wolfram Weimer, who once made a career of decrying left-wing “cancel culture,” has been using his position as culture minister to cancel events that don’t align with the interests of German imperialism (besides lining his pockets).

We can all see the sword hanging over the jury’s head. Berlinale can be “political” as long as it doesn’t criticize the German government in any way. As the noose tightens around the neck of the largely state-funded cultural scene, we can expect fewer films criticizing the Far Right and more cinema praising the glorious Bundeswehr.

So what did Berlinale have to offer?

Red Hangar

It did not feel like a coincidence that a film about the military coup in Chile on September 11, 1973, premiered in Germany. Red Hangar follows Jorge Silva, a taciturn officer in the Chilean Air Force, as the coup unfolds around him. When his superiors ask about his loyalty, he repeats that he only follows orders. Should he join them? Should he join a resistance cell planning to flee the country?

As the military academy where he works is converted into a provisional torture center, Silva is willing to carry out interrogations, but he draws a line at shooting prisoners. As we learn from a title card at the end, he was subsequently arrested, tortured, and forced into exile.

The film offered a perfect yet involuntary metaphor for what filmmakers are going through right now. Should they obediently cash checks from the German government as it provides weapons for mass murder? Or should they take risks and speak up?

After the screening, I got to put this question to director Juan Pablo Sallato. After dedicating years to make a film about moral courage, he decided to keep his head down with a Wenders-style deflection. This is a “violent world,” he affirmed, “in Palestine, in Ukraine, in the U.S.” The film, he said, was just posing questions, not providing answers.

But it’s actually quite easy to provide an answer about the 1973 coup: It was wrong. Aren’t the lessons for today equally obvious? Unlike Silva, Sallato would not have been tortured for saying “Free Palestine.” If the film didn’t strengthen his resolve, even at the risk of being criticized in the German press, then what was the movie for?

As I was asking the question, my microphone was turned off, and a handful of Germans behind me complained loudly about my “propaganda.” I might have turned around and yelled that they all would have supported the coup in Chile. But afterwards, five people came up to thank me. It’s not that hard.

Chronicles of the Siege

Despite all the censorship, following last year’s international scandals, a number of films related to Palestine did make it into the program.

Palestinian director Abdallah Alkhatib presented Chronicles From the Siege. The blurb fails to mention Palestine, while The Berliner magazine refers to the director as being “from Yarmouk, a district of the Syrian capital Damascus,” without mentioning that Yarmouk is a Palestinian refugee camp. Yet at the premiere on Saturday, the room was full of keffiyehs and the director gave a powerful speech.

Five interwoven stories show people trying to survive in a besieged city that is not named but where people speak Palestinian Arabic. Alkhatib did experience a brutal siege during Syria’s civil war, so this isn’t quite about Gaza—but title cards refer to the genocide that has been ongoing since 1948. Without a specific place, the story is universal. Alkhatib presents Palestinians not as perfect victims, nor as angelic heroes, but as people: The stories are full of debasement and despair, as one would expect, but also of humor and warmth.

A documentary, Who Killed Alex Odeh?, looked at the assassination of a Palestinian-American activist in the Los Angeles area in 1985. Law enforcement knew right away who had planted the bomb: three fascists from Meir Kahane’s Jewish Defense League. But two were allowed to leave for Israel, where they continue living to this day, easily found by a single reporter. One of them changed his name and became a lawyer, eventually mentoring the fascist Itamar Ben-Gvir. Odeh’s widow and daughter, still fighting for justice, were present at a moving screening.

This year’s Berlinale is part of a wider authoritarian turn to strangle Berlin’s cultural scene. The government wants to make the country “kriegstüchtig” (fit for military service), and this requires stamping out critical art. But on the margins, a few artists can still use Berlinale to present critical art—while the Palinale Film Festival (complete schedule) doesn’t have to deal with government censorship.

As a right-wing government attacks artistic freedom, some film makers will bend the knee in the hopes of preserving their funding—and others will have the courage to bite the hand that feeds them.

Red Flag is a weekly opinion column on Berlin politics that Nathaniel has been writing since 2020. After moving through different homes, it now appears at The Left Berlin.

19 February 2020: Hanau shootings

This week in working class history

Phil Butland

On 19th February 2020, neo-Nazi Tobias Rathjen killed 9 people and wounded 7 more at the Arena bar and Midnight Shisha bar in Hanau. Both locations were known as meeting points for individuals with migrant backgrounds. The names of the deceased are Gökhan Gültekin, Sedat Gürbüz, Said Nesar Hashemi, Mercedes Kierpacz, Hamza Kurtović, Vili Viorel Păun, Fatih Saraçoğlu, Ferhat Unvar, and Kaloyan Velkov. Remember their names.

