The Hamburg Story

It was a page three story and won't be discussed much, but there's this odd meeting from Hamburg that occurred this week.

For most who might remember....the G-20 Summit this summer....was in Hamburg, and was a fairly big mess with riots.  A lot of locals are still peeved and asking dramatic questions over security, the cops, and the leadership of the city (mostly SPD and Greens, politically speaking).

At the heart of all the riot talk....is this building in the east part of town....the "Rote Flora".

In the 1880s, the Rote Flora was built as a theater for entertaining folks.  The building survived all the way through WW II....avoiding damage oddly.  By the war period, it was in marginally acceptable for musicals, and it became a storage building.  After the war, there was some renovation, and it shifted over to being strictly a movie theater, all the way to the late 1980s.  At that point, it shut down.

Various efforts were made to flip it to the next period of use, oddly drawing the interest of radicals in the Hamburg area.  Eventually, they came....squatted....and made it their turf.

Since the early 1990s....it's been this headquarters for the anti-capitalists in Hamburg. 

The neighborhood?  They've mostly looked the other way.  In the past decade, it's drawn tourists to simply gaze at the graffiti on the building and they all note the building as being some tourist spot in the city.

The cops?  Well...they've kinda figured out that from the G20 Summit, the Rote Flora group was at the heart of the planning of the riots. The cops are fed up with the squatters and want the situation shut down....an eviction.

The enthusiasm of the city political folks?  The cops are now sensing that the mayor (Olaf Scholz) might now have the patience or enthusiasm to kick the squatters out of the building (even though this was listed on the agenda list from two months ago.

Apparently, the Interior Minister for Hamburg (the guy controlling security, the cops, etc)....was at a joint meeting of the cops and Rote Flora folks, and suggested that enthusiasm maybe wasn't there to kick them out.  The cops?  Fairly angry at the public statement, and asking questions.  This was a private meeting....no reporters were allowed, and it might have been interesting to see how the locals would react to the political statement made.

You would think that the city political folks would be seeking an alternate solution and just suggest that they'd give some other building....in a more remote part part of the city....over to the anti-capitalists, hoping that they'd just move somewhere else, and reset the stage.  The cops probably wouldn't be very happy with that type of answer. 

By stalling this....it only constructs a magnet for anti-SPD and anti-Green voting in the next city election (Feb 2020).  A lot of people will remember the riot and the damage done to the city.