Last week, Zohran Mamdani won New York City’s mayoral elections, and reformists around the world cheered. In Germany, Die Linke came up with the admittedly great slogan: “First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin.” (Yes, I know it’s a song—check out this amazing cover by Enrique Moreno.)
The shoe doesn’t fit, though. Mamdani is known for his solidarity with Palestine—he at one point refused to distance himself from the slogan “Globalize the Intifada” (before caving in to the Democratic Party establishment). According to exit polls, this opposition to the genocide in Gaza was a major factor for 38 percent of Mamdani’s voters. While he did focus on a simple message of affordability, he could not help but be the pro-Palestinian candidate.
Die Linke, in contrast, would prefer to not talk about the war. Former co-chair Martin Schirdewan posted a Mamdani hype video. Yet Schwirdewan spoke at the German government’s pro-Israel rallies and boycotted his own party’s limited Palestine solidarity work. Schwirdewan successfully had the Palestinian-German Trotskyist Ramsis Kilani expelled from the party.
Caren Lay, former vice-chair of the parliamentary group in the Bundestag, similarly cheered about New York results—just a month after she helped organize a counter-demo (!) against the huge Gaza demonstration in September.
1. A non-Jewish woman being refused service in the left-wing café K-Fetisch for wearing a Zionist t-shirt in the middle of a genocide.
2. The non-Jewish, pro-Israel bar Bajszel being criticized for supporting genocide. (Bajszel once held a pro-Israel event where they kicked out all Jewish participants and had one of them beaten up.)
In other words, Die Linke agrees with Springer tabloids, the CDU, and the AfD that antisemitism is when right-wing supporters of Israel are criticized.
Is the Guard Changing?
Die Linke is certainly quite a different party than last year (when I and many others saw it on the verge of disappearing.) Tens of thousands of young people have joined the party, and they are instinctively pro-Palestinian. That is what forced the leadership to participate in some kind of Gaza protest.
Yet even if a couple of the vilest Zionists abandoned the party, such as former Berlin vice-mayor Klaus Lederer, the party apparatus is still unflinchingly pro-Israel.
This was shown when the party youth, Linksjugend-Solid, passed a resolution criticizing Israel’s “racist and colonial character.” 17 members of the Bundestag ran to the far-right press to denounce them (including Pascal Meiser of Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg, who represents one of the largest Palestinian communities in Europe).
Some of the most fanatical genocide supporters, like Gesine Lötzsch or Petra Pau, are approaching retirement. But Bodo Ramelow remains the Bundestag’s vice president, and thus Die Linke’s most powerful elected representative. The new leadership is only slightly less Zionist: Co-chair Inés Schwerdtner continues to defend Israel’s right to exist. Jan Van Aken has defended the expulsion of Kilani, and said further expulsions of pro-Palestinian activists could be necessary.
Once Again
This is not some personal moral failing. Die Linke is a party that has, from the day of its founding, been involved in the administration of German imperialism—they have been part of numerous state governments. As recently as 2023, Die Linke had senators in Berlin. In that role, these “leftists” were responsible for evictions, deportations, and the privatization of 200,000 public apartments. They helped sabotage the referendum to expropriate big corporate landlords—and they also carried out the first bans of pro-Palestinian demonstrations, long before Kai Wegner.
I don’t agree with what Pepe T. wrote last week, that “Die Linke once represented a revolutionary alternative to establishment politics” and that it was “once an anti-imperialist force against oppression worldwide.” That is simply not true: the main founder of Die Linke was a former German finance minister who has attacked refugees for decades.
Die Linke’s unbroken Zionism is just a symbol of their fundamental commitment to Germany’s capitalist state—they are willing to throw their supporters under a car whenever the ruling class demands it. They would have expelled a Berlin Mamdani years ago.
But there is hope! Mamdani’s victory shows that leftists can push back against false accusations of antisemitism—Mamdani didn’t just win, but he even won a large majority of young Jewish voters. Die Linke could potentially speak to the large majority of Berlin’s population (70-80 percent in polls) who oppose the genocide.
But for this to happen, all those new young left-wing members of Die Linke need to get organized. They need to call for the expulsion of Ramelow and all the other supporters of genocide. Most importantly, they need to oppose Die Linke’s orientation to joining capitalist governments—another “left-wing government” will only lead to new betrayals and disappointments.