Before killing them, Rathjen had been watching videos of AfD Thüringen leader Björn Höcke. In an online document released prior to the massacre, he called for the “complete extermination” of many “races or cultures in our midst.” He suggested that the “total destruction” of entire states might be justified in a future war, listing 25 countries. In a video detailing his motivations, he referenced various QAnon conspiracy theories and expressed deep-seated hatred for foreigners, women, Muslims, and Jews.

After identifying Rathjen as the perpetrator, it took police five hours to respond to his nearby home. When they finally arrived, Rathjen first shot his mother before taking his own life. Police later claimed they did not hear any gunshots. Despite being known to law enforcement, Rathjen was allowed to renew his firearms license as recently as 2019. It was later revealed that 13 police officers working in Hanau that evening were suspended for participating in racist, far-right group chats.

Sadly, families of the deceased were not promptly notified; some learned of the deaths from news reports. Family members presenting identification had to wait 18 hours before they could see their slain loved ones, and autopsies were conducted without consent. Emergency calls made that night went unanswered. Initially, the media attributed the violence to “clan violence,” suggesting that the victims were somehow responsible for their own deaths. As Seda Artal later recalled, “I think the first headline I read was ‘Shisha murders.’”

The Hanau shootings sparked two powerful chants that have become popular at subsequent demonstrations: “Hanau war kein Einzelfall” (Hanau was not an isolated case) and “Where were you in Hanau?” (directed at the police). These phrases symbolize a pervasive narrative in the media and among law enforcement, portraying attacks by non-white individuals as the work of Islamists, while white terrorists are framed as troubled individuals. Since reunification, over 200 people in Germany have lost their lives to right-wing violence. We should remember them all.

Should film be political?

Even Wim Wenders thinks it should. He just doesn’t want to talk about Palestine

Phil Butland
16/02/2026

Most people will know by now that Wim Wenders, jury president of this year’s Berlinale, recently said “We have to stay out of politics.” He continued: “movies can change the world, but not in a political way.” At the same press conference, Ewa Puszczyńska, producer of The Zone of Interest, said: “we cannot be responsible for what [an audience’s] decision would be to support Israel or the decision to support Palestine. There are many other wars where genocide is committed, and we do not talk about that.”

In response, Arundhati Roy, whose film In Which Annie Gives it Those Ones is due to be screened as part of the Berlinale, announced that she would no longer be coming to Berlin. Roy made her own statement, saying: “To hear them say that art should not be political is jaw-dropping. It is a way of shutting down a conversation about a crime against humanity even as it unfolds before us in real time—when artists, writers and film makers should be doing everything in their power to stop it.”

As a best-selling author, scriptwriter, and anti-capitalist theoretician, Roy had every right to call out both Wenders and the Berlinale for their lack of solidarity with Palestinians who are still suffering a genocide. Yet there is some uncertainty about what Wenders actually said, not least because of the incoherence of his original statement.

In this article I want to look at what Wenders did say and why he said it. I will go on to argue that this is just the latest in a long series of instances in which the Berlinale, and its representatives, have stood in the way of the Palestinians’ fight for liberation.

What did Wenders say? And what didn’t he say?

It would be easy to dismiss Wenders’ statement as the liberal hypocrisy of a man who has spent too much time with Bono. However, I do not believe that Wenders was arguing that no art is political—an untenable position that doesn’t hold up to any serious scrutiny.

In the same speech, he said: “No movie has really changed any politician’s idea. But we can change the idea people have of how they should live,” and “There’s a big discrepancy on this planet between people who want to live their lives and governments who have other ideas.” There is a case to be made that Wenders was not arguing that cinema should be unpolitical, but that the balance of power means that politicians will ignore films, which should, instead, try to address “people”.

Nonetheless, I do believe that Wenders still thinks that Great Art occupies a sacred place outside social relations. Or, as he says, “We have to stay out of politics because if we make movies that are dedicatedly political, we enter the field of politics. But we are the counterweight of politics, we are the opposite of politics.”

In this context, it is worth looking at this year’s nominations for Best Picture Oscar—no guarantee of artistic quality, but nonetheless a sign of current trends. The nominations include Sinners, a film that addresses the legacy of racism in the US South, One Battle After Another, which features state detention centres, clandestine right-wing organisations, and former and future revolutionaries. Bugonia is about conspiracy theorists, and The Secret Agent looks at 1970s Brazil under the dictatorship.

