By James Mackenzie
BERLIN, Oct 1 (Reuters) – Max Mohr, director of Zirkus Mond, an alternative circus troupe in Berlin, got his start putting on shows in abandoned buildings before finding a home on a piece of vacant ground in the northeast of the city.
Now after eight years, the developer who had let them use the land, near the hipster neighbourhood of Prenzlauer Berg, wants it back. So he is striking his tent and moving on with his troupe of jugglers, dancers and acrobats.
“It’s sad but we knew it was going to come, and we found another place,” Mohr said.
Over the past decade, Zirkus Mond, and a group of other associations with names like Kollage Kollektiv, Jonny Knueppel and Mucha gradually turned the stretch of no-man’s-land called “die Greife” into a jumble of bars, open air discos and performance spaces.
“Here is where the magic happens, where you interact, where you can talk and where you can make plans and feel at home, feel seen,” Mohr said.
In recent decades, as Berlin has grown into its role as the capital of a reunited Germany, prices have shot up and once relatively plentiful open spaces like die Greife have slowly disappeared.
Berlin’s underground culture scene has always reflected economic upheaval and the dynamics of the local property market, ever since the days of the Weimar Republic, when hyperinflation wiped out savings, or during the Cold War, when students, punks and hippies moved into the enclosed Western half of the city.
In the years following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, old warehouses and industrial sites provided artists with plenty of space for not much money, reinforcing the city’s image of rough-edged cool.
BERLIN’S IDENTITY: ‘RAW AND DIY’
Now the page has turned again. Last month, a far-left party won a Berlin state election, campaigning on a pledge to take over housing from corporate landlords and cap rents, which have soared as residential property prices have more than tripled in the past 15 years.
“This type of space used to be common in Berlin,” said Elva Lebrun from the Mucha association. “It’s also part of the essence and identity of Berlin, raw and also DIY – everything you see here is done by us.”
Juan Migama, Zirkus Mond’s Spanish-born artistic director, said the cost of housing was driving away many previously drawn to the city but he said Berlin remained “a very tolerant city, really open-minded.”
Berliners’ long familiarity with unusually dressed people engaged in not-easy-to-define artistic pursuits has bred a live-and-let-live attitude even among those with little interest in the alternative scene.
Ironically, even the city’s sometimes cumbersome administration has worked in favour of alternative groups.
“Germans have a lot of rules, it’s true. And because they have so many rules, they have rules that make these things possible,” Migama said. “You can be in a kind of grey area, but as soon as you follow those rules, they let you be.”
City interim usage rules allowed diskoBabel, the association which runs “die Greife”, to set up on the land in the first place, although electricity is supplied by generators and there is no running water.
It is not a recipe for getting rich but people living outside the mainstream have always needed to overcome obstacles, Mohr said.
“If you want this lifestyle, you have to be very driven,” he said. “It’s maybe a lot of work, but it is possible to do this.”
(Reporting by James Mackenzie; Editing by Andrew Cawthorne)
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