Hello everyone,
SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT FOR YOUR CALENDARS: On Friday, 26th January, we’ll be organising an Eye Witness Report from Gaza with Duha Almusaddar, Project Manger of the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung in Gaza. Duha recently left Gaza and will talk about the situation on ground. The meeting starts at 7pm, and will be taking place in Oyoun, Lucy Lameck-Straße 32. Please note that after the Berliner Senat evicted the Oyoun building, no chairs will be available, so we will make ourselves comfortable on the floor. We want to organise a second event with Duha in February, with proper seating and translation into German.
The Muslim Futures weekend starts today in the ACUD Gallery and Club and lasts until Sunday 21st. With Muslim Futures, an empowering and disruptive space is created together with Muslim futurists from art, culture and political education, who translate, exhibit and discuss their imaginations in various installations, interventions and forms of expression. The futurists make use of literary, artistic, documentary, musical and many other perspectives and focus in part on different sensual experiences in imaginative processes. Come, and enter the world of Muslim Futures and to radically imagine more just and inclusive futures with us. Muslim Futures is one of two Campaigns of the Week.
Today also is the start of Views on Israel – a series of films about Israel organised by members of the Judische Stimme. Tonight’s film is Two Blue Lines. Shot over a period of 25 years, Two Blue Lines examines the human and political situation of Palestinian people from the years prior to the creation of Israel to the present day. By primarily featuring the narratives of Israelis whose positions run counter to their country’s official policy, the documentary provides a portrait of the ongoing conflict not often depicted in mainstream media. It starts at 7pm at Café MadaMe, Mehringplatz 10 (venue of last night’s meeting on Apartheid Israel).
Our Regular Palestine Reading Group continues on Friday with a discussion on Why do the US and Europe fund Israel? Follow the link to register and access the suggested reading. Following feedback that some people are not available on Fridays, the Reading Group will now take place on alternate Fridays and Sundays. Next week’s Group will meet on Sunday, 28th January to discuss Post-colonialism, colonialism and settler colonialism. As ever, the meeting is in the AGIT offices, Nansenstraße 2. If you would like to join the discussion about what we read in the future, you can join our Telegram group here.
On Saturday at 10.30am, buses will be leaving Ostbahnhof to take people to a demonstration in Hamburg against state repression. Six and a half years after the G20 summit in Hamburg, the public prosecutor still has a strong intention to persecute. In the so-called Rondenbarg trial, the court case against six affected comrades begins this year. Together we want to travel to Hamburg on the 20th of January 2024 by Solibus and fight with you against the state and repression. The buses are being organised by Gemeinschaftlicher Widerstand (Community resistance), who are our second Campaign of the Week.
On Sunday, 21st January we are organising a Walking Tour about Rosa Luxemburg’s Berlin. “Berlin has made the most unfavorable impression on me.” It is 1898 and Rosa Luxemburg has just arrived in the capital of the German Empire. She describes it in a letter as: “cold, tasteless, massive — a real barracks; and the dear Prussians with their arrogance, as though every one of them had the stick up their ass with which they had once been beaten…” Fair to say it isn’t love at first sight, but Luxemburg stays here until the bitter end. Berlin is her home for the next two decades. The tour will start at 2pm at Mehringplatz, not far from Café MadaMe, and finish around 4.30pm near U-Bahn Friedenau. Participation is free, but we recommend a €10 donation to the tour guide.
There is much more going on in Berlin. To find out what’s happening, go to our Events page. You can also see a shorter, but more detailed list of events in which we are directly involved in here.
The LINKE Berlin Internationals are organising their annual Summer Camp on 29th-30th June in the Naturfreundehaus Hermsdorf, near Berlin. There will be keynote meetings from Ferat Kocak and activists from Italy and Poland on the rise of the far right in Europe, and Hossam el-Hamalawy and others on Palestine, the Arab States and the Arab Street. We are now deciding which workshops to organise. You can vote for the workshops that you want to see here. The survey ends on January 31st. Survey results will be used to make a decision at the next LINKE Internationals open meeting on 5th February.
In News from Berlin, the Rosa Luxemburg Conference shows solidarity for Palestine, and thousands of farmers demonstrate once more in Berlin.
In News from Germany, secret meeting of AfD and CDU politicians and neo-Nazis planning mass deportations exposed, thousands demonstrate against the AfD, new government in Hessen is younger but has few female faces, and Namibia accuses Germany of not having learned from its past genocides.
Read all about it in this week’s News from Berlin and Germany.
New on theleftberlin, Nathaniel Flakin accuses German élites of instrumentalising antisemitism to cover up for their own rotten histories, Patrick Bond exposes the corrupt side of German footballer and manager Franz Beckenbauer who died recently, and we publish an open letter to the UN criticizing Germany’s crackdown on cultural freedom.
Our Videos of the Week show scenes of the police attacking the Palestine block of last Sunday’s Luxemburg-Liebknecht demo, which resulted in 15 demonstrators being hospitalised.
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Keep on fighting,
The Left Berlin Editorial Board
