On Saturday, Berlin police detained a queer person for wearing a white t-shirt with a pink triangle. That symbol was forced on gay men in the concentration camps—wouldn’t German cops remember?—and has since come to stand for remembrance and resistance. Yet under an increasingly authoritarian government, a pink triangle might be a banned marker of a terrorist organization.
People at an anticapitalist pride demonstration got punched, shoved, and arrested by heavily armed cops. In previous years, police seemed hesitant to create images of such unhinged violence in a city that officially supports gay rights. But as democratic freedoms have been squashed in the name of suppressing Palestine solidarity, Berlin police have come to understand they can do whatever they want without fearing criticism from politicians, media, or judges.
This festival of queerphobic violence took place just a few kilometers down the road from the city’s main pride demonstration.
CSD
Berlin’s right-wing mayor Kai Wegner went to Christopher Street Day (CSD), as the Pride demonstration here has been called since it was launched in 1979, to say that the rainbow flag “belongs in the center of our society.” This was a rebuke to Friedrich Merz and Julia Klöckner, Wegner’s colleagues in the CDU, for refusing to raise the rainbow flag at the Bundestag.
Hundreds of thousands of people danced at CSD alongside floats from Vattenfall, Siemens, Commerzbank, and Mercedes-Benz, companies which often only find their voices to champion queer liberation every July. The CDU—the party that deports queer refugees, voted against marriage equality, and prevented the rehabilitation of all gay men convicted under Germany’s notorious paragraph 175—had its own float, as did the far-right media company Axel Springer.
Wegner marched behind a banner that said “Homos Jews Women,” which might sound strange, giving Wegner’s long-standing connections to far-right antisemites. Yet East Pride Berlin is not a Jewish group—it appears to be older white men who support Israel’s far-right government and attacked the Dyke March for speaking out against genocide. Wegner is just another example of antisemites who love Israel.
For decades now, CSD has been a space for reactionary and queerphobic institutions to drape themselves in rainbow flags, yet only if it helps the bottom line. This year, some corporations pulled back in the face of Trump’s anti-woke offensive.
In 2016, CSD gave a stage to the Israeli ambassador, while Palestinian and Israeli queer who protested against him were beaten. Far from being a safe haven for queers, Israel carried out the deadliest attack on queer people in history when it bombed Evin prison in Teheran, murdering 100 trans people.
IQP
A couple of hours later, well over ten thousand people gathered for anticapitalist pride demonstration and chanted “Fuck pinkwashing!” Internationalist Queer Pride, organized by immigrants from all over the world, was taking place for the fifth time. Anticapitalist alternatives to Berlin’s CSD date all the way back to 1998, but certain German leftists always had a problem with Palestine solidarity. IQP was born when the organizers of a “radical” German pride demonstration called the cops to kick out Queers for Palestine—as a result it has always been primarily in English.
This year, IQP’s floats, organized by Black, Asian, and Latino immigrants, moved slowly from Südstern via Hermannplatz toward Kottbusser Tor, through the immigrant neighborhoods where Berlin’s Palestinian diaspora is concentrated. German media would have us believe these communities were particularly homophobic—but older Palestinians showed full solidarity for younger queers. Heavily armed police attacked demonstrators again and again, dissolving the demonstration at 8pm just before it reached Kotti, nowhere near its destination at Oranienplatz.
Tagesspiegel published a headline about right-wing extremists threatening CSD, in reference to a counter-demonstration of 30-50 Nazis. Ironically, the image chosen for the article shows a black-uniformed cop in front of a rainbow flag. Thus, this fervently pro-government newspaper unintentionally revealed the truth: Berlin cops, well known for their right-wing views, committed more queerphobic violence on Sunday than everyone else in the city in an entire year.
Red-Pink
While CSD was a celebration of the privileges that have been granted to wealthy white gay cis-men, IQP was a powerful display of solidarity among oppressed people. Sex workers, disabled activists, and Jewish Queers for Palestine chanted together, “None of us are free until all of us are free.”
A Red-Pink Bloc at the front, organized by revolutionary socialist groups including Klasse Gegen Klasse, drew the connection between class struggle and queer liberation. Anika, a trans electrician at a public hospital, recalled the example of Madygraf, a printshop where workers went on strike to defend a trans colleague—and ended up occupying their workplace. As Anika put it, it’s not advocacy for queer rights that divides the working class. “Queerphobia divides us,” she called out, “and strikes unite us!”
Nathaniel Flakin’s anticapitalist guide book Revolutionary Berlin is the first book to include Internationalist Queer Pride.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.
