Berlin Görlitzer Park gang rape lays bare social weak spots

“Do you want something?” he requested. One other seller, this time on foot, wearing worn-out denims and a free white shirt, tried his luck: “What do you want? Marijuana?”

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Affectionately recognized to Berliners as “Görli,” the 35-acre park within the coronary heart of the town’s Kreuzberg district is a collision of worlds, the place households and college students meander previous sellers hawking marijuana, cocaine and now, more and more, crack and heroin.

The darkish underside of this unusual combine just lately got here to mild once more after a brutal gang rape in June of a 27-year-old Georgian vacationer. At a September safety summit to handle the rise of crime and laborious medicine within the park, metropolis officers agreed to measures together with extra neighborhood outreach, drug consumption rooms, video surveillance and fencing off the park at evening.

What to do about Görli is greater than only a debate over a park embodying Berlin’s countercultural picture. Additionally it is about an rising world metropolis grappling with hovering housing costs, fraught immigration coverage and rising drug tradition — and never studying from the experiences of Europe’s different cities. The destiny of Görli is about whether or not Berlin can preserve what has made it distinctive even because it turns into a world middle.

“We want a holistic idea. We additionally want a citywide technique,” mentioned Oliver Nöll, a member of the Left Occasion and deputy mayor of Berlin’s Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg district. He mentioned that there are not any short-term fixes and that these points should be addressed all through the capital. “We’ve got related conditions in every single place within the metropolis, not simply right here.”

Previous efforts to “repair” Görli have included two process forces, elevated police presence, a short-lived zero medicine coverage, and even the creation of designated areas for drug sellers within the park utilizing pink spray paint — one other short-lived experiment. A fence across the park ought to be erected by early subsequent yr.

“What I don’t need is for Görlitzer Park to signify Berlin going ahead,” mentioned Kai Wegner, a conservative Christian Democratic Union politician who has been mayor of Berlin for 5 months. “We don’t want against the law scorching spot, however a spot the place folks can come collectively and really feel comfy. And above all, I would like all Berliners to be secure in Berlin.”

A local’s guide to Berlin

Wegner is pushing for extra safety than has been seen up to now in freewheeling Berlin, which for many years was recognized for its permissiveness and different way of life — a lifestyle that seems more and more misplaced within the capital of Europe’s largest financial system.

Residents, nevertheless, say that an enormous police presence and shutting off the park at evening aren’t the solutions. Drug raids simply result in video games of cat-and-mouse by their neighborhoods, and customers are actually leaving the park to shoot up of their streets and doorways.

“The neighborhood is without doubt one of the most densely populated city areas in Berlin. And that’s why it’s simply necessary to have the park right here. Closing it off would simply shift the issues elsewhere into the neighborhood,” mentioned David Kiefer, a part of the native residents initiative Wrangelkiez United.

The group insists that any stronger police ways should be paired with in depth neighborhood outreach and makes an attempt to combine marginal populations, such because the rising numbers of homeless — measures the town has promised to look into however has mentioned it doesn’t essentially have the finances for.

“No cops for Görli!” learn a yellow banner strung up subsequent to a small crowd of demonstrators that gathered on the day metropolis officers met to debate cleansing up the park. “Cease racial profiling,” was spray-painted onto the pathway across the park protesting what they are saying is a racial ingredient to the elevated police searches.

Kiefer sees the park and the encompassing space as a remnant of a fast-disappearing Berlin, as excessive rents squeeze out creatives and golf equipment are pressured to shut over noise complaints.

“Görli is all the time thought-about a bit disreputable and wild,” mentioned Kiefer, who has been a resident within the district for 11 years. “Which will have been Berlin up to now, however I believe one thing has modified dramatically. … Berlin is actually abolishing itself.”

Migrants and the drug commerce

Paired with the drug commerce, the park has additionally seen rising numbers of individuals experiencing homelessness and other people with psychological well being points, in keeping with the residents’ affiliation. In February, its members wrote an open letter to the town, calling for the hard-drug and homeless issues to be addressed with secure consumption rooms, psychiatric and medical care, and in a single day lodging.

The park’s drug sellers are overwhelmingly migrants. A lot of them flip to drug dealing as a result of they lack residency permits or have an unclear asylum standing and are banned from working within the official financial system.

In an open nook of Görlitzer Park, a younger Black man disappeared right into a bush to retrieve a brown paper bag from which he extracted a smaller plastic pouch. He exchanged it for money with a tall White man who, judging from his accent, was an area. He shoved his buy into his shorts pocket, earlier than biking throughout the park.

“I might love to remain right here,” mentioned a younger Libyan man sitting close by. In his house nation, he had educated as a automotive mechanic. “Now I’m promoting medicine. However simply marijuana,” he mentioned, talking on the situation of anonymity for worry of being deported. “I don’t inform anybody again house how I earn a living.”

Final yr he began to take crack cocaine. “Generally I take it on an evening. Generally on a morning. It’s unhappy right here. It’s boring. All day. All evening. It will get me by the day. This isn’t what I assumed it was going to be,” he mentioned.

Poverty and migration have lengthy been part of the story for the world round Görlitzer Park. After World Struggle II, swaths of Kreuzberg had been slated for demolition by a freeway undertaking, and people who may moved away. The sudden constructing of the Berlin Wall in 1961 left the neighborhood walled in on three sides, making it much more undesirable.

Quickly it turned house to immigrants, often known as Gastarbeiter (visitor staff), significantly from Turkey, introduced in to assist get the West German financial system again on its toes. They had been adopted within the Nineteen Seventies by the squatter motion that took over deserted buildings.

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Within the three many years for the reason that fall of the Wall and Berlin’s restoration because the capital of a unified Germany, the town has been reworked, particularly areas like Kreuzberg. A wave of gentrification has swept by, rocketing rents and ousting many locals.

As Berlin’s inhabitants quick approaches the 4 million mark, housing is changing into scarcer and fewer reasonably priced, with rents doubling since 2009. Though a city-led census of individuals residing on Berlin’s streets in January 2020 counted nearly 2,000 homeless, these affected disputed the quantity, saying it was not consultant and diminished the folks counted to a mere determine. Welfare associations put the quantity between 6,000 and 10,000.

Because the solar started to set over Görli, teams of buddies settled down on the grass to get pleasure from its ultimate rays and toast the weekend. A couple of toes away, at one of many entrances to the park, three folks settled on the sidewalk in a circle, talking to at least one one other in slurred German. As an alternative of sipping on Friday evening beers, they huddled round their belongings, stuffed into sturdy grocery retailer luggage, and ready their crack pipes, unaware of the world round them.

“It is a consequence to the truth that we’re an enormous metropolis that individuals are coming to, that poverty is there, that homelessness is growing. And we now have zero ideas. Zero solutions, nothing in any respect,” mentioned Monika Herman, a member of the Inexperienced Occasion and a former mayor of the district.

“We’re not studying from the expertise of different cities. We’re beginning to make the identical errors.”