Word: kreuzberg
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...under the twin prods of hard times and rising unemployment, the immigrant question had become a political issue. Responding to pressure from their voters, governments placed heavy restrictions on new immigration. Too late. A new, alien and highly visible population was already entrenched in ghettos across the Continent: in Kreuzberg, along the Wall, in West Berlin; in large areas of Paris, Marseilles, Lyons; in the old quarters of Amsterdam and Utrecht; in the Brussels communes of Saint-Josse, Saint-Gilles and Schaerbeek; in Brixton, Toxteth and two dozen other working-class communities around Britain...
...assault and breach of the peace. When West Germany played Turkey last November in a qualifying match for this year's European championships, police posted 6,000 men at West Berlin's Olympic stadium. Turkish shops were given special protection after neo-Nazi groups threatened that the Kreuzberg ghetto would "go up in flames" on the day of the game. The anti-immigrant atmosphere caused Chancellor Helmut Kohl so much embarrassment that he flew in from Bonn to attend the game...
...looked like some horrifying Polaroid, a rock-'n'-roll Dorian Gray, "positively skeletal," as he remembers, "and mentally about the same." He took a small apartment in the Kreuzberg section, a neighborhood that was "nice, tough and working class," and set about the serious business of cleaning up, recovering a certain kind of anonymity ("Berlin's absolutely the opposite of Los Angeles?star status doesn't mean anything") and starting over. Music was his only continuity. It was a lifeline. "Brian Eno came to my rescue in a way," he says now. "He came along and said, 'Hey, I have...
...surprisingly, house hunters turned to the city's 800 empty buildings, most of them awaiting the wrecker's ball. About 2,000 squatters have moved into 120 such structures, many of them in the city's old Kreuzberg district. At first, comparatively sympathetic police looked the other way, more or less leaving the squatters alone. But the settlement situation turned acrimonious last December when police, ordered by judges to enforce property rights of landlords, raided a squatters' building in Kreuzberg. Violent protests flared. Three consecutive weekends of street battles left 150 demonstrators and 100 police injured...
...What is really criminal," says a 24year-old mechanic who lives with his wife and three children in a rundown building in Kreuzberg's Oranienstrasse, "is not that we are breaking the law, which we are, but that shelter is going unused." Another young, illegal Oranienstrasse resident recalls the travail of walking Berlin streets for a year looking for a place to live. Says she: "It was a nightmare. If you came across a place by chance, the owner would demand $5,000 in key money. Who can afford that...