The Last Morning at Tacheles

The bailiff showed up just after eight. Maybe thirty or forty artists were still there, moving their things out while music came from somewhere in the building and beer coasters flew out the windows onto the street. Resistance in the artistic sense. Hundreds of petition lists lay on the floor—signatures from all over the world, all these people trying to save the place. I’d signed one of those lists myself, for whatever that was worth.

Tacheles wasn’t some carefully curated artist space. It was what happened when squatters and painters and musicians just occupied an old building and made something real out of chaos. Five years I’ve been in Berlin, and for nearly three of those I worked maybe fifty meters away from it. It became the place you took visiting friends when you wanted to show them the actual city, not the tourist version. Street art, the smell of piss, people who’d basically moved into the basement like it was their permanent address. Rough and genuine and completely uncommercial.

The legal owners had a case—HSH Nordbank wanted their building back. That was always the ending, but there was a window where Berlin’s mayor, Klaus Wowereit, could have done something. Could have intervened, given a signal that the artists mattered. He didn’t. One of the people being evicted said something like, Now that Tacheles is gone, maybe Wowereit can go too. I understood the anger. He’d been happy to pose for cameras talking about supporting the arts, but when it actually mattered, when it meant using political capital on actual artists instead of investors, he wasn’t there.

This time there wasn’t even organized resistance. Everyone just started packing, moving out to Neukölln where the rents were still cheap. The building would become something else—a hotel, apartments, condos. The market would decide, and whatever got built there would be clean and profitable and lifeless.

I could get into the whole thing about gentrification and how Berlin keeps losing its edges, how everything becomes sterilized and expensive and safe and boring. It’s true. The clubs are disappearing, the neighborhoods are flattening. But complaining about it doesn’t fix anything. Berlin was supposed to be this resilient city that regenerates itself, but I’m not sure that’s actually happening anymore.