Germany’s Radical Makeover

A fugitive with a penchant for gardening, Tony Miller laid sod near the converted army truck he calls home and mused about the scruffy independence of existing on the fringes.

“We’ve got our own blacksmith in this camp,” said Miller, who lives in one of Berlin’s “wagon fortresses,” as its 11 squatter camps are known. “We’ve got four tattoo artists. We’ve got all kinds living here: French, Italian, Spanish, German, Czech. We’re very ‘multi-culti.’ But sometimes it’s like we’re trying to live a memory. No one has shared political goals. Everyone’s into their own things, creating their own walls.”

It’s tough being a member of the counterculture when so many others have traded in their manifestos for factory jobs -- or become the country’s foreign minister.

Once Europe’s happy caldron for left-wing radicals, punkers, anarchists, squatters and free spirits, Germany is a more staid place these days. Squatters are signing rent contracts, and punk rock is largely a discordant echo from bawdier times. Many of those once on the edges -- reveling in the zeitgeist of the early days when communism fell -- have discerned that cultural revolution can be expensive when pink hair turns gray.

Alternative movements haven’t entirely withered. Left-wing gangs still battle neo-Nazis in violent clashes of black boots, leather jackets, shaved heads, Mohawk haircuts, dangling silver chains and bloody noses. Environmental activists still lie in roads to block transport of nuclear waste. But much of the utopian creed, including the quest by squatters to live in abandoned buildings and in defiance of societal strictures, has lost the sting of conviction.

“We had a political movement, but it disappeared,” said Miller’s girlfriend, Susanne Nachtsheim, shaking her head as Miller unfurled sod near a scarecrow made of rusted steel and animal bones. “I don’t know what happened to the younger generation. People aren’t aware anymore. There aren’t even that many fascists around to protest against. People used to be more angry and intellectual. Now, it’s all just fashion.”

Nachtsheim and Miller are the philosophical descendants of German radical movements that began in the 1970s. It was then that the Baader-Meinhof gang -- a collection of left-wing terrorists charged with murders and bombings -- shook the political establishment with mercurial violent rampages.

Campus radicalism was strong, and many young leaders, including today’s foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, embraced everything from environmental protection to pro-Palestinian causes. Fischer mixed Marxist ideology with anti-Vietnam War passion as he rose from taxi driver to bushy-haired street rebel. He helped rough up a police officer in a 1973 demonstration and befriended other radicals such as “Danny the Red.”

U.S. and British punk rock bands, such as the Ramones and the Clash, inspired distinct musical ideologies on both sides of the Berlin Wall. West German punk bands were driven by irony and satire aimed against industrial life, while musicians in the east, some of whom were arrested, considered punk a political weapon against communism. When the wall fell in 1989, punk’s musical influence diminished. Some punkers founded neo-Nazi bands; many others spilled into the left-wing anarchist and squatter movements.

“For a lot of people,” said Bert Papenfuss, a punk lyricist and a prominent poet in the former East Germany who now runs the Kaffee Burger literary pub in Berlin, “punk was a phase they went through on the way to becoming something else.”

A crackdown against the counterculture movement erupted in 1995 when about 2,000 punks and anarchists clashed with 2,000 police officers during a music festival in Hanover known as the “Days of Chaos.” Nearly 200 police officers were injured as punks looted and hurled firebombs. By then, tolerance for anarchists and squatters was shrinking as Germany faced the monumental political and economic tasks of reunification.

These days there are fewer ragged buildings and fields inhabited by squatters. Of the 111 illegal squatter apartment buildings that existed in Berlin in 1992, about 30 have been shut down and in the rest, residents have signed rental agreements with landlords. Of 11 wagon fortresses, two have illegally taken over land, according to the Berlin development authority. No accurate population numbers exist for punks, squatters and anarchists, but Germany’s Interior Ministry says that only a minority of the estimated 5,400 left-wing radicals nationwide is prone to vandalism and violence.

