On 12th May 2022, the organizer of the Nakba commemoration events in Berlin received a letter from the Berlin police banning all events planned for 13th-15th May 2022. Beyond Palestinian protests, demonstrations for freedom of assembly, press and expression in Berlin were also banned by the police as “substitute events”. A demonstration by Jewish Voice for Peace in memory of murdered Palestinian journalist Shirin Abu Akleh was also prohibited by Berlin police.
Palestine Speaks is an anti-racist coalition in Germany that advocates for the rights of Palestinians. The Nakba events (“al Nakba”: catastrophe) were intended to commemorate the 74th anniversary of the expulsion and ethnic cleansing of more than 800,000 Palestinians and to create a space for collective mourning for Europe’s largest Palestinian community of approximately 80,000. At the same time, the events were intended to draw attention to the de facto apartheid system under which Palestinian people continue to live today.
“The Nakba commemoration events are an important way for us Palestinians in Germany to remember the injustice perpetrated agaist our ancestors and to take a stand for the human rights of Palestinians everywhere”, said a spokesperson for Palestine Speaks.
The international human rights organization Amnesty International (AI) also highlights the crime of apartheid against Palestinian people in Israel, the occupied Palestinian territories, and against Palestinian refugees in other countries in its investigation-based report: “Israel’s Apartheid against Palestinians: A Cruel System of Domination and Crime against Humanity“. Characteristics of the clearly defined crime of apartheid under international law include expropriation of Palestinian lands and property, extrajudicial killings, forced transfers, drastic restriction of movement and withholding of nationality and citizenship for Palestinians. A leading human rights organization states that this systematic discrimination amounts to apartheid, which according to the Rome Statute is a crime against humanity. The UN Anti-Apartheid Convention also condemns such state action and calls for consequences. Other organizations such as Human Rights Watch and the largest Israeli human rights organizations B’Tselem and Yesh Din also confirm these violations of international law as a crime of apartheid.
The Berlin police justifies their ban with two arguments: 1. the Palestinian diaspora as well as “Muslim communities, (…) presumably from among the Lebanese, Turkish as well as Syrian diasporas and (…) especially youths and young adults are considerably tense and emotionalized”, 2. the Nakba commemoration events could be a potential threat to public safety.
Palestine Speaks denies these accusations and has taken legal action to assert the right to freedom of expression and assembly.
The ban on the commemoration events by the Berlin police restricts Palestinians in Germany in their fundamental rights and is worrying on several levels according to the standards of a democratic constitutional state. The blanket designation of certain minoritized groups as “highly emotionalized”, serves a racist stereotype that devalues Palestinians, Muslims and people of the Lebanese, Turkish and Syrian diasporas as a collective and denies them their ability to act “rationally”. Palestine Speaks refutes theunjustifiedpresumption that its events would endanger public safety. Palestine Speaks has organized more than fourty events in public spaces in the last two years, all of which were peaceful. The basic understanding of Palestine Speaks is an anti-racist one, i.e. Palestine Speaks as an organizer actively works publicly and in close cooperation with Jewish organizations to ensure that neither racist nor anti-Jewish statements or actions occur at events as well as in the society as a whole. This can also be read in press releases from Palestine Speaks on the Nakba demonstration in May 2021.
This new dimension of protest bans since April 29 in Berlin represents an alarming overall violation against the right to freedom of expression, which has already been and can further be extended to other areas of the right of assembly.
I’m sure I’m not the only person in Berlin who gets visits from socialists from other countries and wonders where he can take them. Of course it’s great to take people to the Marx and Engels statue in Alexanderplatz, the memorials to Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in the Tiergarten, and Bertolt Brecht’sBerliner Ensemble. But it’s sometimes good to have a surprize up your sleeve,
This is an article about the less well know monuments in Berlin which might be interesting to a left-wing audience. As a prelude to the political walking tour on 15th May, this article restricts itself to sights in East Berlin. Watch this space for a similar article that I’m intending to write on West Berlin.
Karl Marx studied law in Berlin University in 1836. In April 1837 he moved to a flat in Treptow on the street that’s now called Alt-Stralau. In 1962, the DDR government decided to erect several monuments to Marx. One of them was a series of sandstone memorials by the sculptor Hans Kies near his former flat. These were erected in 1964.
On one side of one memorial, we see a profile of Marx’s head. On the other side, a scene from a beer garden where Marx was trying to convince young Hegelians about the need for Communism. On another memorial, we see a picture of a general strike initiated by glass workers, opposite the words “The Philosophers have interpreted the world, the point is to change it”.
The memorials are part of a number of monuments to Marx, and are also very close to one of the prettiest parts of Berlin, just across the river Spree from Treptower Park (site of it’s own memorial).
