Blood on the Kotti Tiles
We were halfway up the stairs when the beer bottle exploded against Sarah’s face. Black-clad figures were screaming leftist slogans from every direction—it should have been dark, but the burning Molotovs, the camera flashes, and the constant rotating blue of the police lights kept the sky above Kreuzberg’s Kottbusser Tor in an unnatural suspended dusk. Sarah went down against the tiled wall, her blonde hair bloody and matted to her face, heaving. We’d walked straight into something. The U-Bahn station had become a fortress. The floor was red-speckled and smelled like vomit, alcohol, and sweat. Armored police had us ringed from outside; the defenders inside were hurling bottles at them; the gate had been sealed from within. Come out and I’ll smash your face,
muttered an old man before disappearing back into the depths of the station.
The paramedics had to fight their way through to us. When the big green steel gate finally opened and they started working on Sarah, we heard thundering footsteps from behind. The police had been waiting for exactly this moment and came at us like a green wave, batons swinging. The medics threw themselves over Sarah, cursing the advancing cops. We raised our arms and screamed "Stop" and "Injured" with everything we had. It did nothing. The wave hit with a dull impact—my lip split open. In slow motion, people bounced off the wall and tumbled down the stairs, and in my ear, inexplicably, Nothing to Worry About by Peter Bjorn and John. I got one last desperate look at the bloody smear on the tiles before a cop grabbed me and threw me into a pack of press photographers whose flashguns didn’t stop for a second.
Got a light, mate?
An old drunk hauled me back to earth and swayed off behind the wall of bystanders holding up phones and cameras. Two girls were singing the Tetris theme and dancing in circles around a riot squad. Traffic signs got knocked over. One man dropped his pants and shat on the ground directly in front of the police line. The crowd went berserk with joy. Then screaming again and boots—this time not green but black, heavier armor, pepper spray already hissing. Probably shouldn’t have come in an all-black outfit with my hood up to this particular war zone, because I got grabbed again and thrown into the crowd at the street’s edge with the full force of a cop behind me. Gasping, I scrambled onto a traffic island. The ground was solid broken glass and torn-up cobblestones. We were surrounded.
Fires burning around us, the crowd still hot and throwing whatever the ground offered at the police closing in from every side. An ambulance pulled away from the station—which was sealed the moment it left—and I chose to believe Sarah was in it, and that the wound had looked much worse than it was. My head was ringing. For the first time I could read the actual shape of the thing: violence everywhere and kebab stands selling beer. But you learn the rhythms fast—which strip of street is relatively safe, how to read a shout about gas, when the sound of boots means move. The harder problem was the projectiles, which came from every angle and didn’t distinguish between cop and protester, journalist and passerby. People kept collapsing around me, hands over their faces, blood hitting the asphalt, and every time the police pushed through they moved without a glance at the injured or the medics or anyone who hadn’t asked to be there.
By the time I made it to a U-Bahn stop a few stations away—somewhere around midnight, completely wrecked—the world had snapped back to itself. Ordinary people. Quiet trains. Everything completely fine. The small cosmos I’d just left was still burning, still running with fire and glass and blood, but here it might as well not have existed. You start to doubt the reality of what you just lived through. I fell asleep on that thought, warm blood still running from my lip.