Or we could look at the homepage of the 2026 Berlinale, where you can read: “The exciting thing about this year’s edition—probably the most political in a long time—is the diverse range of different cinematic forms used to set out concrete themes that hurt, such as enduring colonialism and the structural repression of Indigenous populations, violence against women, systems of corruption, social injustices.”

The Berlinale’s page about the Teddy awards promises: “Films that resist the mainstream, challenge racist structures and genre conventions and explore queer resistance alongside gender and body politics form a vital core of this year’s programme. This discussion considers the significance of such works in relation to the cultural and political moment we currently inhabit and asks whether, and in what ways, these films might serve a broader purpose beyond the screen.”

You can argue about both the political and artistic quality of some of these films, but we are not in a period in which either Hollywood or the Berlinale are staying out of politics.

Can art be unpolitical?

Before I move on to what I think is going on here, I’d like to address the issue implicitly raised by Wenders’s statement—the idea that while some films may have political content, the best art remains politically neutral (whatever that means). Perhaps it is worth mentioning here that only 9 months ago, Wenders himself made a film for the German Foreign Office.

Wenders was not the only person arguing for “unpolitical” art. After the scandal broke, self-regarding German actor Lars Eidinger said that he was only at the Berlinale for the cinema, adding: “Sometimes you come to the Berlinale to watch the films you’ve made yourself.” This may well describe Eidinger’s viewing habits, but he does not speak for all of us.

It is difficult to imagine any film that is not political, indirectly at least. All films are set in a certain era and in one way or another reproduce the contradictions of class, race, and gender in the society which they are describing. Clearly some films are explicitly political, but I would go further. Because they are the products of social relations, all films are political.

Even a film that uses exclusively middle class white male actors is doing this for political reasons. A Merchant Ivory film in which every single character is white and well off is making a political statement about what it considers to be important every bit as much as any film by Ken Loach or Gillo Pontecorvo. As John Berger said in Ways of Seeing, works of art are defined just as much by what they omit than what we can see.

To back up this argument, I would like to quote from the 1991 book The Logic of Images. You can find this quote on the goodreads page: “Every film is political. Most political of all are those that pretend not to be: “entertainment” movies. They are the most political films there are because they dismiss the possibility of change. In every frame they tell you everything’s fine the way it is. They are a continual advertisement for things as they are.”

Great stuff. And who wrote The Logic of Images again? Oh yes, it was Wim Wenders.

It’s all about Palestine

So, what was Wenders really trying to say? A little context is useful here. Wenders’s statement was a direct response to a question by Tilo Jung from the Jung & Naiv podcast. Tilo asked: “The Berlinale as an institution has famously shown solidarity with people in Iran and Ukraine, but never with Palestine, even today. In light of the German government’s support of the genocide in Gaza and its role as the main funder of the Berlinale, do you as a member of the jury…”

Viewers of the Berlinale livestream never got the chance to see Tilo finish his question (“Do you as a member of the jury support this selective treatment of human rights?”). Coverage was interrupted, with the Berlinale organisers announcing “technical problems”. Whether they were lying or not is a secondary point. Wenders was not saying that the Berlinale cannot discuss politics. He was saying that they can’t discuss Palestine.

Wenders, like many German artists, has a history of staying silent on Palestine. Last year, Françoise Vergès published an essay in which she said of Wenders: “His is a Eurocentric history, as if this history ended in that European ‘centre’, with not a single word about the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He speaks of Ukraine but not of Gaza, nor Sudan, Congo, Kashmir or any other place in the world that does not belong to the white West.”

Abbas Fahdel was part of the 2024 Berlinale documentary jury that awarded a prize to No Other Land. He recently argued: “Since then, it has effectively made it impossible for films openly committed to the Palestinian cause or critical of Israeli government policy to be present. Wenders’s position today, under the cover of supposed artistic neutrality, seems to confirm and legitimize that shift.”

The Berlinale was always political

The Berlinale has a long history of political statements. At the 1991 festival, Iranian director Jafar Panahi was supposed to be one of the jurors. The Iranian government refused to let him leave the country. The Berlinale website still proudly reports its response: ”The Berlinale sections screened five of his films in 2011 as a sign of solidarity.” When the jury announced its decisions, Panahi’s chair was symbolically left empty.

