Berlin: 2019 A decisive year ?

Within the next days the contracts of Liebig34, Potse, Drugstore, Großbeerenstraße 17a and Syndikat are ending. The future of many other projects like Meuterei, Rigaer94, Brauni is not much clearer. Whether they just have more time or the so called owners are playing with concealed cards, we have to develop and adopt a defense for these projects.

A good moment to go into a counteroffensive

The restructuring of the city is thundering on and even a bourgeois middle class can not ignore the consequences anymore. The City is becoming more and more dense and those that still fit in it richer with every wave of gentrification. Houses are getting forcefully vacated, renovated and turned into condos. Renters get forcefully evicted when the so called owners are coming up with more modern schemes of maximizing their profit, renters cannot keep pace with rent raises or are just plain “too annoying”. The last vacant lots are getting covered with new luxury lofts even when they very well were used since their beginning by the people around. Commercial premises are being rented out at such a steep price that businesses inevitably have to become more high priced and exclusive even when the operators might not want that. [Read More]

Berlin: Attacks on Google and gentrification

On Thursday 1/11/2018 we did some work using angry hammers on the door of a Google office under construction in Tucholskystraße, Berlin.
Even if a Google campus is not to be set up in Kreuzberg for the time being, Google remains an engine of our alienated daily life and an instrument of authority. To attack Google, control and dominion, be it with graffiti, solidarity, hacking or hammers, is necessary in order to breath with self-determination.
The essence is in the liberating decision to act in person.
On Saturday night of 03/11, an evil spirit took the initiative to damage an ex neighbourhood shop in Friedelstraße 54. The poltergeist destroyed the walls, the windows, the pipes and the floors. Of course with every regard for those who live in the house.
As Halloween is over, one can foresee that the building will remain doomed for the whole year. Little is known about spirits, except that they seek company, usually remain alone and let themselves be cast out most unwillingly. This should be clear to businesses and possible tenants as they decide to rent the haunted place in Friedelstraße 54. [Read More]

Berlin: Film about Liebig34

On 09-01-2019 we will show the premiere of the movie “Indoor” in SO36. The
movie is about the queer-feminist houseproject Liebig34 in Berlin.

This is the timetable for the evening:

7:00pm doors
7:30pm lecture from Prof. Dr. Margrit Meyer
8:15pm screening “Indoor”
9:00pm discussion

[Read More]

Berlin: They‘re coming closer! International call to support Rigaer94

On the 15th of November, five hundred cops, including special forces with assault rifles, attacked Rigaer94 to make a house search in the case of a trouble in a shop some month before. The investigation is labeled as „robbery and bodily harm“. A video published by the shop owner shows, that this is an obvious lie in order to create a reason for a martial attack against rebellious structures. The pigs came at 6 o‘clock in the morning and managed to open the doors quickly, meanwhile aiming with their rifles towards anyone showing up at the windows.

In the same moment, four other houses were searched in different areas of Berlin in this issue. Later the Minister of Interior, Andreas Geisel (Socialdemocratic Party), declared that all this was not politically motivated but instead was an offensive against the criminal underworld. But everyone knows that the raids were nothing else than attacks on anti-authoritarian ideas and combative structures in order to claim the monopoly on violence.

In addition to the pigs, the guy who declares himself the lawyer of the official housowner (the british mailbox company Lafone Investments Ltd.) entered the scene in Rigaer Strasse in the company of some construction workers in order to destroy the doors of the house. But he was stopped by the presence of comrades and finally sent away by legal threats by the lawyer of Rigaer94. Nevertheless the presence of the dubious circles that claim the ownership of the house for several years now, is again a meaningful sign. [Read More]

Berlin: Liebig34 must stay!

We are Liebig 34, a self-organised anarcha queer feminist house project in Berlin-Friedrichshain made of different collectives: the Infoladen Daneben, the-queer-feminist living-project Liebig34 and the queer feminist eventspace L34-Bar. 40 people from all over the world with different backgrounds and gender identities collectively live together whitout cis-men, trying to create a “safer political space“ without hierarchies, a space where we try to develop, extend and exert anti-patriarchal practices, where we reflect power structures, privileges and where we empower each other.
Liebig 34 was squatted in 1990 and later legalized like many other houses in east-Berlin. After the failed attempt to buy the house collectively, a contract was made for 10 years.

Now, december 2018, our contract is coming to an end.

Our house, like over 200 others around Friedrichshain, is owned by Gijora Padovicz and his company Siganadia Grundbesitz GmbH, famous for the systematic buying, eviction and destruction of houses and houseprojects for commercial profit in detriment of affordable housing spaces for all. [Read More]

Berlin: We will #occupy again

We will #occupy again.

On the 20th May 2018, 10 houses were occupied in Berlin and the bordering city Potsdam. Despite positive feedback by neighbours and the public (aka media), all houses were violently evicted the same day. Despite promises concerning housing, the „left“ government had the police evict houses and beat up people. The protection of private property was yet again more valuable than the right to housing or the right to physical integrity. Nonetheless, the occupations were not just right but necessary. More than half of Berlin‘s population finds occupations legitimate. The need for space to housing and living however, remains.