As Rosa Luxemburg said, the role of a socialist party “in bourgeois society, is essentially that of an opposition party. It can only enter on scene as a government party on the ruins of bourgeois society.”
The resolution by Linksjugend-Solid—and the furious reactions to it from far-right tabloids and Die Linke’s leadership—show a way forward. This kind of militant opposition to Germany’s capitalist state is how we will get left-wing policies in Berlin.
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.
On 15 November 1884, Otto von Bismarck opened the Berlin Conference in his palace on Wilhelmstraße. The conference aimed to resolve the “Scramble for Africa,” in which Global North countries competed to control the continent’s mineral-rich resources. Nineteen delegates from fourteen countries attended, ranging from the United States to Tsarist Russia. Despite it sometimes being called the Congo Conference or the African Conference of Berlin, not a single African country was invited.
The conference redrew the borders of Africa. When it opened, only 20% of the continent was colonised. By the outbreak of the First World War just thirty years later, only Ethiopia and Liberia remained free. Ten thousand distinct communities were forced to live within forty separate occupied territories. Before the conference had even ended, Nigeria’s Lagos Observer reported that “the world had, perhaps, never witnessed a robbery on so large a scale”.
Colonisation was far from peaceful. South Africa saw the world’s first concentration camps, set up by British occupation forces. Germany followed suit in Namibia, where a German-organised genocide killed 80% of the Herero and Nama populations. Various methods were used to normalise colonisation to the German public: street names were dedicated to colonisers, and the supermarket Edeka took its name from an acronym for the Einkaufsgenossenschaft der Kolonialwarenhändler (Cooperative of Colonial Grocers).
The General Act of the Berlin Conference contained two key articles. Article 34 declared the “doctrine of spheres of influence,” allowing European powers to claim parts of Africa provided they informed the other nations beforehand. Article 35, the “principle of effective occupation,” stated that a country could acquire rights over colonial land by setting up a coastal base, as long as it promised to protect existing rights and freedom of trade—meaning the rights and freedoms of other imperial powers.
The attempt by the Great Powers to carve up Africa did not go unopposed. The Nandi waged a ten-year war in what is now Kenya, disrupting the construction of the Uganda Railway. Ethiopian resistance preserved the country’s independence until the Italian invasion of 1936. The Maji Maji rebellion in Tanzania between 1903 and 1907 was one of many local uprisings. Ultimately, however, European firepower overwhelmed local resistance. The divisions sown in Berlin endure to this day.
Threads of Resistance: the women stitching stories and struggles
From Palestine to Greece, mothers are the roots of hope, the strength of solidarity, and the flames that keep tradition and dignity alive.
The art of Palestinian embroidery, or «Tatreez», is a decorative technique on fabric using needles and threads, passed down through generations of Palestinian women. This art form encompasses a variety of styles and motifs from different regions of Palestine, with each design reflecting the life, experiences, and social fabric of its community. The creation and preservation of these garments played a vital role in the daily life, cohesion, and socialization of women within each local society.
From nature-inspired motifs — such as flowers and trees — to geometric patterns, the embroideries carry unique meanings and histories. The most characteristic garment adorned with such stitching is the traditional thoubah — the wide dress once worn by Palestinian women. Every village in Palestine had its own distinct motifs, serving as visual identifiers for the women of that community. Red is the dominant color in embroidery, though its hue varies from region to region, from one artist to another. Common designs included the “eight-pointed star”: the moon, birds, palm leaves, stairs, and diamonds or triangles used as amulets to ward off the evil eye.
The Greek tradition of embroidery, though unique in its own right, follows a similar path. In Greece, embroidery has long been a form of expression and social connection, deeply rooted in history and tradition. From the famous embroideries of Macedonia to the intricate patterns of Crete and Thrace, the creation of woven and embroidered textiles in materials such as linen, cotton, and silk was intertwined with women’s everyday lives and with the preservation of family and local heritage. The motifs — whether depicting elements of nature or geometric forms — were closely linked to the rhythms of Greek life and society.
Just as in Palestine, embroidery in Greece served as a form of communication and a marker of one’s place of origin. Each region had its own characteristic designs, many of which — such as the cross-stitch — were rich in symbolism. Through embroidery, women cultivated their artistry, preserved traditions, and created garments that held deep significance in both their social and personal lives.