The 2023 Berlinale issued a statement Solidarity with Ukraine and Iran, in which it announced: “The film selection and various events—in part with cooperation partners—will focus on Iran and Ukraine”. All companies and media outlets with ties to Iran or Russia were banned. The same year, the festival was opened with a 10 minute speech by Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy. I do not recall any objection from people like Wenders that this was politicising an event that had to stay out of politics.

In 2024, Wim Wenders proudly told the German press that: “The Berlinale has always been the most political of the big festivals”, and “I like the Berlinale because it always opens its mouth and takes a stance”. On that occasion he was commenting on the festival’s decision to uninvite five AfD politicians. Note that even in this case, it was not that the festival refused to invite a bunch of Nazis. It invited them, and was then forced by public outrage to change its mind.

The IMDb description of No Good Men, the opening film at this year’s Berlinale, describes it as a “lumpy mix of workplace observation, anti-patriarchal social realism, spiraling alarm over the return of an oppressive regime”. Meanwhile, festival director Tricia Tuttle boasted to Deutsche Welle that the festival is “not afraid of championing and backing very political films—films that might create difficult talking points”, adding that “every kind of cinema is political in some ways”.

Time to boycott the Berlinale?

In 2024, Strike Germany, an organisation representing more than 500 global artists, filmmakers, writers and culture workers called for no more collaboration with German-funded cultural institutions, which—they said—were carrying out “McCarthyist policies that suppress freedom of expression, specifically expressions of solidarity with Palestine”. This explicitly included the Berlinale.

In 2026, Strike Germany issued a new statement, saying: “STRIKE @berlinale is not over. With continued lack of genuine response from Tuttle and the Berlinale team, it’s clear that in 2026 Berlinale remains committed to its irrelevance for film workers who oppose genocide. Berlinale must understand that if it does not use its remaining power as a cultural force in the capital, then it does not deserve our participation.”

I’m not fully convinced by the arguments to boycott the Berlinale in 2026. For a boycott campaign to be effective, it needs to be a mass action. Otherwise it risks being just individual virtue signalling. This year—unlike in 2025—the international BDS campaign has not targeted the Berlinale. But if anything has shown the need for a political reaction to the festival’s whitewashing of Gaza, it is Wenders’ badly worded and reactionary speech.

This year, the Palinale Film Festival showed that there are plenty of film offers outside the Berlinale. Palestinian activist Majed Abusalama, who will be speaking at the Palinale on February 18th, posted on facebook: “It is no longer enough to simply condemn the Berlinale each year. The community must begin building alternative cultural platforms that reject complicity and center decolonial, unapologetic representation.”

Recent films like The Voice of Hind Rajab, All That’s Left of You, and Coexistence: My Ass! have been prepared to take on different aspects of the Israel/Palestine struggle whether the Berlinale wants them or not. As a movement, we need to decide whether to kick the Berlinale into touch, or if we think it can be saved from itself. Either way, there are plenty of viable alternatives.

“Cops regularly and routinely had intimate relationships—and even planned children—with unwitting activists.”

Interview with Jason Kirkpatrick, co-producer of “The Spies Who Ruined Our Lives”

Phil Butland
14/02/2026

In 2010, the so-called “Spycops Scandal” broke, eventually revealing that UK undercover cops were used to infiltrate social movements in the UK and internationally. At least a dozen of these cops apparently had intimate relations with activists who did not know their real identity. Some had children. Berlin-based activist Jason Kirkpatrick discovered that at least one of those cops, Mark Kennedy, had been deployed in Germany to target him, and infiltrate the movement planning protests against the 2007 G8 summit in Heiligendamm, Germany. We spoke to Jason, whose film about the scandalous Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) spycops unit will be soon shown in Berlin.

Hi, Jason, thanks for talking to us. Could you first start by introducing yourself? Who are you? What do you do?

I’m Jason Kirkpatrick. Currently, I work at a Ukrainian-based peace and clean energy group called Razom We Stand. I’ve been an activist dealing with environmental, climate, human rights, and peace issues since the end of the 80s.

You’ve produced a film, which is going to be shown in Berlin soon. How did you get into film production?

It started with the outing of spy Mark Stone, who was, I thought, a very good friend. It turned out that he was a British spy whose real name was Mark Kennedy. At the end of 2010 he was uncovered by his activist girlfriend, who didn’t know his real identity until she saw it on a passport when they were traveling on a road trip through Europe.

I found out from a friend here in Berlin. I was completely shocked to find out this guy who I thought was my friend was a spy. We found out that he was working under a contract with the German police (LKA).

