The Left Berlin News & Comment

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Month: August 2021

“Open the airport. Put pressure on all the governments.”

An Afghan NGO worker speaks on the developing situation in Kabul airport


18/08/2021

You are in contact with people inside and outside Kabul airport. What is happening at the moment?

There’s basically an unofficial three step process to get out of the country, not necessarily in chronological order. The first step is to get on some kind of list to get out of the country. There is a proliferating number of lists. It’s very confusing. Some lists emerged then were scrapped again. And by no means does it mean that being on the list will help you to get out at all. But from what we understand, not being on the list means the only way to get out is by hanging on to a plane.

The second step is to get into the airport. Again, this is not necessarily in chronological order. So you can currently get into the airport without a list, but you need to get into the airport and the third step is to get into a plane.

And the problem is that each step is very difficult for ordinary people. It’s impossible to get onto that list. It looks like like the only people who get out have a certain way of either communicating with people in power or have friends abroad.

From what I understand, the people who get on the list are activists, human rights defenders, journalists, et cetera – people that must leave – but they are not, quote unquote, ordinary Afghans. And so there is a quote unquote necessary hierachisation. By “necessary” I don’t mean that it is a good thing, but that it is the inevitable consequence of this absolutely disgraceful withdrawal and the aftermath of the way it’s been conducted.

On the other hand, people who were activists in the provinces have many more difficulties getting out because most of their initiatives and projects were organized by bigger organizations in Kabul. And as a result, they never had any direct contact with the Western backers, and probably won’t be able to get out.

Social media is full of a picture of one US-American aeroplane which rescued 600 people. Does this mean that people are getting out?

Yes, our source inside the airport has confirmed that planes are coming and going, especially U.S. and some British. I’m not sure whether she saw British planes leaving or she just saw British army personnel. But U.S. and British are coming and going, and they have taken substantial numbers of Afghans for the past few hours. But again, it doesn’t seem to be making any difference number wise and the airport is not getting any emptier.

22 of our 25 employees are in Kabul. They’re all outside the airport property right now. The airport property begins approximately 1.5 kilometres from the airport terminal. And there is no way to get in right now. Probably the only way to get in would be if some armed group with a military or even the Taliban themselves would open some kind of corridor for people to go through. Other than that, there’s thousands of people trying to get in and there’s just no way.

Getting into the airport right now is almost an impossibility. This may obviously change any minute, but for the past few days and hours, this has further deteriorated. People are stranded outside. And, of course, it’s dangerous to just sit there with the Taliban presence. There are so many people there that abuse is happening, harassment is happening. You can imagine what’s happening to the many women sitting there waiting.

It’s a highly volatile situation, but our people are there. A few have decided to stay in Afghanistan for now, mostly because they have families. One of our staff is inside the airport. She managed to get in. Obviously we’re trying to get her out while also hoping that she can continue to give us information about what’s happening and perhaps support the evacuation of other people.

How other Western governments, particularly Germany, reacting?

Well, from what we know, obviously way too late and thanks to a lot of public pressure and the power of images, the German government seems to be ever so slowly waking up to the need to somehow manage the disgrace they are constantly bringing upon themselves.

From what we understand they are trying to get people out, including many organizations and individual staff members who worked with German government-funded institutions or German state-funded organizations and projects, or the military.

At the same time, the German government and other governments are – let’s put it diplomatically – not clear about whom they are evacuating. The policy right now, as far as we understand, is that only people who directly worked with the government, the military or a publicly funded organization would be evacuated, but not their families. Which is not surprising, but is a huge disgrace. At this stage, all I want to say is that let’s make sure that people will be evacuated with their families.

The German government is waking up very, very late to its responsibilities. In the long run, we need a very thorough self reflection about the past 20 years. This must be self-critical and open to public scrutiny. But for now, what we are demanding from the German government is to honour that commitment to get people who worked with Germans out of the country, including their family members.

How did the Taliban take power so quickly?

Honestly, the first thing that I must say, this deserves a longer and more in-depth analysis. It’s difficult right now to try to summarize why this happened in one or two quick sentences.

But of course it has to do with a long history of an attempt to impose a way of life onto the Afghan people from 2001 onwards. The invasion was was never about human rights. It was never about democracy. It was never about the women. It was never about the schools. It was revenge for September 11th. It was a colonial project.