Both the Greek and Palestinian traditions reveal how women, even within societies shaped by different historical and political contexts, use art as a way to express identity, forge communal bonds, and strengthen their position within society. The art of «Tatreez» and Greek embroidery are inextricably linked to resistance, the preservation of cultural heritage, and the ongoing struggle for equality.
On March 8, a day that honors women and mothers around the world, we are reminded that — though they come from different lands and historical realities — the women of Palestine and Greece share common struggles, aspirations, and values. Our worlds may seem distant, separated by thousands of miles, yet the power of art and solidarity brings us closer than ever.
In 2021, UNESCO added traditional Palestinian embroidery to its List of Intangible Cultural Heritage.
“The reason the housing crisis continues is because there are people benefitting from it”
Interview with Jacob Stringer, author of “Renters Unite”
Hi, Jacob, thanks for talking to us. Can you first introduce yourself?
I’m Jacob Stringer. I organised for five years or so with London Renters’ Union and then I did a PhD on tenant unions. I just wrote a book called Renters Unite, which is an overview of the new wave of tenant organising in the Global North.
When you say the Global North, where exactly do you mean?
The book covers Europe and North America. Realistically, I didn’t have the opportunity to go to Australia or other more far-flung places. But it’s a wide variety of countries and experiences.
Tenant unions have been springing up across Europe, across different parts of the UK. There are city-specific unions, so I talk about the Manchester tenant union. Then some countries have a national tenant union. Ireland has one called CATU. It’s also happening in the Netherlands, in Germany, in Poland.
In the US, there’s a huge number of new tenant unions, which tend to be city based. I talk a lot about the Los Angeles and Crown Heights (Brooklyn, New York) tenant unions because they’re particularly interesting examples.
You say there’s a new surge of tenant unions. Why now?
It’s happening now because many places are experiencing what we loosely call a housing crisis. “Housing crisis” is a strange term, because usually you use the word crisis for something that doesn’t last long and then you resolve it. That’s not what’s happening with housing.
In many countries, people are facing ridiculously high rents for very low-quality accommodation. There’s a lot of overcrowding in the UK. A lot of low-income families are pushed into “temporary” (accommodation) in which you can actually be for years.
It’s better to talk about housing injustice because the reality is that it’s a crisis for tenants, but it’s not a crisis for landlords and it’s not a crisis for a lot of the establishment. The reason it continues is because there are people benefitting from it.
The increase in housing costs and degradation of conditions has now been going on for decades. Housing has become a very intensive site of exploitation in the current moment and often the big investment funds see more opportunity to extract money from housing than they do from setting up a factory, say, particularly in de-industrialised countries like the UK.
Around the world, people are starting to say that this can’t continue. We’ve got to do something about this. We’ve got to take the fight to the landlords and to the establishment who are keeping things going this way.
After Occupy, for instance, a lot of people started thinking about more permanent organisations, which could gather people together in communities of solidarity. Tenant unions just became the answer in a lot of different places.
You’re talking about the Global North where the population is stable. Free market theorists say that supply and demand means that housing prices should remain as stable as the population. So, what’s behind this surge in rent costs?
That depends on who you ask. There are some on the UK left who say that we don’t need to build more housing in the UK. I disagree with that. As an example, housing has been quite tight in London, and over the last few years net migration into London has been half a million people. When that’s happening, I do think is necessary to build more housing.
However, at the moment, building more housing doesn’t actually make prices cheaper, and part of the reason for that is because more and more capital is flowing into housing. It is becoming really attractive to big real estate investment trusts, private equity even.
Housing prices are not just about supply and demand. It’s also about who has the capital to put into it. So, what’s happening in the UK, and I suspect in a lot of countries, is that the landlords have more capital than ordinary people. They out-compete everyone.
People also occupy housing less densely than they used to. In a lot of rich countries the boomer generation is coming into retirement. In a more rational housing market, when you retire and your kids have left home, you might sell your three- or four-bedroom house and move into a smaller place. But what’s happening is that for a lot of retired people, their house is their main asset, which gives them a lot of security.
It’s not just retired couples. Single people are also living in large family houses. The boomer generation is called that because it was so large. Now enormous numbers of older, retired people who don’t really need very much space are living in these big houses. That’s a more peripheral effect, but it all comes into the mix.
In the UK, a big factor is the sale of social housing. The purpose of social housing was to undermine the landlord class and provide cheap, quality accommodation. Nobody would dream of paying large amounts of money to a private landlord. A big project of neoliberalism was to sell off a lot of public housing.
