Hamburg Burns on the Shortest Day

The Rote Flora had been squatted since 1989—a concrete shell in Hamburg’s Schanzenviertel district that started as an abandoned nineteenth-century theater and became, over decades, an autonomous leftist center, a permanent thorn in the city’s side, a symbol that meant different things depending on which side of the police line you were standing on. On December 21st, people came from across Germany to say they weren’t going to watch it disappear quietly.

Around eight thousand demonstrators gathered. The stated aims were multiple: defend the Rote Flora, support the Lampedusa refugees living in legal limbo in the city, fight the planned evictions at the Esso-Häuser apartment blocks nearby. Within half an hour the police declared the assembly dissolved. What followed was hours of running battles through the neighborhood—pepper spray, overturned benches and trash cans, small police units charging into the crowd and being pushed back out again. People collapsed on the pavement. Restaurant guests were trapped inside, told not to leave the area. Arrests on charges of aggravated breach of the peace.

Hamburg’s entire political spectrum—Social Democrats, conservatives, Greens, liberals, and the Left Party—issued a rare joint appeal for calm. Remarkable that it took something this large to get them to agree on anything. Less remarkable that none of them seemed to understand why three thousand people willing to fight had shown up in the first place.

The Reeperbahn, usually the city’s rowdiest stretch on a Saturday night, was a war zone by evening. I watched the feeds come in and kept thinking: this is what happens when you spend long enough telling people that the places they built have no value. Eventually they stop taking your word for it.