Or How the Berlin Bear Opened its Butt Cheeks to Corporate Cock
There’s a limit to my patience. Sure, I was forced to move out of P’berg by
greedy landlords—and now I haven’t had my favorite Berliner pfannkuchen mit kirsch for over a MONTH. But now They
have gone too far. The day that a world
class city like Berlin decides to
sell its famous historical landmarks to make way for luxury yuppie scum condos
is a sad day indeed. The East Side
Gallery section of the Berlin Wall may be marked with little metal plaques
proclaiming it to be a historical monument, but that shouldn’t deter would be corporate
raiders. If you are a large investment
company looking for the next big bubble economy to rape and pillage, well,
pilgrim, the Berlin Bear is ready and willing to love you long time.
And like any discreet whore, Berlin
is not your average Tiergarten variety bang-em-against-the-bin-in-the-alley
crack ho, no sir. The Berlin Bear may
have always been poor but sexy, wearing its saggy Russian dancing bear tutu
with shame while it desperately tried to leap through the hoops of progress,
but fear not: times they are a’changin’.
For a few million, not only will the Berlin Bear do a little dance, make
a little love and get down tonight—you get total control over the zoo.
On the eve of March 1st, sneaky little bastard
developers removed a piece of the Berlin Wall monument in the middle of the
night. By 9am
the next morning, hundreds of protestors and media (including one pissed off
dunkin’ berliner) brought the whole destruction to a standstill by sheer force
of will. The cops were not afraid. They brought enough of them. At the end of the day, it’s awfully difficult
to do your job as a construction/destruction worker when hundreds of people are
screaming at you. It causes the
jackhammer to fall from trembling fingers.
I’d like to say I got some juicy pics of the Berlin Bear
doing its dirty deeds with the Men in Suits in a seedy alleyway somewhere. But I only got protest photos. The dirty shit
was done behind closed doors. When
confronted by the media, the duplicitous bear trainers and tutu cleaners (aka city
honchos) simply stated that the owners of the site (developers) had the legal
right to do what they wanted to the monument.
Waitamotherfuckingminute. The DDR
commies built and owned the Berlin Wall.
After the fall of communism, the Wall was owned by the State. So how in the hell did a public/government
owned landmark come to be up for sale to the corPIRATES?
The East Side Gallery restoration group spent millions of euros of EU
money on the complete restoration and renovation of this particular stretch of
the Berlin Wall. They even invited back
the original mural artists who had left their marks and messages of freedom
emblazoned on the wall 20 years before.
Acid rain and graffiti wore heavy on the concrete barrier, and during
the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall (2009), the
renovation was completed in a gala ceremony.
Hell, I even spent several months making a photo documentary on the
whole process.
And there’s the rub.
As a photographer I can take photos of people painting on walls.
As a writer I can make frequent and flippant usage of the some of the
most offensive Anglo-Saxon words on offer.
But how can I photograph and write about the largest invisible city
killer out there? Berlin
is gentrifying at an alarming rate.
Every time I move to a new flat, the rent DOUBLES. Either that or there are 30 people waiting
outside the door of the flat for a group viewing.
The Berlin Bear was beaten by its cruel Russian handlers for
decades. They starved it, poked it, dressed it in a pink tutu and forced it to
ride a bicycle. Any normal wounded
animal would bite back. Instead, this
old bear, poor and helpless without its old master, dragged its battered ass
and tattered tutu in search of a new master.