Nearest public transport: S-/U-Bahn Frankfurter Allee
If you leave the Frankfurter Allee station and walk down the main street, it is quite likely that you will miss a plaque on the wall of the main street. But if you look closely, you can see the inscription “V. I. Lenin took part in a workers’ meeting in this building in August 1895”.
Little information seems to be available about this meeting, but what we do know is that Lenin lived in Berlin between July and September 1895, where he was trying to make links with German socialists. Among others, he met with William Liebknecht (father of Karl), a founding member of the SPD.
In a letter to his mother, Lenin wrote “a few steps away from me is the Tiergarten (a splendid park, the best and biggest in Berlin), the Spree, where I bathe every day, and a station of the urban railway. There is a railway here that traverses the whole town (above the streets). The trains run every five minutes, so it is easy for me to go “to town” (Moabit, where I am living, is actually considered a suburb).
The only bad thing is the language—I understand far less conversational German than French. The pronunciation of the Germans is so unlike what I am accustomed to that I do not even understand public speeches, although in France I understood practically everything in such speeches from the very outset.”
Any similarities with the present are, of course, entirely coincidental.
Nearest public transport: Straßenbahn Mollstraße/Otto-Braun Straße
Barnimstraße was Berlin’s main women’s prison between 1864 and 1974. It is now most famous because Rosa Luxemburg was imprisoned twice here – for two months in 1907, and for a year in 1915-16. Over 300 women who resisted the Nazis were also sent from the prison to be executed in Plötzensee. Other prisoners include opponents to DDR, prostitutes and women who had had illegal abortions.
Luxemburg was first imprisoned in 1904, and over her life she was jailed for class hatred, conscientious objection and treason. The current site contains a sign reading “here stood the women’s prison where Rosa Luxemburg was detained because of her revolutionary attitude”.
A few doors down from the Brecht-Haus, whose garden contains the graves of Brecht, Hegel and others, there’s a monument which was built by East German sculptor Dietrich Grüning in 1977. At the top of the monument, there’s one word: SPARTAKUS. Below is a quote from Karl Liebknecht: “That means fire and spirit. That means soul and heart. That means will and deed. The revolution of the proletariat”.
At the back of the monument there’s an explanation of why it’s there. “This is the place where the Spartacus Group, the nucleus of the Communist Party of Germany, was formed on 1st January 1916 under the leadership of Karl Liebknecht”. I guess that it was a big public meeting point in DDR times.
Now it stands in the garden of expensive flats, and you can only see it by waiting outside for someone to come out and leave the gate open. I only found out about it all when I was researching an article about the Spartacus film. What we’re left with is a Liebknecht quote on a statue that is only accessible to rich tenants. Who said Germans have no sense of irony?
Nearest public transport: U- and S-Bahn Alexanderplatz
Hidden away in a back street around the corner from the Fernsehturm, there is a memorial to the women’s uprising of 1943. In February 1943, a new wave of deportations was planned. This affected, among others, 1,500-2,500 Jewish people, mainly men who had been in mixed marriages. They were taken to the former Jewish Welfare Administration on Rosenstraße 2-4.
On 27th February, the non-Jewish wives and the children of the imprisoned men assembled in front of the building, calling for a release of their family members. 600 women protested every day for a week, resulting in some prisoners being released on 6th March. Others were not as lucky – on the day before, 25 of the prisoners in Rosenstraße had been deported to Auschwitz.
In the words of one protestor: “One day the situation in front of the collecting centre came to a head… The SS trained machine guns on the women: ‘If you don’t go now, there are orders to shoot.’ But by now the protesters couldn’t care less. The women screamed ‘you murderers!’ and everything else.” The women survived and no-one was punished for taking part in the protests.
The site of the demonstrations now contains a sculpture made in 1995 by the Jewish Communist Ingeborg Hunzinger. It includes women and children waiting anxiously. Opposite stands a sculpture sitting on a park bench – a privilege which was denied to Jews in 1943.
Address: Greifenhagener Straße 59, Wichertstraße 53
Nearest public transport: S-/U-Bahn Schönhauser Allee
Werner Prochnow was a baker and a leading member of the German Communist Party. In March 1933 he was captured by the SA. He was able to escape and emigrated to Czechoslovakia and Switzerland. In 1937 he joined the International Brigades in Spain.
Prochnow was imprisoned in internment camps in France and North Africa, but managed to flee to the Soviet Union in 1943. In 1944 he was sent behind the front lines to make contact with German partisans In 1945, he was captured by the SS and shot on 19th January.
There are 2 memorials to Prochnow, not far from each other. The first is a plaque on Greifenhagener Straße showing a man and woman protecting a child in the background, and a soldier raising a fist in the foreground. The second is outside his old house in Wichertsraße, and contains the text “The anti-fascist Werner Hermann Prochnow lived here. Born: 2 March 1910. Fell in the common partisan fight against the SS.”
