Berlin plans put artists in firing line

FOR 20 years, a graffiti-covered ruin of a former department store in Berlin has housed studios and workshops for artists who occupied it and saved it from demolition shortly after the Wall fell.

The building, known as Tacheles, is now protected as a historic site. The artists, meanwhile, without a lease for nearly two years, face eviction to make way for a lavish new development.

For Berlin, more is at stake than the age-old gentrification dilemma. The threatened closure of Tacheles, the name of which derives from Yiddish for "straight talk", has sharpened the debate over Berlin's identity.

No longer divided by the Wall, it is now split between its unique past as a volatile blend of dark history and bright creativity and its status as the capital of a stable, reunified country. While the cash-strapped city has sought to capitalise on its reputation as a free-wheeling, chaotic nest of painters, musicians and anarchists, it is also home to a buttoned-down government and growing bureaucracy.

"I'd hate to see Berlin smoothed over, with no critical voices left, the way the alternative art scene has been sanitised away in New York," said Felicitas Adler, 54, clad in a trash-art sculpture she made out of cardboard and empty plastic bottles painted black at a recent demonstration to save Tacheles.

Built a century ago out of steel and concrete, the building was used by the Nazis during the Second World War to hold French prisoners of war. It was badly damaged and was empty when the squatters occupied it in 1990, on the Oranienburger Strasse.

The building today houses 30 studios and at any given time between 70 and 100 artists. Generations of backpackers and students have toured the open studios or drunk and danced downstairs in Caf Zapata. Tacheles is an artefact of the post-wall era when an extension cord, a sound system and a cooler full of beer were all it took to start a club in an abandoned building.

But change is evident everywhere. All but a few symbolic stretches of the Berlin Wall have been torn down. The East German Palace of the Republic was demolished in 2008 to be replaced — if the financing can be worked out — by a reconstruction of a Baroque-era Hohenzollern palace. The historic Tempelhof airport was closed to make way for a new airport outside the city.

A short drive up Chausseestrasse from Tacheles, the government is building a new headquarters for the foreign intelligence service, nearly three million square feet for 4,000 spies and support staff, at a cost of 700 million."It's been really noticeable, the escalation in the last two or three years of this capital-city syndrome," said Klaus Bergert, 43, a member of the group that runs Schokoladen, a theatre and live-music venue on Ackerstrasse, not far from Tacheles, which is threatened with eviction.

"These Bonn people want a peaceful city, and it just doesn't work," Bergert said, referring to the sleepy small town that was the capital of the former West Germany. "On the one hand they want to be the cultural capital, but on the other hand they knock everything down that contributes to that."

The post-wall generation faces not only the encroachment of investors and developers, but criticism from within the cultural community for camping out in prime locations, collecting tourist cash and refusing to change with the times.

"They have this conservative image of the city as a static environment in which everything is supposed to stay the way it was when the wall came down," said Jrg Koch, publisher of a contemporary culture magazine in Berlin. "Tacheles is just like a dirty version of Disney World. Ask any Berliner when he was there for the last time and it's probably ten or 15 years ago. It's just like an empty relic."

In 1998, the Tacheles organisers signed a ten-year lease, requiring only a symbolic payment of one mark per month. Since the lease expired, they have found themselves in limbo, with a pending auction of the site. The building occupies a lot of 13,000 square feet, but the entire area of the site to be developed is 272,000 square feet, and is expected to fetch around 57m.

"We anticipate that the foreclosure sale will take place by the end of the year," said Gesine Dhn, spokeswoman for HSH Nordbank, which leads the consortium of banks trying to sell it. Berlin's mayor, Klaus Wowereit, has spoken in favour of saving Tacheles, but with 56 billion in debt, the city has limited means to influence the outcome.

"It belongs in Berlin," said Norwen Strker, 33, a construction foreman, who watched the Tacheles supporters march past recently. "The artists should stay. If all you're after is luxury apartments you can go to Munich or Hamburg."