People talk about this a lot in the UK. But there are other countries that haven’t sold off their social housing. Spain never had much social housing. France hasn’t really sold off much. Yet they still have housing crises. There are a lot of factors in play. But the really short answer is property becoming attractive to capital.
How are people resisting the rise of rents?
The short answer is that they’re setting up tenant unions.
What does a tenant union do?
A tenant union is a membership organisation that collectivises people’s struggles around housing in a similar way to a union collectivising people’s struggles around the workplace.
A lot of people were involved in smaller struggles before over a particular building or a particular housing estate in London. And people saw that there was a need to build larger organisations, to really build broad-based solidarity. And so, these tenant unions have arisen. Usually, they have a fee-paying membership. So, they have resources. Some of them have paid staff, others don’t.
But all the tenant unions have two main tracks that they’re working on. One is solidarity around particular conflicts with landlords. Sometimes that’s just an individual having a conflict with a landlord, sometimes it’s a whole building. A lot of the base organising of the tenant union is around those conflicts.
Another track is campaigning. Most tenant unions are involved in campaigning for things like rent controls or ending no-fault evictions, which has just been won in the UK. They are also campaigning at local level around regulation of landlords and things like that.
A lot of the tenant unions are also trying to build local communities of solidarity, so that neighbours get to know each other and people do not live in isolation. Most tenant unions see themselves as part of a wider political project of trying to challenge individualism, making sure that people don’t feel that they’re facing the troubles of life alone.
London Renters Union, for example, tries to make its events enjoyable. It’s not just about having meetings. We have food in most of the branch meetings, we put on events people can enjoy coming to. It’s about building relationships and trying to spread networks of solidarity through your community.
You’re talking about moving from smaller, localised struggles to larger ones. It’s obvious how that works in social housing if everyone has the same landlord. How can people with different landlords work together?
This is a particular problem in the UK, where ‘landlordism’ is very dispersed. Most landlords in the UK only own one or two houses. Most blocks are owned by the local authority. This is something that London Renters Union has had to address by developing a narrative of mutual aid: “We’re going to help you. You’re going to help with someone else’s struggle.”
We sometimes put quite a lot of work into just one individual’s case. Sometimes that person then leaves the union and never sees us again. It’s always a little disappointing when that happens. But a lot of people don’t. They stay and want to fight other people’s cases as well.
The collective action element comes in with individual cases, where a tenant union decides that we will bring pressure on either the landlord or the agents in a collective way. We might write a letter to an agent who is failing to do repairs on a house. Then we turn up at the agent’s office with 20 people and say: “here are our demands. We are not going to go away until you sort this out. We are going to make your life miserable until you sort this out.”
That can be very effective. It doesn’t always work. Any workplace union could tell you that you don’t win every fight. But London Renters Union has got pretty good at winning.
Part of your book covers Berlin, where most of our readers live. As an outsider, what’s your perception of the housing movement in Berlin at the moment?
On the one hand, the housing movement is stronger in terms of numbers than in London. Berlin has had strong housing organising for a while. On the other hand, it’s very apparent that a lot of the attempts to stop gentrification have not, in fact, stopped gentrification. Many attempts to save sites which were available for community use have failed. The rents keep going up. There are some really wonderful successes, but it feels like not enough.
I talk a little bit about the expropriation campaign in the book. That’s a wonderful, inspiring campaign in many ways. A lot of people around the world read about it and go: “Wow, we wish we could achieve something like this here”. On the other hand, it also feels painfully slow to many people. It also feels like it will only help a limited number of people.
In Berlin, everyone knows the figure 59.1%, which was the number of people who voted to expropriate the big landlords. But after we won the referendum, the Berlin government just simply ignored the decision and carried on as before. What can we do to ensure that we do not just win votes, but get real change?
Barcelona has suffered some similar disappointments, where the housing movement got their people into the city government for a few years, who managed to make some changes, just not as many changes as people were hoping. And there’s still a housing crisis in Barcelona.
Now that that left wing government is out of power, they’re asking themselves: how is it that we could get so far and still not really make a big impact on housing for ordinary people? I think the difficult but true answer is that it’s hard to see how housing issues will really be resolved without undoing the wider neo-liberal governing conjuncture and taking on the powers of finance at the national and international level.
