Sex Sells, Even at the Brandenburg Gate
Twenty police cars showed up in the middle of the night. That’s how the first night went for the refugees who had walked from Würzburg to Berlin—nearly 600 kilometers on foot—to demand basic rights at the Brandenburg Gate. Ashkan Khorasani, a 23-year-old Iranian, described it to the Süddeutsche Zeitung: the police tried to storm the camp, seize the tents and equipment, clear everyone out. The protesters tied themselves together. The police came back later, and people got beaten. It was terrible,
he said.
By late October 2012, the camp had been there almost a month—first at Oranienplatz, then in front of the Gate itself. The demonstrators weren’t asking for much by any reasonable standard: an end to mandatory housing in remote reception centers, the right to work, the right to move within the country. Baseline dignity. The kind of thing that shouldn’t require a hunger strike to obtain. And yet the German media had almost completely ignored them.
That’s where the stunt came in. Four activists—Anne Helm, Anke Domscheit-Berg, Julia Schramm, and Laura Dornheim—invited journalists to the Brandenburg Gate under the false promise of a topless protest, then publicly called them out for showing up to photograph breasts while living human beings were sleeping in tents thirty meters away, fighting for their rights. It worked. It was humiliating that it had to.
The protest and its cause—the urgent problem of inhumane asylum policy—had been almost completely ignored by the media,
Dornheim explained afterward. We also wanted to show how mass media in this country works. Sex still sells. It wasn’t enough that people were willing to go on hunger strike. No—it takes tits for anyone to cover it.
The press responded predictably. Die Zeit ran a headline about tourists taking selfies with hunger strikers. The left-leaning TAZ wrote admiringly about the media manipulation. The Berliner Morgenpost complained that the square wasn’t meant for camping. Everyone had a take; nobody had a solution. The question of what to do with people who had fled to Germany and officially shouldn’t be there—and whose treatment would set the tone for everyone who came after—went unanswered.
Ashkan had his own answer, at least: We leave only when the laws change. No human is illegal. The way refugees are treated in Germany cannot be right.
He made a point about the German word Flüchtling—the suffix -ling is diminutive in German, a marker of smallness, of victimhood. He rejected it. We are not small. We are strong. We eat nothing, we barely sleep, we own nothing. And we fight for our goals.
I don’t know how it ended for Ashkan or the others at that camp—whether the hunger strikers held out, whether the laws moved even a centimeter, whether the next winter was any less brutal. What stays with me is the image: people who had walked the length of the country sleeping in tents in October, and a media landscape that needed the promise of exposed flesh before it would look at them.