Rising East Online

Subway Politics in Berlin

Tessa Mayes

Politics is depressing! At least that’s what I’m told by Berliners. There is no real politics, they say. The Grand Coalition is uninspiring, compromised, cautious, managerial and bound to fail. Angela Merkel is a leader whose policies lack ideology: a plastercene pragmatist. ´Surely politics can’t be left to the accountancy class?’ I ask nearly every person I meet in this city. And indeed it isn’t.

Late one night I found myself on the S-Bahn travelling from Schonefeld Airport when four young guys wearing headscarfs jumped on the train near Altglienicke shouting and swearing at some other youths on the platform. One of the youths on the train shouted: ‘Turk! Russe!’ The group on the platform ran at the door. It slid shut. They banged on the glass. More shouting. More banging. . Everyone looked uncomfortable. The youths calmed down, chattering among themselves. Then a suited man in his thirties turned to them and said: ´You shouldn’t say racist things at immigrants.’ There was a hush in the carriage. . ´I can say what I like,’ said the loudest youth, his body swaying angrily. ´Not at immigrants’, came the reply. ´MY FATHER IS AN IMMIGRANT!’, screamed the youth, pulling out his ID and showing the suit his surname. ´You fascist, trying to tell me what I can and can’t say.’

In London such a heated exchange could well have ended in a fight. I thought of intervening but Mr Suit kept replying to Mr Headscarf who just as quickly answered back. No physical punches were thrown, but their verbal punches were not pulled, either. Each was committed to winning the verbal battle. At last, I thought. A political debate, of sorts! To my mind the younger guy won. More importantly, in this unregulated territory – a railway carriage – they were both able to speak their minds, a rare thing in a country where the spectre of fascism can be used to rein almost anyone in.

At one point an old Oriental-looking woman shuffled across the carriage in what sounded like her slippers. There was a lull in the loud verbal ping pong. ´Immigrants,’ she said in a soft voice. ´We get nothing.’ The loud youth nodded silently and sympathetically as she sloped off. . As soon as she sat down, however, he continued with his midnight war of words.

I don’t want to romanticise the event. Arguments between individuals on a U-bahn are hardly a political awakening. But at least it was a row charged with political meaning about rights and more interesting than discussing what level VAT should be raised to.

Up until then I was beginning to wonder whether there was any political life outside the Bundestag. Walking around east Berlin this week the only sightings of anything using political language was a poster for a jazzy hip hop and russki-ska event called ´Globalista World Domination’ and art graffiti with the words: ´Viva La Bourgeoisie!´ … at least I think it was art graffito.

Just as I was giving up on non-parliamentary oppositional politics, the words ´STREIK´ appeared on a banner running down the side of Charite, the biggest hospital in Berlin. ´Ein Arzt ist kein Sparschwein!´ was written on a banner of one of 1000 demonstrators in Berlin. Asssistant doctors are working up to 70-hour shifts. They hope to earn on average 48,145 euros a year fully qualified, but that’s about half the wages of doctors in the UK and France. Fed up and tired is an understatement. Doctors all over the country are hanging up their white coats and saying, according to banners on the demonstration: ´Der Patient Zahlt die Zeche’. I may be struck down with stethescopes for saying this but how defensive can you get? You´d laugh if striking McDonald workers carried banners declaring: ´Big Mac lovers pay the price.’

In any case, it’s not necessarily true that others will automatically pay a price when health workers are exploited. Cutting wages might mean lower health costs for everyone else. Claiming ´Der Patient Zahlt die Zeche’ is also used by those who condemn strikers for putting patients in danger. It’s the workforce who pay the price so why don’t they come straight out and say it. Berlin strikers’ expectations are low. They used to demand wages and argue with management. Now strikers ask us to pity them because all they want to do is defend existing services from cuts.

I hope Berlin doesn’t copy London, where soon-to-be-unemployed are frequently offered counselling as jobs are axed. Thankfully, I can’t imagine the young guy on the train from Schonefeld substituting ´it’s not me but the listeners who pay the price’ for his declaration of the right to say what he thought – even if I don’t agree with everything he says.

Tessa Mayes is a journalist and author living in Berlin and London. (info@tessamayes.co.uk)

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