The central government never had any any substantial support in the country. The army is composed of people from all over the country and different ethnic groups which are at odds and even at war with each other. It was always an impossibility to keep that army together and fight for a fatherland, for a nation that was never their nation to begin with because they didn’t really recognize the government and they certainly didn’t feel any effective political connection to them.

So, for many soldiers, being in the army was a job to earn money and be able to serve your family. I mean, so many are now laying down their weapons because under a Taliban regime, they would be punished, they would be persecuted. And there is no point in sticking up for a government that is no longer there or that was already in the process of disintegrating and that you never affiliated with in the first place.

These are some of the factors. There are many others, of course. People are also tired of war after so many decades. Even quote unquote, ordinary people didn’t rise up, even though some of them probably had guns. Many of them are tired of it.

The Taliban are a formidable force, even though they’re a complex entity and have different strands. There was probably also some kind of process that they just could not be stopped any more. With the Taliban gaining more and more ground in the provinces people started to believe that this is what was going to happen, that they were going to conquer the country. As a result, they took precautionary measures to make sure that they are on the side of the victors.

What can we in the West do to help you? What should we be demanding of our governments?

Put pressure on the German government, the British government, all the governments, especially in terms of opening the airport, opening a pathway for people to get into the terminal because it’s jammed. And any evacuation of people must be with their family members. Governments are adopting a policy of only taking out staff, Afghan staff, who directly work with Western governments, embassies or NGOs.

I’m not in Kabul, but I’m coordinating, trying to get our people out of there. They are all outside the airport right now. It’s almost impossible to get in. So, please put that word out there. People must be taken out, evacuated together with their families now.

Finally, how are you coping?

There’s a little bit of a nervous lull right now because it’s late in the evening already. And it’s been a long day. Another day has passed, another fruitless day, unsuccessful day, discouraging day. We had 20 people, 20 hard core human rights activists sitting outside the airport compound since 6am. It’s 9.30 in the evening and they’re still there. So they’ve been there for 13, 14 hours straight.

It’s a highly straining environment, a lot of pressure. Many people, a lot of noises, people with guns. This is very intimidating for some of the women – not because women are weaker – but because they’re being harassed and looked at.

Of course, things may change in the next five minutes. But that’s the way it looks and that’s, of course, very draining. Very, very draining.

Labour Party Purges Ken Loach, Keeping British Capitalism Safe

Film director’s expulsion is part of plan to silence left-wing voices


17/08/2021

Ken Loach’s reputation as a film-maker is extraordinary. From his breakthrough TV piece Cathy Come Home, shot verité style and focusing on the housing crisis tearing poorer families apart in 1966, up to his two most recent works of cinema, I, Daniel Blake and Sorry We Missed You, exposing the life-threatening cruelty in both the 2010’s UK benefits system and the bogus self-employment offered in gig-economy Britain. His candid view of systemic injustice and its impact on ordinary people is unstintingly truthful, compassionate and condemnatory. Loach’s lengthy career has seen him not only present international struggles such as the Spanish Civil War (Land and Freedom) and that for Irish independence (The Wind that Shakes the Barley) but has returned again and again to depict the dangerous erosion of labour rights in films like Riff-Raff, The Navigators and Bread and Roses. These stories often follow characters with whom we readily identify, the political points arising naturally in the protagonists’ attempts to overcome systemic obstacles that block or destroy their simple aims of having a decent life.

Very, very few film-directors portray characters and predicaments such as this, and to do so consistently for almost seven decades, shows an astonishing dedication to telling it like it is for those at the bottom of the capitalist heap. This commitment, together with the humanity of his stories and characters has earned Loach the love and gratitude of huge numbers in the UK and abroad, especially for his ability to so precisely portray the contemporary inequities besetting people via housing deficiencies, welfare bureaucracy or employment exploitation. Somebody cares enough to show this! Audiences watch in thanks as truth is told movingly and eloquently to power, shaming the legislators. Fêted internationally, Loach is the only director to have twice won the Palme d’Or at Cannes as well as having been lauded with honours such as university doctorates, a BAFTA and an Honorary Golden Bear in Berlin for his lifetime achievement.

