March Violets by Philip Kerr (Viking 1989)

Driving west on Leipzigerstrasse, I met the torchlight parade of Brownshirt legions as it marched south down Wilhelmstrasse, and I was obliged to get out of my car and salute the passing standard. Not to have done so would have been to risk a beating. I guess there were others like me in that crowd, our right arms extended like so many traffic policemen, doing it just to avoid trouble and feeling a bit ridiculous. Who knows? But come to think of it, political parties were always big on salutes in Germany: the Social Democrats had their clenched fist raised high above the head; the Bolshies in the K P D had their clenched fist raised at shoulder level; the Centrists had their two-fingered, pistol-shaped hand signal, with the thumb cocked; and the Nazis had fingernail inspection. I can remember when we used to think it was all rather ridiculous and melodramatic, and maybe that's why none of us took it seriously. And here we all were now, saluting with the best of them. Crazy.

Rosa by Jonathan Rabb (Random House 2005)

Pimm bobbed his head as if conceding the point. He then took a towel and wiped his face. When he spoke, it was with a focus that was wholly unexpected: "The reason so many of you Reds are Jews, Herr Spartakus, is that a Jew is told to create heaven on earth. The next world, messiahs, fear of hell - never really been the point, has it? The Jew is meant to do it here, now. And the ones who get tired of waiting become Reds because for them, socialism is heaven on earth. The perfect world, and with no God telling them what to do this time. Everyone just as good as the rest. Everyone looking out for the rest. The Red can't tell you how you're supposed to get there - in fact, all he can tell you is what you're not supposed to do and what won't be there - but, still, he thinks he can build it. Sounds familiar, does it?" Pimm paused. "Your Red never loses what makes him a Jew; he simply shifts his focus." Pimm held Jogiches's gaze and then he turned to Hoffner. "You've get my help, Inspector, not because it's good for business, or because the devil I know is better than the devil I don't, but because even if nothing else of what you're saying is true, I have no interest in having one more lunatic tell me what my elimination is part of his grand plan." He shouted to the door. "Zenlo." The man appeared instantly. "We're going east. Tell the boys."

Pimm a Jew and a political one at that, thought Hoffner: the world was full of surprises. At least this one was working in their favour.

Clandestines: The Pirate Journals of an Irish Exile by Ramor Ryan (AK Press 2006)

The modern history of Mayday in Berlin follows this model. Mayday is a ritualistic confrontation between rebels and authority. As West Berlin became a haven for those avoiding the military draft, so an oasis of civil defiance, a pirate utopia, a quilombo of sorts was created by the dispossessed youth and the resident bohemian artists. The theatre of confrontation became Kreuzberg, traditionally a workers’ and migrants’ neighborhood now colonized by a multitude of politicized squatters. Anarchists, autonomes, punks, Turkish, and Kurdish youth fought pitched battles with armies of riot police. Burning barricades, tear-gas-filled streets, fierce combat, mass arrests, and police brutality became standard fare for Mayday in West Berlin.

So this day in East Berlin, the conflict has kicked off early. As the convoys of police vans descend on the park to witness the smoldering ruins of the burnt-out carcass of this dead beast, we have all already taken off. Now is the hour of the Black Bloc, the insurrectionary anarchists, the Maoists, the Trotskyites, the political hooligans, the casares (a reference to French rioters) and the drunken punks.

Mayday and I, aligning ourselves with one of the above categories (not sure which), cycle down to Oranienstrasse, the heart of historical Kreuzberg. There is a full-scale riot in progress and we arrive on the wrong side, behind the police lines. The sky is filled with flying objects raining down upon the besieged police lines. lt is a truly astonishing sight as paving stones, bottles, cans or whatever beat down like a medieval barrage. The lines and lines of riot cops are under intense pressure and occasionally one cop or another is carried behind, nursing an injury. "A handful of skilled stone-throwers can fend off a whole battalion of cops” explained Ringrose my elder sister’s boyfriend, years before when I was still a kid. He was of the earlier generation of Berlin Anarchists, who had raised the stakes in the early 1980's by taking to the street with combative resolve. And today, years later, his words resound as we witness maybe 50 stone-throwing militants holding off this street-full of riot cops. The tight street is a chaotic boiling pot of bedlam and as usual, the press is out in force, cameras everywhere, vultures stealing images to sell.

What to Do in Case of Fire? (2001)

Zoo Station by Ian Walker (Abacus 1987)

P. 27-28

Walking to the party. Tommy was describing a gig he had recently attended at the Church of Our Saviour in Rummelsburg, a few miles away. Gigs in churches were always unofficial, advertised by word-of-mouth only. Although the security police never arrested anyone inside the church grounds, there were always plenty of Staasis at such events, mingling with the audience and maybe taking photographs.

'In the front row of pews there were about twenty Staasis,' said Tommy, 'You know how they always stick out a mile in their tight white T-shirts and moustaches? Well there was this group playing a mixture of R & B and soul and one of the Staasis got really into it, jumping up and down and singing along. The other cops kept trying to restrain him, but eventually they had to escort him from the church.'

P. 319-320

I thought about the nightshift, the international community of nightshifts, all the metropolitan people toiling at nights to earn enough money for the basics plus one annual family holiday and maybe a car and some new furniture now and again if they were lucky. The driver had asked what freedom was. What was freedom for the nightshift? What was freedom for the women nightcleaners vacuuming office blocks in cities all across the west? The freedom to work all night and wait for the bus home at dawn? The freedom to fix breakfast and get the children off to school? The freedom to clean up the house and maybe catch a few hours' sleep before the children came home for their tea? The freedom to wait again for the bus that will return them to the deserted empires of the company headquarters that must be spick-and-span by morning for all the secretaries, clerks, accountants, PR people, designers, marketing and personnel managers, salesmen, lawyers and company directors, especially the place must be spick-and-span for the company directors, for all these armies of people busy making and selling useless things for fun and profit, the freedom to be part of this grand design? The freedom to enter polling booths, to inscribe twelve crosses during the course of a voting lifetime? I was thinking that people like the driver of this Trabant, people anywhere working on the nightshift, had neither the energy nor the inclination for silent bicycle protests of the kind described by the graphic designer of Köpenick. East and west, the same kind of people did these things. Dissent was also a kind of luxury. The driver of the Schwarzetaxi didn't give a fuck about freedom.

He would have felt out of place at the party in Köpenick. I had felt at home there. There was an international community of big-shots, of dissenters, of nightshift workers, all these little western worlds and eastern worlds holding up clean mirrors to each other. Big-shots in West Berlin lived in Dahlem. Big-shots in East Berlin lived in the suburb nicknamed Volvograd. Big-shots in West Berlin were capitalists. Big-shots in East Berlin were communists. Big-shots said we and spoke for all their nation. I felt drained and drunk. I wanted to shout things from the rooftops, but the things got so complicated and the words just blew around like dust in the wind.

What can I say; a writer I love so much that I had to inscribe two passages rather than the usual one for a book just (re)read to give you a flavour of his humour, humanity and sense of anger at the injustice of the world. For the millionth time on the blog, I'll recommend the following articles by Walker that originally appeared in the pages of the New Society magazine:

Anarchy in the UK

Skinheads: the cult of trouble

Also check out the comments on this old blog post which gives more background on Walker.

1st of May: All Belongs to You (2008)