It is a huge struggle, but we have to face up to the reality that to make changes through legislative methods, these wins at local level are often not enough. You’re going to have to get wins at national level and get your people into government at national level.
But even then, you’re going to find that you’re up against the power of capital and the finance power block. The reality is that we’re not going to solve housing crisis until we are strong enough to take that on. That’s quite a difficult message, because it feels a long and painful job to take on those powers. But I do think it’s going to be necessary.
The strongest interim measure that you can take, without entirely overthrowing the current order, is to get public housing built in very large quantities. But the problem with that is you’ve got to get the finance for it. And as long as governments are pretending that austerity is the only option, it’s very difficult to get the finance for that housing.
Building more public housing is not a full answer, but it’s a good halfway house. And even to get that, we’re going to have to undo the entire austerity narrative that has bedevilled Europe for the last couple of decades. We’re going to have to say: “this scarcity you’ve created is false. We do have the resources to build the public housing we need”. I think it’s achievable, but it’s a big, big project.
What would you say to the people who say higher rents are not because of landlords or austerity. They’re the fault of migrants?
Of course, it is not migrants’ fault that house prices go up. This is about the scarcity narrative that years of austerity has induced. People are convinced that there’s very scarce resources to go around and that there’s not enough to share with new people coming in.
That narrative is entirely false. In the case of London, which has had a lot of migration over the last few years, you do need to build more housing, but that housing needs to be public housing. It needs to be aimed at the working-class, low-income people who need it the most.
In many cities, the population is not increasing. In that case, it’s very easy to show it’s nothing to do with migrants. It’s to do with the grip that landlords and capital in general have over the housing economy.
The main thing we have to do around this migration issue is destroy this idea of scarcity. We live in very rich countries with enormous access to resources. We can share these resources around, as long as the people at the top aren’t hoarding too much of it. And that’s got to be the main message.
Where can people get hold of your book?
Renters Unite is published by Pluto press, and you can order from their website, or you can just go into a bookshop and ask them to order it for you.
Is there anything that you’d like to say that we haven’t covered?
I would say, join a tenant union. And if there isn’t one near you, start a tenant union. Because this is the fight of our lives. We’ve got to win decent housing, or we can never live well.
Back in 2017, when Orania.Berlin, the luxury hotel at the western end of Oranienstraße, first opened its doors, it’s likely more than one lukewarm bottle of Sterni had “Berlin is over” muttered into it from across the street.
Lavished with handwoven Luribaff carpets and Japanese silk curtains, “Berlin’s coolest grand hotel” was a new kind of Kreuzberg arrival, one that didn’t just move in but repackaged the fading smell of anarchy around it as ‘boutique ambience’. Sitting on a low-slung designer couch behind a floor-to-ceiling glass façade, guests could look out onto a scuffed up Oranienplatz and feel, for a moment, like they were part of the furniture. Like they were part of the myth of a city built on art and friction. Like being there was a creative act in itself.
The promise of inclusion
But while guests behind the glass cosplayed the city’s creative identity, and that familiar three-word prophecy floated through streets being steadily smoothed out for consumption, artists arriving in Berlin were cautiously optimistic about a different kind of shift. Beyond the warnings of paperwork, waiting rooms, and Kafka-esque loops of registration (all the things Germany truly excels at), new spaces and collectives were taking shape, and the cultural scene was finally trying, or at least pretending, to catch up with the diversity already shaping the city.
In the same year, the Berlin Senate had launched Diversity Arts Culture, a project aimed at addressing structural racism and underrepresentation across the city’s cultural sector. And at Weißensee Art Academy, the *foundationClass — founded in 2016 for artists affected by racism, exile, or displacement — became one of the clearest expressions of that moment: a counterspace where creative practices could continue despite the barriers of bureaucracy and belonging.
Room to make it happen
What allowed these movements to take root wasn’t just Germany’s supposed awakening to the language of inclusion, but the material conditions that made it possible: space. Berlin’s reputation as a cultural haven rested on an older foundation of subsidised studios and public grants that kept artists secure in the city. Berufsverband Bildender Künstler (BBK), is one such association whose network of subsidised studios quietly made it possible for its tenants to keep working as the city grew less affordable.