Within a couple of months, following the “spycops scandal,” Mark was all over the UK news. At first the British police said: “Mark Kennedy is just one bad apple. He’d admittedly slept with a couple of activists. but that’s just a one-off case”. It turned out that Kennedy was one bad apple amongst a whole barrel of abusive cops, in a political policing unit that dates back 1968, and had even targeted the famous German 68s radical Rudi Dutschke

To summarize the spycops scandal, British policemen developed relationships and had children with women who didn’t know they were cops.

Yes. Cops regularly and routinely had intimate relations, and even planned children with activists. More than one of these activist women have told the media that they felt raped by the state. I’ve heard that again, including yesterday in a telephone call with one of these women. If someone deceives you, that’s bad enough. But when it’s a 5 year relationship, or you have planned children with someone paid and trained by the state, who suddenly disappears and leaves you to raise that child alone, that’s traumatic.

The story broke in 2010, and it just got bigger. The police in Britain have made massive apologies and massive payouts—over £400,000 in one case. In 2015, the former Prime Minister Theresa May called for an Inquiry, which is still ongoing.

And the year after these revelations, you found that your “friend” Mark was one of these spycops. How did you react?

I immediately talked to members of the British press and said that Kennedy was also in Germany. I was interviewed by the British Guardian newspaper and German newspapers like the Taz in 2011. I also went to some contacts I had in the German parliament in the Green Party and the Left Party. They started asking parliamentary questions; “Why was a British spycop in Germany, spying here? Why? Who paid him”

It came out that the German police (LKA MV) actually had a contract with the British police to have Kennedy come here and spy on activists, especially around the G8 summit protests in 2007 in Heiligendamm near Rostock.

How many police were involved in this?

We know that there have been 200-or-so spycops in Britain in a formerly secret division called the Special Demonstration Squad, or SDS. They started in 1968 after a big protest in London against the Vietnam war that went to the US Embassy. It turns out that the police leader at the time told the Home Office: If you give me a million pounds, we’ll make sure these protests never happen again. We’ll infiltrate them.

And that’s what they did. They infiltrated protest groups, peace groups, women’s groups, all sorts of advocacy groups, animal rights groups, from then until today. And this is still going on now.

You say it’s still going on. You might naïvely think that after the Spycops Scandal, this would be stopped.

One could naively think that police were embarrassed by this scandal of police abuse, but political policing continues, as recently exposed in Bremen. We know why—because people in power are insecure and afraid, and use every tool of the state they can to protect their power.

In the UK, we found out that they’ve used undercover police against direct action and climate groups like Extinction Rebellion. In the USA, a wave of FBI repression against groups like Earth First was exposed in the 1990s. In Germany, for years peace, human rights or environmental activists have been wrongly labelled as extremists, and this loose term is used by security services to target activists.

How does this link to the recent case of police in Bremen infiltrating the Interventionistische Linke?

This is really interesting for me, because the Interventionistische Linke was one of the groups that I organized around. I wasn’t a member, but they organized with me and many thousands of others against the G8 in 2007. Now we see that the police have infiltrated them in Bremen. These activists must have been doing something right.

The police are targeting anybody who wants social justice and an end to these kinds of abuses.

How were you personally affected?

I was doing press work for a group called the Dissent network. We were organizing protests and activist camps in the areas around Heiligendamm. I was in a Infotour group giving public lectures, sending press releases, training activists in media skills and organizing interviews with journalists. I’ve since gotten some of my police files in Germany and England, and found out that I was targeted because I was dealing with the press and I was seen as a spokesperson. These police, and the big firms that profit off the fossil fuels causing climate chaos, for example, don’t like the pressure we were putting on them.

Doing journalistic work is supposed to be protected by the constitution. Everyone’s supposed to have freedom of speech. But that definitely was not the case when Kennedy was targeting me. In the end we see again and again that Kennedy and these Spycops were on the wrong side of history, and they were effectively doing pro-racist, pro-fascist, anti-equality, and anti-climate work by repressing justice movements working for a better world. Kennedy’s specific tasking appears to have had the effect of sabotaging the climate movement, so he effectively was an expensive publicy funded tool of the corporations causing the climate catastrophes.

Why did you make this film?

When this scandal first broke in 2010-2011, we got a bit of press. The police were saying that Kennedy was just one bad apple, and the police never do such bad things. Many of us saw that this clearly wasn’t the case; clearly, Kennedy was part of a larger system. The parliamentary questions in Germany exposed that Kennedy had a contract with German police, and that spycops regularly cross borders.

