Kreuzberg
We were climbing the stairs when a beer bottle hit Sarah’s face. One second she was there, the next her hair was dark with blood and she was screaming. The chanting started from everywhere at once—black masks, slogans, the leftist fury that had been building all day. It should have been light out but the burning Molotovs and camera flashes and the endless blue lights above Kottbusser Tor had broken the sky into something unnatural. Sarah sank against the tiled wall, crying.
We’d walked straight into a trap. The U-Bahn station had become a fortress—red on the ground, reeking of vomit and booze and sweat. Cops in green gear surrounded us, helicopters circling overhead. The people inside had locked the gate and were throwing bottles back at the crowd. An old drunk yelled something about getting beaten and disappeared into the tunnels.
The medics couldn’t reach us at first. When they finally opened the big steel gate and started working on Sarah, I held her hand. Then there was this deafening roar—screaming, footsteps—and the cops had been waiting for exactly this moment. They came in a green wave with batons out. The medics threw themselves over Sarah, cursing, yelling to stop. We were yelling too—”Wounded! Medics!”—but it meant nothing. Everything went slow, my lip split, people flying against the wall and down the stairs, and the song that was playing—”Nothing to Worry About” by Peter Bjorn and John—is what I remember, which is just what sticks with you when everything’s falling apart.
One of the cops dragged me out and threw me toward the photographers. Their flashes wouldn’t stop. Some old drunk asked for a light and vanished into the crowd filming on their phones. Two girls were dancing around the riot line singing the Tetris theme. Signs came down. Someone shit right in front of the cops. Then more screaming, more footsteps coming. This time it was black-gear cops, heavier armor, pepper spray in the air. I shouldn’t have come in all black with my hood pulled up. They grabbed me and threw me into the crowd on the sidewalk. I managed to get to a traffic island. Glass and broken stones everywhere.
We were surrounded, fire everywhere, the crowd throwing everything—bottles, rocks, torn pavement—at the cops. An ambulance came out of the U-Bahn and then the station sealed shut. I watched it drive away hoping Sarah was in it. My head was pounding. You learned fast where to stand, how to react when someone screamed Gas,
how to move when footsteps came at you. But the projectiles didn’t distinguish—they flew at cops and protesters and onlookers the same way. People were collapsing around me with their hands up, bleeding, and the cops just plowed through.
It was bizarre, all rage and violence mixed with this drunk carnival energy. When I finally made it out to the U-Bahn a few stops away that night, I was destroyed. Back in Kreuzberg was another universe—fire, stones, glass, blood—but down here it was peaceful and quiet, the kind of normal that makes you doubt what you’d just lived. I fell asleep on the train with my lip bleeding, that warm trickle, wondering if I’d actually been there at all.