The Morning Tacheles Ended

The bailiff showed up just after eight this morning. Thirty or forty of the last artists still in the building are packing their things. Somewhere inside, music is playing. Beer mats are flying out of the windows. On the floor: hundreds of petition lists, signatures from people all over the world who wanted the place to survive. Mine is on one of those lists.

I’ve been in Berlin for five years, and for five years Tacheles has been part of how I understand this city. For almost three of those years I worked a few meters away. Every time a friend came to visit and I wanted to show them the version of Berlin I actually loved—the street art, the smell of piss, the drunks tucked into the catacombs of that enormous ruin on Oranienburger Straße—Tacheles was the answer.

The artists aren’t going quietly, even if they’re going. A spokesperson made their feelings about Berlin’s ruling mayor perfectly clear: Tacheles is gone, now Wowereit can go too. Have a nice day. And I understand that anger. Wowereit loves being photographed next to art, loves stepping up to local TV cameras to perform his cultural credibility. He had a chance here to make that mean something. He didn’t. That window is closed now.

In a few days, whatever survives of the Tacheles community will reconstitute itself at Cube, a club in Neukölln’s Rollbergstraße—the new cheap art district, the place displaced creatives go when the center pushes them out. Meanwhile, HSH Nordbank, the rightful owner of the property, gets to decide what comes next. A hotel. A parking garage. New apartments. Whatever it is, the middle of this city will be a little flatter, a little more finished.

I could spin this into the bigger argument—the club closures, the architectural disasters eating up the Spree riverbank, the slow gentrification converting everything interesting into something safe and expensive. It all connects. But I’ve made that argument before and it doesn’t go anywhere. Can Berlin save itself? I used to think yes. I’m less and less sure it wants to.