I thought that this was a big enough scandal to warrant a film. In 2011, I started shooting a documentary, telling my story in Germany and the stories of some of these women. I interviewed a whistleblower named Peter Francis, who’s been in the media quite a bit in England. He’s a former undercover cop, who exposed the scandalous racist work of UK undercover cops.

However, by the year 2018 I wasn’t able to finish my film as thoroughly as I wanted. I met another British filmmaker who said: I’m starting to make a film in England, and I want some of your footage. So I gave him my material interviewing a couple of these women, the whistleblower Francis, and a couple of others.

The Director ended up using a good amount of my footage in his film, which is called The Spies Who Ruined our Lives. I took on the role of co-producer. I get asked more and more to show it in cinemas and different activist centers, and the reception has always been very good. People have been fascinated and shocked to see the film and hear about this scandal.

Who is the film for? Is it for activists or for “normal people”?

I would say it’s for both. It fits very well for activists who know a bit of the background context. They can jump into the themes a bit easier because it gets complicated, especially with this British undercover policing inquiry, which has now spent over £100 million. It’s currently the longest ever British inquiry, at 11 years – longer than the Northern Irish related Bloody Sunday Inquiry, which took 10 years.

It’s such a scandal seeing these women tell their stories and hearing from former British ministers who campaigned against apartheid and were targeted. It’s almost so complicated that you have to see a film about it to understand it.

After showing the film on Saturday 21st February you’ll be doing a Q&A accompanied by Kate Wilson. Who is Kate, and what has she got to do with the film?

Around 2005, Kate was living in Berlin. We became friends. Mark Kennedy visited us both in Berlin, and we had a lot of good social times together. Kate had a relationship with Mark for around two years, and after the scandal broke, she took legal action, which she won a couple of years ago. The British state tried to stop her at every point.

She’s going to be here this weekend telling her story, because she’s also written an amazing book called Disclosure: Unravelling the Spycops Files. It tells of a 15 year struggle against the British state for justice. A big part of it is just struggling to get the facts and the truth of the story about what happened to her. Who gave the orders? Why did Mark Kennedy spy on her for so long, entering her family life? It’s an amazing book, and she has amazing stories to tell.

What are you trying to get out of these court cases?

A lot of us want to know who gave the orders. How does this spying work? Why were we targeted? Were we targeted individually or as groups? We want to know the background.

Mark Kennedy hasn’t earned himself the best reputation among especially the women friends of mine. He’s had every chance in the last 15 years to come out and help the victims of his abuse. He could have been a whistleblower. He could have told the truth. He could have said: “this is why I did what I did, and here’s who gave the orders.” He hasn’t done that yet.

Why do you think that the police behave this way?

When they see activists and activist movements growing, police and politicians can feel their power being threatened. This happened with the anti-racist movement in the 80s or 90s in Britain, and the movement against fossil energy now. As the climate movement grows, they want to know who’s possibly going to be taking power from them. And they use every tool they can to stop us, but we aren’t intimidated.

What should people do after they’ve seen the film? Do you want to encourage people into doing something specific or is it just about informing people?

It’s always good to be informed, but also to turn information into action. Once you have more information, you know a little bit more about where you can best use your energy to make change. The message that I’d like to carry forward is that all the activism we were involved in was creating change, and that’s why it flagged up these security services. What we were doing was right, and we often won despite their efforts to stop us.

These spycops fall on the wrong side of history again and again. But we are on the right side. The anti-apartheid movement was targeted by these police. Luckily, apartheid lost. The climate movement has been targeted by these police since the early stages. In Germany, I shouldn’t have to explain why that’s a problem. But again and again they have targeted anti-fascists. Mark Kennedy asked me if I knew a Fascist that we could attack together. I’m supposing he wanted to provoke and try to get someone arrested. Kennedy, in effect, was doing pro-fascist work in Germany. What a disgrace.

You said earlier you’re more an activist than a film maker. What’s the specific role of activist film makers?

The thing that is really, really difficult with film making is raising money. I wanted to make a film that wasn’t just going to be shown to a few people here and there. But you have to get copyrighted images, a soundtrack, all this post-production work. You’re talking about at least €100,000 euros for a film that’s going to be shown in cinemas and distributed. It’s just not going to be good enough quality for less than that.

Having said that, storytelling anywhere is important, whether it’s on social media, on Instagram or whatever. That human part of activism needs to be used to change minds, because people connect to other people’s stories. We can put out facts and figures and statistics proving we’re right, but a lot of evidence shows that facts are not what actually changes average people’s minds. But human stories, and connecting to real people is.