Nearest public transport: Straßenbahn Brodowiner Ring
On the edge of Marzahn, near the border with Brandenburg, you can’t help seeing a house with “21 April 1945” written on its wall. Above the date are the words “Victory” and “to Berlin” written in Russian. 21st April was the day that Russian troops first reached the Berlin border. It is claimed (and disputed by others) that the Haus der Befreiung (House of Liberation) was the first house in Berlin on which a Soviet flag was hoisted.
In 1980, on the 35th anniversary of the end of the war, the house was renovated and the inscription was added to the wall. A memorial stone was also added, reading “On the way towards the liberation of Berlin from Hitler fascism, Soviet soldiers hoisted the red flag of victory.”
In 2015, there was an attempt to sell off the Haus, and it has been empty since. Selling the Haus could have meant losing the monuments to the defeat of fascism. With the help of over €1 million, mainly taken from old DDR institutions, it is being renovated once more. After renovation, the plan is to make the Haus available to people with a refugee background.
Nearest public transport: Straßenbahn Werneuchenerstraße
This is another memorial that is hidden in the backstreets, not far from the old Stasi prison (now a museum), and hidden behind a playground. It is a memorial to soldiers who died when the Red Army fully captured Hohenschönhausen on April 25th 1945, 4 days after they entered Berlin.
The memorial consists of a largely symmetrical wall, on each side showing a Soviet soldier standing over a surrendering German. At the side, plaques say “Eternal glory to the heroes of the Soviet army” in Russian and German. In front of the wall is a single red star.
The memorial was first built by the Soviet sculptor Ivan Pershudchev In 1947, and then moved to the Soviet memorial in Schönholz (see below) the following year. It was re-modelled in 1975 for the 30th anniversary of the liberation of Hohenschönhausen.
Many people have visited the Soviet War Memorial in Treptower Park. And so they should. The Stalinist architecture is impressive, if slightly excessive. Much less known is the similar memorial in Schönholzer Heide, just on the edge of Wedding. This is a graveyard for more than 13,000 Red Army soldiers who died in the Second World War.
Schönholzer Heide was an old recreational area, which in Nazi times was used as a camp for forced labour. In the late 1940s, the Soviet architects Constantin A. Solovyov, W. D. Korolyov, M. D. Belavenzev, together with sculptor Ivan G. Pershudshev designed the memorial park.
The main part of the memorial is a huge field surrounded by plaques containing details of the people who are known to have died in the war. On the edge are 16 burial chambers, each containing over 1,000 dead soldiers. At the edge of the field, there is a 33½ metre high obelisk. Behind the obelisk there is a memorial stone remembering Russian soldiers who died in German prisons.
Nearest public transport: Straßenbahn Björnsohnallee
I was walking from Wedding through Prenzlauer Berg, and all of a sudden I saw a familiar face on the side of a house. Marielle Franco was a Brazilian activist and politician who became a city councillor in Rio de Janiero for the PSOL party, a left wing split from Lula’s Workers’ Party. In 2018, she was murdered. Two former police officers were charged with her killing.
Berta Cáceres was an indigenous leader and environmental activist in Honduras. She was an important member of the campaign that stopped the building of the Agua Zarca dam at Rio Gualcarque. She too was murdered after being on the hitlist of the Honduran military.
So what are they doing in a wall in one of Berlin’s more gentrified districts? Firstly, there’s the complicity of German companies Voith and Siemens in building the Agua Zarca dam. Then there’s the gun used to murder Marielle Franco, which was produced by the German arms manufacturer Heckler and Koch.
The mural was initiated and implemented by CADEHO (human rights collective for Honduras) and Kollektiv Orangotango (collective for critical education and creative protest). It was designed and painted by Fonso, La Negra and Soma, three Colombian artists. They encourage you to become active for justice for Marielle and Berta and an end to the complicity of the German arms industry.
The Berlin LINKE Internationals walking tour of East Berlin will take place on Saturday, 14th May at 10.30am. Meeting point is the Luther statue at Alexanderplatz
Political Conferences in Berlin – Opportunities for English speakers
Some tips for conference sessions in English in May and June
May-June is conference season in Berlin. The weather encourages people to leave the house, and most people haven’t started their summer holidays yet. Most importantly, there are a string of public holidays which enable you to take a long week-end off work. This year is no exception, and I’ve noticed that more conferences than ever before are offering at least some workshops in English.
This article is a summary of some of the conferences coming up soon, with a particular focus on the meetings you can attend if you don’t trust your German.
