A short visit to Kreuzberg
I don’t really know Kreuzberg: somehow my visits to Berlin have never taken me there, I suppose because I spent time in the old East and have always kept going back there. I’ve no reason to go on this visit, except to have a look around, and a walk along another stretch of the Landwehrkanal, a short on from Kottbusser Strasse to the Böcklerpark. And then to Oranienstrasse – not to be confused with Oranienburgerstrasse, the one I keep going on about, which is a quite different place. East Kreuzberg, I guess I was in.
Everyone will tell you that Kreuzberg is where Berlin’s ethnic minorities live, and indeed they do. This is a massively racially mixed area, but the main influence is of course Turkish: every other shop seems to be a Turkish grocery or café, with men outside sipping tea and most probably talking nonsense, and many, or most of the women are wearing headscarves – fun, colourful ones for the most part. What you don’t see though is any sort of face-covering veil here, which I think suggests that the Turkish community in Germany, even if non-secular and consciously Islamic, is less receptive to extreme versions of Islam than, say, the Pakistani community in England. That sort of thing seems to have little purchase here.
Apart from the ethnic mix, Kreuzberg is a very aggressively alternative part of Berlin, which is something I must admit I find hard not to satirise. As I sat making notes for this post, behind me in the Bateau Ivre bar a young woman types at her Mac, a copy of a book called Classic Marxism open beside her. The men to my left are sharing a tin of tobacco, those to my right, two men of a certain age trying to look younger with long, dry hair (not that I’m against that: I need not to be) and slack, deep-folded faces roll their own from a packet of some other brand; on the other side of the road, a shop called the Hanf-Haus (‘Hemp House”) sells I know not what, but I think I can guess, roughly. Back in the Böcklerpark, a group of youngish adults sat on the grass surrounded by any number of kids; one of the women wore a woolly hat, I noticed, and one of the men was tapping on a little drum – like a tambourine but without the jingles. And there’s not one, but two radical bookshops within a short walk.
Just two more things I’ll mention: just before I left, a young couple walked past me on the pavement in pretty tame but very black and attention-seeking bondage gear, while behind them a young woman drove past in a motoring school car. She was in a headscarf; her instructor one of those hard-face middle-aged Berlin blondes with curls. I could really get to like Kreuzberg, I think, but I can’t take it completely seriously.
The graffiti gets me down a bit though, I must admit: some of it is worth being called street art, yes, like the piece I've used here. But like all graffiti, most of it's crap.
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