What’s next for you? Will you be making a new film or just carrying on with your activism?

I’m carrying on with my activism as Head of Communications at a Ukrainian non-profit right now; Razom We Stand. I’m very happy in that job, and I think it’s a great project with people I knew a little bit before from circles of climate and clean energy activism.

We see now clearly that the war in Ukraine is fuelled and shaped by Russia’s export of fossil fuels. If Germany, Europe and the rest of the world would pivot to clean energy, which is cheaper, then Russia wouldn’t be able to finance the war, and we would have peace in Ukraine.

The film The Spies Who Ruined our Lives (English with German subtitles) will be shown at Lauseria, Lausitzer Straße 10 on Saturday 21st February at 7pm, followed by a Q&A with Jason Kirkpatrick and Kate Wilson. On Friday 20th February at 7pm, Kate will be presenting her new book Disclosure: Unravelling the SpyCops Files in Aquarium, Skalitzer Straße 6,

Berlin enters new surveillance era

Breaking down the new surveillance and policing law in Berlin

Jasmine Erkan
13/02/2026

Pro Palestine Berliner on their cell phone with blurred face

Following the drastic shift in the policing landscape in Berlin over the last two years, the CDU/SPD coalition has scrambled to codify new police tactics into law. For those who have been at the forefront of the pro-Palestine movement in Berlin, this amendment comes as no surprise. Berliners have seen severe police brutality against demonstrators and an unprecedented use of surveillance and privacy breaches directed at the population, exposing the ultimate irony of Germany’s “data-privacy culture”, rooted in a historical distrust of surveillance and misuse of data.

Since 1975, police powers in Berlin have been regulated by the ASOG (Allgemeines Sicherheits- und Ordnungsgesetzes / General Security and Public Order Act). After two years of negotiations, the ruling coalition passed an extensive amendment of 736 unruly pages to this law. It entered into force in January 2026 and represents a shift towards preventive and data-driven policing in Berlin, amounting to one of the most aggressive expansions of policing and surveillance in Berlin’s post-war history.

What are the new changes to the law?

While the law represents a wide extension of powers granted to the Berlin police, in reality, it reflects tactics that had already been deployed by police against racialised communities for many years and were significantly escalated in response to pro-Palestine demonstrations across Berlin since late 2023. The media spectacle of physical violence during these demonstrations contributed to a broad support for the amendment to the law, granting the police a legal justification for their violent and unlawful tactics.

The law places an alarming emphasis on predictive policing measures that broaden what police are allowed to do before a crime has even taken place, by anticipating potential threats with the help of AI surveillance technologies and through legalising telecommunications surveillance via court order. In practice, this means that surveillance has become legal, even if you are not under investigation, and before a warrant for your investigation is granted. Under the new rules, Berlin police are now allowed to:

Deploy AI-supported video surveillance in public spaces
Use predictive analytics systems that pool large volumes of police and administrative data
Use automated licence plate recognition
Analyse telecommunications and digital infrastructure in real time
Read encrypted messages via court order (so-called “source telecommunications surveillance”)
Covertly break into homes to install spyware on personal devices and use body cameras indoors
Scrape images from social media to train facial recognition systems
Use ‘fatal force’

How will it affect people in Berlin?

Under these new laws, some Berliners will face a new reality of permanent and invisible surveillance, particularly in neighbourhoods that are deemed ‘crime-prone areas’ or ‘kbO’ by the Berlin Police. There are currently seven locations in Berlin classified by the police as kbOs, namely kbO Alexanderplatz, kbO Görlitzer Park/Wrangelkiez, kbO Hermannplatz/Donaukiez, kbO Hermannstraße/Bahnhof Neukölln, kbO Kottbusser Tor, kbO Rigaer Straße, and kbO Warschauer Brücke. Neuköllners have drastically felt the impact of the kbO classification since 2023 due to the district’s high population of Arab (many of which are Palestinian) and Turkish residents. Although these classifications are not new, this type of profiling alongside new technologies of surveillance will inevitably disproportionately affect racialised people, unhoused people, young people, and activists. Predictive policing using AI all over the world has been shown to reproduce and amplify bias on vulnerable communities that are already over-policed, and does not reduce crime in these areas.