He easily fits then, into categories of both national treasure and people’s champion. In addition to producing works of fiction that rigorously represent facts, he has authored a number of superb documentaries, not least the most recent The Spirit of ’45 made in 2013, about the triumphant post-war Labour government that went on to create the NHS and other aspects of social provision. For a 21st century Britain endlessly pumped with militaristic nostalgia by the media, this was a people’s history seen shockingly rarely but instantly and lovingly celebrated. It provided a stark contrast with the austerity people had been experiencing since 1979 at the hands of governments who had long since torn up the social contract and sounded urgent warning bells about how the health service could be lost through stealth privatisation. It also offered a sobering compare and contrast exercise between the pioneering socialist spirit of Labour in 1945 and the bland, ineffectual opposition nominally led by Ed Miliband, who went on to lose the general election two years later.

After Jeremy Corbyn’s election as Labour party leader in 2015, Loach not only rejoined the party, but also shot and directed election broadcasts such as Let’s do it differently in 2017 for no fee. Watching it now, one can see how Corbyn’s message – “to give everybody a decent chance” – is the longed-for antidote to the plight of people suffering like Loach’s characters. The surge of relief and gratitude seen on the streets and workplaces in the broadcast conveys the poignant sense of the possibility of an oppressive spell being lifted and that Corbyn, like Loach, is someone who has not only listened and seen what is wrong but is determined to put things right. In #We Demand, again in 2017, Loach lets the people themselves speak to camera. Young, old, black and white, their message summed up by the young woman who looks into camera at the end and says “We demand a chance to be all that we can.” Labour was tantalisingly close to winning that election. Murkier deeds may have played a role in the result being short of a victory, but more of that later.

Of course there had been attempts to remove Corbyn as leader from within by disgruntled MPs who hadn’t signed up to serve these kinds of socialist principles. Loach criticised Tom Watson (for a time Labour’s Deputy Leader) and other members of the PLP for lack of solidarity, and for trying to destroy the socialist programme the Corbyn leadership was offering. He suggested that sitting MPs should reapply for their jobs before each election so as to be judged on their records. This calling to account clearly didn’t sit well with people who preferred to think of their parliamentary positions as uninterrupted trajectories of influential prestige, untroubled by something as grubby as mere party democracy and giving members some say. Telling truth to power started to get Loach into trouble with those who began to see him as less of a party asset and more of a threat, mostly to their jobs.

Despite his great popularity with the electorate (increasing the share of the Labour vote since 2010 substantially even in defeat) and with the Labour membership, Corbyn lost the 2019 election. Tory propaganda about the supposed bright sunlit uplands of Brexit had supplanted Labour’s transformative anti-austerity and Green Industrial Revolution messages. The Conservatives had ditched the dithering Theresa May for rumbustious and cunning clown Johnson, who seemed to some voters so funny and loveable he couldn’t possibly be lying. Continuing the deception of the Leave campaign, the Tories purported to hold the NHS as sacrosanct.

Despite the harrowing result, Ken stayed in the party as did most members, hoping that what had been built in the last four years could be strengthened and maintained and that everyone, together, could galvanise in the fight against the Tories. Keir Starmer presented himself as the “unity candidate” and also promised in 10 pledges to continue the direction of social justice set since 2015. On the basis of these promises, he won the leadership but within just seven months, several pledges were broken and others on shaky ground. Then, far from the unity promised, Starmer began to jettison left-wing Cabinet members like Rebecca Long-Bailey, herself the author of the Green Industrial Revolution and even Corbyn himself was suspended and the whip withdrawn from him.

Around Easter time in 2020, a leaked report seemed to indicate deep factional hostility at Labour HQ towards allies of Corbyn in the run up to the 2017 election, and even hinted at behaviour and actions that may have undermined Labour’s chances at the ballot box in the last crucial days of campaigning. Allegations about the lackadaisical attitude of party officials in dealing with accusations of antisemitism, behaviour at complete odds with the party’s avowed claims to be doing the opposite also surfaced. All these things were said to have occurred before Corbyn ally Jennie Formby took over as General Secretary, painting a picture of vicious, factional hostility towards the left and a disingenuousness about tackling all forms of racism. Starmer’s response was to set up an inquiry into whether all of this was true, which was supposed to publish its findings early this year at the latest. We’re still waiting.