What it is: Over three days, the festival will open up resonant spaces for feminist debates and movements – multiperspectival, intersectional and diverse
Where it is: Pfefferberg, Schönhauser Allee 176 and Sophiensaale and Sophienstraße 18
Meetings in English:
Feminist Resistance through the Arts (with Urvashi Butalia, Aram Han Sifuentes, Sabika Abbas, Farzana Wahid Shayan, Carola Lentz and Nabila Horakhsh)
Intersectionality and Its Critics (with Nikita Dhawan, Mario do Mar and Castro Varela)
Feminicide and Violence against Women (with Meena Kandasamy, Hannah Beeck, Aleids Lujan Pinelo and Valeria España
What it is: Conference around the subject of expropriation and the nationalisation of the real estate companies
Where it is: TU Berlin, Straße des 17. Juni 135
Meetings in English:
How can non-Germans get involved in the fight against gentrification? Sunday 29th May, 10 am (Organised by the DWE English-language working group Right2The City)
What it is: one of the largest left wing conference in Germany
Where it is: Franz-Mehring-Platz 1
Meetings in English:
Imperialism Today (with Alex Callinicos)
Perspectives from Sudan (with Muzan Alneel, Think Tank for People-Centered Development, Khartoum)
Can Israel’s Left be part of the liberation of Palestine? (with Ilan Pappe (historian), Michael Sappir (Jewish Israeli Dissence, Leipzig) and Mays Ashash (Jewish Bund))
10 years Arab revolutions (with Hossam El Hamalawy and Anne Alexander)
What it is: A week-end of networking, fun and political discussion on the edge of Berlin
Where it is: Naturfreundehaus Hermsdorf, Seebadstraße 27
Meetings in English:
The War in Ukraine: Voices from Eastern Europe (with Sasha, Russian Socialist Movement and Oksana Dutchak (Deputy Director of the Center for Social and Labor Research (Kyiv))
Palestine and the German press (with Palestinian journalist sacked by Deutsche Welle)
Reading from WTF Berlin? Expatsplaining the German Capital (with Jacinta Nandi)
This book provides a helpful and eminently readable overview of ‘health’ and how a government with a ‘health justice agenda’ might effect meaningful change. ‘The left’ (a troublingly amorphous concept that casts the Royal Colleges in the role of key institutions of the ‘health labour movement’) is castigated for being romantic and defensive rather than innovative and visionary, placing a narrow focus on health services rather than the more important social determinants of health.
Some arguments appear overstated for rhetorical reasons, for example: “We believe in 1948 as an ultimate victory for the left on the health agenda”. This disregards justified and longstanding criticism of the NHS by progressives that it was a ‘sickness’ service rather than a ‘health’ service, and that some elements such as mental health were never given the investment they warranted. The author also acknowledges that Bevan’s plan did not include a universal public health service.
In any case, few would now look at the current state of the NHS with its record waiting lists, staffing crisis, relatively poor outcomes and increasing penetration by the private sector, and not reflect that the ‘ultimate victory’ may yet prove to have been only a temporary respite. The Just Treatment ‘NHS New Deal’ is singled out as an exemplar of a myopic fixation on the NHS (exacerbated by Covid), and yet a glance at this organisation’s website shows it also has an international focus including vaccine equity and challenging the profiteering by big pharma. There is no mention of last year’s People’s Covid Inquiry which critically examined the government’s response to the Covid pandemic, but also explored health inequalities and in fact opened with internationally renowned Michael Marmot as an expert witness.
The book is divided into sections on the NHS, social justice, economic issues, social care, sustainability, and finally, a new deal for public health. Work on health inequalities by pioneers such as Marmot, Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson is duly acknowledged. The section on social care is rightly critical of the limitations of Labour’s National Care Service (“the NCS does not sufficiently change the nature of care, the power relationships that define it, or the level to which institutionalised and paternalistic care dominates provision”) and advocates a much broader approach, similar to the campaign for a National Care Support and Independent Living Service (NaCSILS).
There are a couple of minor if surprising errors. It is stated that “Since 2010, about 10,000 hospital beds have been closed in England”, whereas according to King’s Fund data around twice this number were lost. Of less importance is the attribution of the Black Death to a virus rather than the bacterium Yersinia pestis.
The author makes a cogent plea that health improvement and health justice require looking beyond health services to a public health system as a whole. This is perhaps the key message overall for health campaigners. The issue of affordability is dealt with well, although there is little on reformation of the tax system as a way to finance public services. While the author distances himself from the suggestion that the book is really a polemic with a somnolent Labour Party in need of “a far more compelling vision”, statements such as “the leftist strategy in health has therefore become defined by maintaining the status quo”, leaves little doubt as to exactly where the barbs are aimed.
If we agree that it is conditions of social injustice that make us sick, the questions remain as to whether democratic socialism is up for seriously challenging the dominance of those businesses and corporations who profit from our ill health, and what might be revealed about the balance of power in the course of such a struggle. Even more reason to rally the troops around defending and rebuilding the NHS perhaps, while setting this in the context of a much broader vision of public health as outlined in this book.
Christopher Thomas. ‘The Five Health Frontiers. A New Radical Blueprint’. Pluto Press, London, 2022
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