Germany’s current efforts and budget commitments on both the national and the EU levels reflect an era of militarisation and the prioritisation of security over the protection of civil liberties. The Berlin 2026/27 budget sees a continued expansion of the security apparatus, where expenditure on police has increased from under €1.2 billion in 2010 to over €2 billion in 2024. Spending on defence and security technologies comes at the expense of social welfare, healthcare, public infrastructure, education, and civil society organisations, always at a direct detriment to the working class population. The burden of the harsh austerity measures imposed in the budget is one that Berliners can already see and feel in their everyday lives and within their communities.

What “AI surveillance” actually means in practice

The new ASOG amendment enables the use of AI-based video surveillance systems designed not merely to record public space, but to analyse and evaluate behavior of pedestrians. Some listed applications of this technology include the detection of so-called unusual movement patterns, sudden changes in crowd behaviour such as the dispersal of groups, prolonged presence in one location (“loitering”), unattended objects, physical altercations, and the crossing of restricted perimeters.

The amendment leaves broad room for further policing “experiments”, creating legal ambiguity over what is lawful, leaving those subjected to these systems with little legal recourse. The use of this technology warrants police to move beyond just responding to concrete evidence, and into the realm of prediction and pre-emptive suspicion.

Three German federal states currently hold licenses for software by Palantir, a US tech company that builds AI-driven analytics software for law enforcement, national security, military tactics, and warfare. Berlin police have denied the use of Palantir’s technologies, but the new amendment invites exactly the kind of data-pooling, AI-driven policing systems already deployed in other German states under different names (Hessendata, VeRA, DAR, Gotham) to be deployed in Berlin as well. This is underscored by a report of Friedrich Merz and Emmanuel Macron sitting at the table with a Palantir representative at the Summit on European Digital Sovereignty, raising concerns as to why a Palantir manager is represented at an EU initiative.

These Palantir systems pull together data from multiple state or federal police databases into one searchable system, including biometrics, traffic videos, public data from internet, telephone and communications records, and other sources to link information and reveal patterns or connections. By merging large datasets this way, the systems generate detailed profiles and networks, with the inclusion of people who are not suspected of any crime, raising serious civil-liberties concerns about AI-powered policing.

How can Berliners stay vigilant?

Staying vigilant does not mean paranoia, it means cultivating a culture of digital security and political awareness within your networks and communities. If you belong to one of the communities that are at most risk to the new law, now is the time to start being proactive about digital security, your individual and collective relationship to technology, and the power of collective action. For Berliners, vigilance can begin with small, practical changes and extend outward into collective action.

Digital Security

Keeping devices (software and hardware) up to date, using strong passwords instead of biometrics where possible, rebooting phones regularly, and securing your communication channels can all contribute to strengthening digital security. Tactical Tech’s Security in-a-box, developed with Front Line Defenders, is a good guide to get you started on protecting devices, communications, and data. It is designed precisely for people working or organising under conditions of heightened surveillance.

Rethinking “convenience” technologies

Many apps, platforms, and smart services quietly extract location data, contact lists, biometric information, or behavioural patterns. These technologies often double as surveillance infrastructure, as they extract far more personal data than necessary. Pausing to question whether an app is necessary, what data it collects, and who ultimately has access to it is a small but meaningful form of resistance. You can find an extensive list of resources compiled by Tactical Tech here: ‘The Persistent Problems Of Digital Resilience’.

Collective action and public pressure

Security should not be treated as an individual responsibility. Sharing knowledge and agreeing on basic security practices within groups are forms of mutual care. Following or registering with civil society organisations can also help you stay informed and mobilise your communities, or they can help you in case of arrest, police violence, or security breaches. Collective mobilisation is also an accessible point of entry into resisting these measures—on 15 March 2026, Berlin will see a demonstration marking the International Day Against Police Violence, organised by the alliance Keine Einzelfälle. For further information and to register your interest in participation, you can email keine-einzelfaelle-berlin@riseup.net.

The ASOG amendment is now law, but its implementation is not inevitable or uncontested. Public scrutiny, legal challenges, investigative journalism, demonstrations, and organised resistance can all play a role in preventing measures from becoming permanent. Although the amendment has entered into force, its meaning will be shaped by how it is resisted, challenged, and scrutinised in practice.

This article is a summary of research by the Berlin Surveillance and Predictive Policing Research Unit, a community research project hosted and initiated at Trust.support, and a panel discussion organised with guests Matthias Monroy, Lena Rohrbach and Petra Sußner that was held on the 19th of January 2026. Research for this article was compiled by Lina Martin-Chan, Filipp Smirnov, Chloê Langford, Peter Polack, and Jasmine Erkan.