For decades, the BBK’s studio programme has been one of Berlin’s quiet pillars of cultural life. The association rents buildings across the city and offers them to artists at affordable, income-adjusted rates. In 2021, the system was restructured into two funding tiers — 4.09 and 6.50 euros per square metre, bruttowarm (heating included) — with the BBK covering the difference between those set rates and the market price. The model allows hundreds of artists to maintain stable studios in a city where commercial rent has become unmanageable, effectively bridging the gap between public funding and private property.
Atelierhaus Fichtestr. 3
On Fichtestraße, six artists — Salwa Aleryani, Anaïs Héraud-Louisadat, Verónica Lehner, Isabell Spengler, Antje Taubert, and Ladislav Zajac — share one of these BBK studio houses. The space holds a mix of practices: installation, moving image, participatory art, and art therapy. It’s less a collection of rooms than a small ecosystem, where studio work spills into workshops, neighbourhood collaborations, and classrooms.
For Salwa Aleryani, who arrived in Berlin a decade ago, the studio represents what once drew so many artists to the city, the chance to sustain a practice without constant precarity. “On a daily basis, it gives me a framework to structure my work around” she says. “If I don’t have that studio, I would lose not just a physical space to build my work, but also the structure for preparing classes, organizing my thoughts, bringing people in. That’s not something you can really do from your kitchen table.”
Across the corridor, others describe it the same way: a working space, but also as a small community that still carries something of Kreuzberg’s collective spirit, even as the pressures of rent and redevelopment close in. “Our studio house is a diverse community of artists from different backgrounds, generations, and disciplines,” says Héraud-Louisadat, who has shared the building since 2018. “Because of the long-standing connections and shared energy, this place is unique, not anonymous like so many others. It’s what people mean when they talk about Berlin’s creative synergy.”
The cuts
Then in May, the artists at Fichtestraße received an email. As part of Berlin’s much-publicised cultural budget cuts — which stripped €130 million from the 2025 culture budget, around 12 to 13 percent — their studio was among those at risk of losing support by year’s end.
The BBK called the move “a severe threat to the atelier program, with no studio truly secure”. Without these workspaces, the entire system begins to unravel. Artists already working at the edge can’t simply relocate; the private market offers no affordable alternatives, and a studio isn’t something you can easily replace.
“I depend financially on my studio,” says Héraud-Louisadat. “Losing it would mean I might not be able to continue my profession at all. It wouldn’t just affect me, but also my family, my collaborators, and the people I teach or work with through art education and therapy.”
Verónica Lehner feels the same uncertainty. Her practice relies on large, time-intensive installations and paintings — the kind of work impossible to make in an apartment shared with family. “Without this studio,” she says, “I simply couldn’t continue.”
Artists from endangered studios across Berlin haven’t been waiting quietly. They’ve written open letters, met with local representatives, and joined demonstrations. For months, they’ve petitioned the Senate to reconsider, coordinating with the BBK to push for temporary extensions and public visibility.
According to BBK estimates, Fichtestraße is one of seven subsidised studio houses set to lose support in 2025. Thirty more are expected to follow in 2026, and another fifty-eight by 2027 — nearly a hundred buildings in total. Most are tied to leases the Senate has chosen not to renew, and once those expire, the spaces don’t come back; they’re converted, privatised, or simply folded into the commercial market.
The city is effectively cutting away the very infrastructure that drew visitors, residents, and artists alike, and the fallout is anything but equal.
Who gets left behind?
Aside from the studios at risk, when it comes to funding cuts for spaces, institutions with PR departments, long-standing ‘prestige’, or the right philanthropic ties are better equipped to weather the storm and grab all the headlines. Meanwhile, initiatives that aren’t — like *foundationClass — have already disappeared.
The Senate has scrapped Diversity Arts Culture and drastically reduced support for Berlin Mondiale, which connected underrepresented communities with the city’s cultural institutions. Oyoun, a cultural space in Neukölln committed to decolonial, queer, feminist and migrant perspectives, lost public funding after refusing to disinvite a Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East speaker (a decision that exposed how conditional Berlin’s support for diversity really is). Sinema Transtopia, known for its intersectional programming and social discourse, also had 100% of its support pulled.
The list goes on and the pattern is impossible to ignore. The same communities once held up as proof of “Berlin’s cultural diversity” are now the first to lose support. “You start to see that those who have much bigger cuts,” Salwa points out, “it’s connected to institutions that are more grassroots, are more connected to certain communities, and have a certain kind of programming. It’s affecting people, but not equally and there’s a reason for that. It’s not coincidental.”
