Your Friend and Protector
The image that keeps coming back: Angela Merkel, Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and the rest of the G20 sitting in the new Elbphilharmonie listening to Wagner while Hamburg burned outside. There’s a postcard quality to it—the leaders of the world, the cathedral of high culture, the composer most associated with Germanic grandiosity—and it reads less like coincidence than like someone’s deliberate joke.
What happened in the Schanzenviertel during the July 2017 summit was contested for weeks afterward. Police spokespeople made the rounds on talk shows insisting that force was used only against the so-called black bloc, that peaceful demonstrators were untouched, that the violence was contained and proportionate. Eyewitnesses described something else entirely. An independent documentation project began collecting accounts almost immediately, and what emerged—peaceful protesters shoved to the ground, journalists caught in police sweeps, bystanders with no connection to the protests finding themselves on the wrong end of a baton—didn’t match the official version.
Video evidence circulated. None of it was neutral—no single document of a confrontation ever is—but it showed specific moments: individual officers, individual choices, individual people on the receiving end of them. That granularity matters. It’s harder to dismiss a face than a statistic. The Tagesspiegel ran a detailed piece on exactly what was said publicly and what the footage actually demonstrated, and the gap between the two was not small.
The phrase "police violence" triggers a particular defensive reflex in official discourse. The institution pushes back hard, union representatives appear, and the conversation shifts to whether any given recording shows full context. It’s not a uniquely German problem, but the intensity of that reflex—the need to insist everything was handled correctly while the footage shows otherwise—is what sticks. What Hamburg left behind wasn’t just broken glass and burned cars. It was a record.