The suspensions have continued, usually of left-wing members, regularly left-wing Jewish members. Some of these suspensions have been fought in the courts, not all members have been reinstated. The promised unity has melted into thin air and we have instead a war of attrition against the left-wing membership. The vigour and robustness with which this has been pursued contrasts steeply with the underwhelming opposition to the government. Inevitably the membership is dissatisfied not to say outraged. But even this dissent has been curtailed by the unelected General Secretary, preventing discussion in branches on high profile suspensions like Corbyn’s and even putting an embargo on discussion about himself. To say this is a sea-change from the inclusive, participatory, enlivened democracy of the party Corbyn headed is the understatement of the century. In lieu of being able to discuss these things within the party structures, innumerable groups have sprung up on social media. Some of these groups themselves have now been “proscribed”, that is membership of them means a five year auto-exclusion from the Labour party.

Ken Loach, unwilling to denounce those he considers comrades or basically play along with this charade of moral rectitude, is the highest profile member to have suffered this fate. Yes, the 85 year-old world-renowned film-director, famous for championing the oppressed and exposing the savage inequities of neo-liberalism has been kicked out of the Labour Party. What a demolition of your ‘brand’. If the eruption on social media is anything to go by, hundreds of members promptly resigned at this news saying more or less that not only did the party seem not to stand for anything under Starmer, it seems positively hostile to democratic socialism, the description it still bears on its party card. The haemorrhaging of members, unhappy at the current mixture of external blandness and internal aggression has already starved the party of funds and very little financial support has been forthcoming from an attempted schmooze of big business.

So one has to wonder, who is this PR disaster actually aimed at? Do the leadership and advisors think that expelling a paragon of compassionate socialism puts them in a good light with voters? Do they think that being strict like this will bring the membership into line, and they’ll deliver leaflets like good little boys and girls with nary a critical peep? The answers are clearly no and no, with polls lacklustre, election results dire and a membership shrinking by the day. And of course, Ken is only the highest profile victim of the latest purge. I have heard of members who have had threatening letters citing that a couple of ‘likes’ on Facebook posts (before any of this proscription business was announced) constitutes gross misconduct and said members must prove they are not members of such abruptly unacceptable groups. Calling this McCarthyism is letting it off lightly, being more akin to accusations of ‘thought-crimes’, sending the message that social media groups may suddenly become verboten at the capricious wish of a party official. Woe-betide you if you’ve ever attached any kind of positive emoji to some quip or comment.

Interviewed by the BBC in 2016, Loach described the UK benefits system as “a Kafka-esque Catch 22 situation designed to frustrate and humiliate the claimant to such an extent that they drop out of the system and stop pursuing their right to ask for support if necessary”. Frustration, humiliation, dropping out. But why would Labour wish to frustrate and humiliate its members into dropping out when they are the ones who give it money and work on its behalf for free? One answer in terms of timing might lie in the looming dates of the party conference starting 25th September. This annual event was online only last year but is traditionally where MPs and leaders meet the membership, where policy is thrashed out, where disagreements are had, sometimes loudly, where in other words, democracy happens. Could it be that those in charge wish for as little dissent as possible in this arena and hope that the big public expulsion of Loach will demoralise those still clinging on in the hope of some socialism? It’s only a theory.

But why would they not want a vibrant membership full of progressive ideas? That’s a good question and perhaps one only partly answered by this Tony Benn quote from 1982:

“If the Labour Party could be bullied or persuaded to denounce its Marxists, the media – having tasted blood – would demand next that it expelled all its Socialists and reunited the remaining Labour Party with the SDP to form a harmless alternative to the Conservatives, which could then be allowed to take office now and then when the Conservatives fell out of favour with the public. Thus British Capitalism, it is argued, will be made safe forever, and socialism would be squeezed off the National agenda.”

Carol McGuigan is a socialist living in Berlin who will vote for the first time as a dual-citizen in the coming German elections.