What’s happening isn’t just a question of budgets or priorities, but of power and of who gets to define culture in the first place. Funding cuts are being used not just to save money, but to silence institutions that challenge Germany’s self-image, whether through decolonial, queer, or pro-Palestinian perspectives. And while artists and cultural workers fight to hold onto their voices, the state is quietly investing in more police, more surveillance, and more rules about who can gather and what can be said.
Policing the void
In 2023, just around the corner from Orania.Berlin, on the edge of Kottbusser Tor — a neighbourhood with a largely migrant community — a new police station opened its doors. Officially framed as a response to “safety concerns” in the area, the move marked a shift in tone, with politicians speaking of danger zones and disorder. Fast forward to today and knife-crime posters line Görlitzer Park and Kotti, casting a sense of threat over public space. The message is clear: be afraid.
Because while artists lose studios and community spaces disappear under the guise of austerity, Berlin’s police budget has magically climbed to €2.9 billion. The city that once prided itself on artistic freedom now dismantles cultural infrastructure with one hand while expanding its machinery of surveillance and control with the other.
And the fearmongering doesn’t stop at knife posters. Over the past two years, Berlin has become a testing ground for the criminalisation of protest — just look at every Palestine demo. They’re often banned pre-emptively, and people are prosecuted for flags, slogans, or even gestures. When demonstrations do go ahead, it’s always the police who escalate violence first, using disproportionate force and provoking confrontation before pointing to the resulting chaos as justification.
At the same time, there must have been hundreds of thousands of euros poured into court cases against pro-Palestine activists caught in that chaos. The cases are so weak they’re routinely thrown out, yet they still drain public funds and attention.
The cycle is self-perpetuating: police violence produces unrest, the media report the police are the victims of disorder (yes, really), and authorities cite that disorder to spend more on the very system causing it. Meanwhile, those protesting genocide are criminalised and art reflecting an increasingly authoritarian reality quietly disappears ‘from the walls’.
Resistance, solidarity, and the future
Even as “austerity” tightens its grip, cultural workers across Berlin are refusing to accept silence as the new normal. On July 8th, dozens of social and youth organisations shut their doors in protest. ‘Tag der geschlossenen Tür’ was a citywide action warning that the coming cuts wouldn’t just mute culture, but dismantle youth development, cultural education, inclusion, and anti-discrimination work.
As well as the march, a petition to preserve the BBK’s subsidised studios continues to gain support (sign it here), while collectives organise open letters and open studios. “I think resistance looks like collectivity,” Salwa says. “Trying to come together and mobilise, have more presence in the public to show how this affects not just us on a personal level, but entire communities, and the wider city too.”
Artists are using what platforms they have to make visible what’s being quietly erased and to remind those in power that what’s disappearing isn’t abstract. Some are listening. “There are a couple of political representatives who are really supportive,” she adds. “They’re sharing information, trying to mobilise, mostly from the opposition. At least when it comes to these kinds of cuts, they’re really trying to push back for now.”
And sometimes, persistence pays off, if only temporarily. After months of uncertainty, the artists at Fichtestraße received new contracts with a one-year extension. On paper, the building’s lease runs until 2027, though the Senate says funding may only last until 2026. It’s a reprieve, not a resolution, but for now it buys a bit more time.
So what’s left to lose?
Back in 2017, when people muttered “Berlin is over” into lukewarm bottles of Sterni, it was mostly a cliché — shorthand for tourists, tech money, or another wave of gentrification. None of it seemed good, but now that prophecy sounds different. What’s fading isn’t only affordable studios or community spaces, but also the fragile progress made toward inclusion and access, not just in the arts but across Berlin’s broader cultural, ethnic, and public life.
The cuts follow a familiar pattern; one where spaces led by migrants, queer artists, and people of colour are the first to lose support, and where the language of diversity that once signalled progress now rings hollow, masking the same exclusions it once claimed to address. Behind the talk of austerity sits a quieter kind of gatekeeping, deciding which stories get told and which are made to disappear.
Across the city, dozens of collectives and cultural spaces are trying to hold things together: places like Oyoun, Sinema Transtopia, and Berlin Mondiale, continue to make space for dialogue, collaboration, and care despite shrinking resources. Showing up still matters — at protests, in petitions, and in the rooms where culture is made and shared — because what remains of Berlin depends on people keeping those spaces alive before the only version left is the one seen from the top of the Amazon Tower.
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