Normalising #occupations

That is why we take space!
[Read More]

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Berlin: The Senate speaks of housing policy – we make it

Last whit Sunday, ten empty houses were squatted in Berlin and Potsdam. From a villa over a former kindergarten to a whole house. What was dead speculative mass for years was filled with life. Even though some of the occupations were abandoned very quickly, #besetzen (occupying) was not just a symbolic action. Each empty building was placed in its context and for almost all objects there were concepts that showed a possible use in the sense of a solidary urban policy. It has always been emphasized that not the vacancy is the problem, but the principle of (private) ownership of useable and living space, which makes speculation possible. But speculation is not only about vacancy, but also about inhabited and used areas. This means that it can displace anyone and anything. Whether they are youth centers, day-care centers, a late night kiosk or entire blocks of flats. Therefore, on May 20, it was clear: Spaces must be occupied and defended. On this day, especially the Bornsdorferstraße 37b (Borni) in North Neukölln and the Reichenbergerstraße 114 (Friedel54 in exile) in Kreuzberg were to be defended as self-managed places for the moment and on the long-term to become places to organize the struggle for a city policy from below.

They do not want negotiations, they just want violence.
[Read More]

Berlin: New squats!

Places open as of 14:52 today:

Odenwaldstraße / Ecke Stubenrauchstraße (Steglitz) #OdenEckeStuben
Finowstraße / Ecke Frankfurter Allee (Friedrichshain) #EckeFinow
Bornsdorfer Straße 37b (Neukölln) #Borni
Reichenberger Straße 114 (Kreuzberg) #Friedel54 im Exil
Petersburger Straße 16 (Friedrichshain) #Peter16
Arndtstraße 13 (Kreuzberg) #Arndt13
Regattastr. 277 (Grünau) #Funkwerk
Rummelsburger Landstraße #Bootsschuppen
Karl-Marx-Straße 145 (Neukölln) #KMS145

More infos as it happens at https://besetzen.noblogs.org/ and https://twitter.com/besetzenberlin

Berlin: Raid in Rigaer Str. 94

Two weeks ago the current reinforcement of the siege of Berlin-Friedrichshain’s Nordkiez culminated in yet another crazy raid in Rigaer Str. 94, at the center of the so called “danger zone”. Two residents were imprisoned.
At approximately 8 o’clock in the morning on 29th March 2018 our dear friend was assaulted and arrested by special forces. 350 pigs were luring around the neighbourhood and waiting for him to be alone, walking his dog, Raf. Only then they dared to approach him. They ripped off his keys and entered Rigaer94 to raid his home. Dozens of pigs supported with ballistic shields and backed up by helicopter entered his flat, seeking to humiliate his teenage daughters, who, too, rank very high on the pigs’ personal lists of enemies of the law and order.
After two long years of round the clock siege, this is the most recent climax of escalation and police terror in our Kiez*. The answer won’t be violent enough.
In the course of the action another resident of Rigaer94 was arrested. They both are kept imprisoned in JVA Moabit. [Read More]

Berlin: Courtdate in the eviction case against the groundfloor of Rigaer 94

“OUR IDEAS ARE NON-NEGOTIABLE” – Courtdate in the eviction case against the groundfloor of Rigaer 94

In Court

On the 14th of May 09:00 AM, the doors of the court will open up again to enforce German law.
The discussion will revolve around paragraphs that were created to protect and perpetuate the capitalist system, paragraphs that value property the highest of all. On this date of course, judiciary, the senate and the owner will try anything to leave the courtroom with an eviction title. This letterbox company will try to enforce the claim, that stones put on top of each other are their property. Little later they will try to take our spaces violently, breaking in with hundreds of their uniformed bandogs.They will think themselves victorious.
[Read More]

Berlin: Intersquat Block at the chaos and discussion days, 10.5. -13.5.2018

You’re invited to an Intersquat Block at the Chaos and Discussion days in May in Berlin. We want to offer the space for an exchange on our tactics and techniques, discussions and information within the Chaos and Discussion days at Rigaerstrasse.

Structurally we don’t plan on this being an equal replacement for the past Intersquat meetings, unless you want to make it such. We do think this is a good opportunity to connect the general discussions on the sense and future of urban struggles with questions that come up when considering squatting as more than a tool to satisfy basic housing needs. We hope for a discussion on the importance of squatting for other liberatory struggles, houses as political tools, questions on working within and with neighbourhoods and more.

Evictions, Repression, Surveillance, Prisons, the maggots using and supporting oppressive structures are everywhere let’s get together to support each other and smash the ball not just into their court but through its heart. [Read More]

Berlin: Ohlauer evicted

Gerhart-Hauptmann Schule, a school building on Ohlauer Straße in Berlin’s Kreuzberg district squatted in 2012 by a group of refugees and activists, was evicted today [jan11].

The vacant school was first occupied during a particularly harsh Winter in December 2012 in order to house homeless refugees camping at Berlin’s streets. Initially, the occupation was tolerated by the district office Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg, and it housed hundreds of people. In 2014, 211 refugees were registered as residents of the school. In the months since the announcement that the building is scheduled for eviction, this number decreased.
[Read More]