Why the 1969 Moon Landings Were No Giant Leap Forward for Mankind

The original space race was inspirational, if tainted by militaristic motives. Today’s is sheer vanity


16/08/2021

It if just over 50 years since Gil Scott-Heron wrote the incredible satirical poem Whitey on the Moon

“A rat done bit my sister Nell.
(with Whitey on the moon)
Her face and arms began to swell.
(and Whitey’s on the moon)
I can’t pay no doctor bill.
(but Whitey’s on the moon)
Ten years from now I’ll be payin’ still.
(while Whitey’s on the moon)
The man jus’ upped my rent las’ night.
(’cause Whitey’s on the moon)
No hot water, no toilets, no lights.
(but Whitey’s on the moon)…”

The poem highlighted the enormous disparity between the money available to poor Black people in the ghettos and that spent on the Apollo 11 moon landings. In 2019. Forbes.com estimated that the landings cost $152 billion at current prices. Scott-Heron’s poem was a necessary counterweight to the dominant narrative that the moon landings were a victory for science and progress and had nothing at all to do with politics.

The “Race to Space” and the Cold War

In fact, the Race to Space was always dominated by the Cold War. Indeed, the very term “Race to Space” got its name from the arms race between the USA and Soviet Union. In the 1950s, both countries were developing reconnaissance satellites to spy on each other. The same technology would later be used to develop rockets.

The US American space programme was led by Wernher von Braun, a former member of the NSDAP (Nazi Party) and the SS. Although von Braun later denied his involvement, he was very aware of the crimes that were taking place in Germany. In 1943, he was given at least one guided tour of the Mittelwerk factory, where concentration camp prisoners built the V2 rockets he had designed. Many of those prisoners died of disease and malnutrition, were worked to death, or were executed.

In October 1957, the USSR launched Sputnik 1 – the first artificial satellite to orbit the earth. President Eisenhower’s response was to form the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA, later DARPA) whose remit covered space, ballistic missile defence, and nuclear test detection. In 1960, when the space programme was transferred to NASA, DARPA continued to work on the military and surveillance aspects of space.

In early 1958, the CIA and US Air Force initiated the Corona project. Officially a scientific research programme, the Corona project launched a secret spy satellite containing a camera which was used to take photographs of the Soviet Union. Between 1960 and 1972, 100 Corona missions took over 800,000 high resolution photographs.

A less successful project, also launched in 1958, was Project A119. This was a secret plan of the United States Air Force to detonate a nuclear bomb on the moon. The aim was to show that the US was still the world leader in space. In the end, US Air Force officials decided that A119’s “risks outweighed its benefits.”

The 1960s Space Race – from Gagarin to Armstrong

The 1960s were book ended by two events. In 1961 Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space. For the best part of 2 decades, politicians and media had assured the post-war world that the USA was #1. Yet somehow they had been beaten into space by the upstart Gagarin. Worse still, he was from the Evil Empire.

Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev understood the ideological implications, claiming that

“economy, science, culture and the creative genius of people in all areas of life develop better and faster under communism.”

Gagarin went into space on April 12th 1961. Six weeks later, on May 25th, President Kennedy announced his goal of landing a man on the moon.

The Cold War was heating up, and the following year, the world was brought to the brink of destruction by the Cuban Missile Crisis. As the 1960s continued, the US bombing of first Vietnam, then Laos and Cambodia intensified. The US moon landing in 1969 was a very important significant statement that the US was back in charge. We may be losing a war to peasants in South East Asia, but at least we control space.

Of course, this was not how the Race to Space was sold. Rather it was portrayed as being part of the US pioneer spirit (we’ll ignore for a minute that the original pioneers were bandits who stole huge swathes of Native American land). In the forefront of the campaign was the young, liberal president John F. Kennedy, who famously promised to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade, saying

“I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.”

In a less well known quote, Kennedy told NASA director James E Webb

“Everything we do ought to really be tied in to getting on to the Moon ahead of the Russians… otherwise we shouldn’t be spending that kind of money, because I’m not interested in space… the only justification for it, in my opinion, to do it in this pell-mell fashion is because we hope to beat them and demonstrate that starting behind, as we did by a couple of years, by God we passed them. I think it would be a hell of a thing for us.”

Kennedy’s successor as President, Lyndon B Johnson was just as clear about the US government’s priorities:

“We’ve spent between thirty-five and forty billion dollars on space…but if nothing else had come from that program except the knowledge that we get from our satellite photography, it would be worth ten times to us what the whole program has cost. Because tonight I know how many missiles the enemy has.”

