Keys to the City, Distributed Without Permission

Several homeless people have already frozen to death in Berlin this winter. One man was found in the ruins of a burnt-out leisure complex in the Britz neighborhood. Another turned up dead in a park in Gesundbrunnen. The temperature drops, the shelters fill up, and the people who don’t make it in simply freeze. This repeats every year—by one estimate, more than 300 homeless people have died of cold in Germany since reunification.

What makes this winter particularly grim is that the BVG, Berlin’s public transport authority, decided to stop allowing homeless people to shelter overnight in subway stations—a practice from previous years that, whatever its practical inconveniences, kept people alive. The city’s senate asked them to reconsider, invoking their social responsibility. The BVG said no. The BVG, incidentally, runs an entire advertising campaign around the slogan "because we love you." Make of that what you will.

Into this gap stepped Rocco und seine Brüder—a social art collective named, knowingly, after Luchino Visconti’s 1960 film—along with the group Dies Irae. They obtained keys to several Berlin subway stations and began distributing them to homeless people, so those people could let themselves in at night and get out of the cold. The BVG will be furious. That’s the point. The collective is forcing a confrontation: either the city finds a real solution, or it has to explain why it’s prosecuting people for not freezing to death.

Berlin’s Kältebus—a citywide cold-weather service that dispatches assistance to homeless people in distress—is part of the patchwork, but patchwork isn’t sufficient when the infrastructure that should protect people is being actively withdrawn. Rocco und seine Brüder’s intervention is illegal and correct. Sometimes those two things coincide.