Punks and squatters today are poorer than in the past and -- like many Germans -- are insecure over the country’s high unemployment and economic turmoil. Many of them are in their 20s and 30s and often can be seen begging with their dogs in the subways or washing car windows for change in traffic.

The counterculture traditionally emerged from the “bourgeois class,” said Hans-Georg Soeffner, a sociologist at the University of Konstanz.

“Today, they’re coming from lower economic classes,” he said. “Punks and squatters used to be dirty, but they had money. Now the scene is dirty and poor.... Their goal is to live without constraints. Their enemy is capitalism.”

Down the block from Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder’s Social Democratic Party headquarters, a mural of fire and flying tanks depicting a Germany in tumult adorns one of Berlin’s oldest squatter apartments. The building is named for Tommy Weissbecker, an anarchist known as a “hemp rebel,” who was shot in a 1972 police raid on suspected left-wing militants and sympathizers.

Unlike in times past, today’s 40 or so tenants pay rent and conform to rules. The building has the aura of a fraternity house that has collided with an ill-defined revolution. The foyer is pasted with stickers for bands such as 100 Demons and the Skabilly Rebels. An explanation of how government cuts to unemployment and health benefits will affect squatters is posted near the door. (Many squatters profess to be “autonomous” from the state yet collect subsidies.)

Jenny, a Weissbecker tenant wary about divulging her last name, crossed the alley and unlocked the Line 1 tavern.

She lighted a few candles and was soon pouring beers beneath a sign that said “Religion Is Curable.” Two fellows who appeared to be pensioners and one jittery punk rocker, who sensed he had arrived way too early, whispered and sipped.

Jenny said she was worried about the recent rise of right-wing extremist political parties, adding, “They’ve had power before and behind them are people with much money, and with money comes power.”

When asked what it means to be a punk these days, Jenny thought for a moment.

“What’s it mean to be anything? I am what I am.”

Rain was blowing hard and sideways when Uwe Hecht slipped inside the tavern. The son of a railroad worker, Hecht followed his brother and sister into the counterculture movement. Both his siblings have since found other passions. His brother became a Buddhist. And his sister, once one of Berlin’s most dedicated squatters who lived in a wagon across the street, manufactures motors and has moved into a house.

“She became disillusioned,” said Hecht, a thirtysomething free spirit who prefers the teachings of a long-dead Russian mystic to any factory job. “The squatter scene fractured, and many people got bought out by the state.... The anarchist movement in Germany is quite oppressed. We’re under surveillance. I’m apolitical. I’m not a punk. I’m a freak. I don’t want to assimilate with anything. I want to live and let live.”

Across town, there’s barely an imprint of the Berlin Wall that once skirted the wooded plot now home to Nachtsheim, Miller and other squatters, a clattering miasma of scavenged wood, twisted metal sculptures, beer and vegetables, and men studying sprockets, chains, transistors and other cobbled trinkets.

Like other squatters, Miller is a forager who also works jobs on the black market to sustain indulgences such as a digital camera and a computer with a flat-screen monitor. He said he had been on the lam a few years -- trouble with police in England he didn’t want to talk about.

He invited a visitor through a gauze curtain and into a boxy one-room home crammed with a bed, the scent of oil, the hint of a wet dog and a lot of tools. Other squatters, mostly young men with nose rings and so many silver studs on their jackets and belts that each one seemed his own tiny galaxy, poked their heads in and borrowed things.

A guy carrying two cymbals and wearing a ball cap that said “Scum” hurried past. Another disappeared into a trailer with a wrench. Someone turned on a punk rock record. But the camp seemed a place of denial and nostalgia tucked amid a city that had moved on to new architecture and fascinations.

“The activism’s gone,” Nachtsheim said. “You know every May 1 we hold a counter-protest to the neo-Nazi rally. But the police don’t even take us seriously anymore. They use our rally as tactical training in crowd control for their young officers. It’s become a joke.... I guess all we’re trying to do now is find a way of living without bothering anyone around us.”