What happened next – Star Wars and Challenger

After the USA won the race to the moon, interest and resources diminished. The US Congress was less interested in funding more space travel, especially as the US Army was being bogged down in Vietnam. In July 1975, 2½ months after the fall of Saigon, the joint Apollo-Soyuz mission saw three US astronauts dock in a Soviet space capsule. This was to be the last major event that decade in the Race to Space.

In 1983, Ronald Reagan showed renewed interest in the fight in space with the launch of his Strategic Defence Initiative, which as the old ham actor he is, he preferred to call Star Wars. As he announced the launch of Star Wars, he said

“I call upon the scientific community in our country, those who gave us nuclear weapons, to turn their great talents now to the cause of mankind and world peace, to give us the means of rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete.”

The “world peace” that Reagan talked about was to be achieved by total military domination. The aim of Star Wars was to shoot down Soviet missiles, so that only the US would be able to threaten total nuclear devastation.

In the same year that Star Wars was announced, the US launched the first Challenger Space Shuttle. Challenger flew nine missions, each lasting between 5 and 8 days. Numerous further shuttles were planned, one of which would be armed with nuclear weapons. The Challenger experiment ended in January 1986, when the tenth mission was aborted after Challenger exploded on launch, resulting in the deaths of 7 crew members.

Not everyone was upset. Spoken word artist and Dead Kennedys’ singer Jello Biafra wrote a prose-poem called Why I’m Glad The Space Shuttle Blew Up. Biafra quoted an article in the Nation reporting that NASA was planning to use the eleventh Challenger mission to send 46 pounds of Plutonium into space.

The Second time as Farce

Now it’s happening all over again. Elon Musk, Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos have been recently engaging in a dick swinging contest about which of them can be the first into space. This time, the main finance is not coming from the military industrial complex, but private capital. While this may mean that humanity is under slightly less risk from armageddon, the futility of the project is there for all to see.

I’m not the first person to point out that these men own huge businesses and have amassed their vast fortunes by paying their workers way less than the value of goods and services that they produce. And yet rather than paying decent wages, they prefer to spaff their money on vanity projects like this.

On top of this, it wasn’t even all their money that they’ve been spending. Elon Musk’s SpaceX company was awarded a $178 contact by NASA. Fortune magazine reports that Branson’s Virgin Galactic flight into space was “worth $841 million for Virgin Galactic”. In 2020, Branson had asked the British government to give him £500m Corona bailout money for Virgin Atlantic while telling his staff to take 8 weeks unpaid leave. In 2017, after he threatened legal action, the NHS paid him an undisclosed sum.

Conclusion

Whatever their problems, the first moon landings did inspire people. Young boys (and hopefully some young girls) wanted to be Neil Armstrong. Even though the Apollo and Sputnik projects were ultimately tied up with the arms race, many people genuinely felt that we were pushing back scientific boundaries. This time round, it all feels rather pathetic. I’m not going to say that no-one wants to be Elon Musk or Richard Branson, but those who do need to give themselves a good talking to.

Once upon a time, it was possible to sell space travel as something noble which advanced scientific progress. It was a shame that this was being largely funded by US and Soviet imperialism, but at least we got GPS out of it. The antics of Bezos, Branson, and Musk are entirely without honour or scientific curiosity.

The New Space Race is a metaphor for the arrogance and false priorities of neoliberalism capitalism. It only serves a few rich white men, and it is devastating for the environment. You’re worried about the carbon footprint of long-haul flights? Professor Eloise Marais calculates that the footprint of commercial space travel will be 100 times higher.

We deserve better than that. We deserve better than capitalism.

Film Review – Wem gehört mein Dorf? / Who Owns my Village?

A new film shows that urban Leftists are not the only people fighting gentrification


15/08/2021

The film opens with what seems to be home movie footage. A woman is swimming in the sea with her children. All are naked. A shout out to the old Freikörperkultur of East Germany. A time that is in living memory, but still so far away.

One of the children is presumably Christoph Eder, the director who has made a film about his home village of Göhren auf Rügen. Like most people of his generation, Eder no longer lives there – after the wall came down, anyone without family ties went West in search of employment or education. But he obviously feels a deep emotional bond with the villagers who are currently fighting against the encroachment of property developers.

Since German reunification, one man in particular, Wilfred Horst, has been buying up the land around Göhren. Now he is planning to build holiday homes on the surrounding fields. Villagers rightly fear that this will damage both the environment and the beauty of their tranquil village. It turns out that the “hospitals” which he says he wants to build are in fact “wellness clinics”, in other words hotels for sick, and usually wealthy, tourists.

Horst is not able to proceed without planning permission. The film contains a lot of clips from sittings of the Gemeinderat (local council). Each time, much the same thing happens. The council members – mainly older men with the occasional older woman for diversity sit at the front of a hall. The many villagers in the audience ask questions which are batted away. Then the Gemeinderat votes to give Horst more rights to build, usually with the same minority voting against.

The Gemeinderat is dominated by 4 men, known as the “Vier von der Stange”. I can’t think of a satisfying translation – maybe “four off the rack”. The implication is that they will always do Horst’s bidding- The four are rarely to be seen without a large glass of Rostocker beer and a chaser of Schnapps or maybe something more deadly. They are genial enough, which is presumably why they’ve been able to stay in office for decades. But one woman now wants to change this.

Nadine Förster doesn’t look like she’d ever come close to the counter culture. But together with her father (who we learn in passing is a CDU councillor), she has formed the Citizens Initiative “Liveable Göhren”. This film mainly concentrates on their attempt to get people from the Initiative onto the Gemeinderat and to stop the rapacious developers.

This might not sound so exciting. However ‘Wem gehört mein Dorf?’ is a fascinating depiction, of how gentrification is not just something that happens in big cities, and of what has happened to the Eastern part of reunified Germany. Or, as Eder said in an interview: “It is a film which tells a story about democracy in East Germany, without reproducing the Eastern clichéd image of Nazis, prefab buildings or Stasi.”

Wulf Sörgel runs the Moviemento cinema here in Berlin, and says: “It is truly an amazing film as it tells how people would actually start being political and maybe even start acting political or even becoming political activists and how then they might succeed achieving something, despite they felt completely powerless in the beginning.”

The film shows a very parochial kind of activism, but this is none the worse for that. There are several issues that it doesn’t address, such as the nature of Citizens Initiatives, which come from a disillusionment from establishment politics which could also push a reactionary agenda – such as the campaign against minarets in Switzerland. But this was not in the remit of this film, nor should it have to be.

Nonetheless, I would love to see this other film. How do politics work in an area where official politics have broken down, where the Left is identified with the Stasi, and where leading Conservatives can be leading a fight against the encroachment of capital? When the age group from which activists traditionally emerge is absent, how do people organise? But until this film is made, we still have this one.

It is unclear what the motivation of many of the protagonists is. Are they fighting capitalism, or just trying to preserve an old way of life who’s time has come and gone? Are they trying to change the world or fighting as hard as they can to prevent any change? The film does not offer any answers to these questions, but the fact that it causes them to asked is a great start.

‘Wem gehört mein Dorf?’ is showing in Berlin cinemas now.

Sinema Transtopia

Transnational, post-colonial, (post-)migrant cinema programme


13/08/2021

Bi’bak is embarking on a cinema experiment at the Haus der Statistik.

SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA explores cinema as a space for social discourse, a place for exchange and solidarity. SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA brings together diverse social communities, links geographically distant and nearby places, the past, present and future, and decentres an eurocentric view through transnational, (post-) migrant and postcolonial perspectives. SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA is a transtopia, a place where “cross-border ties and connections converge, are reinterpreted and condense into everyday contexts” (Erol Yıldız). As part of the pioneering urban policy Initiative Haus der Statistik, the cinema experiment bridges the gap between everyday urban practices and film to create an alternative art form that connects different social perspectives.

SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA is funded by Haupstadtkulturfonds, Conrad Stiftung and the Programm NEUSTART KULTUR

bi’bakino

bi’bakino is a curated film program that focuses on transnational narratives, migration and mobility discourses in film and seeks to stimulate differentiated discussions and changes of perspective. The program highlights films from outside Europe that have often not been shown in Berlin before, as well as archive excavations and rediscoveries. Following the film screenings, moderated discussions take place with filmmakers and experts.

Past event series can be found in the archive.

Coming Events (more information here)