By Elena Fontanari
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| Collective draw of Oranienplatz protest done by Oumar Assoumane, Giulia Borri, Elena Fontanari, Cosimo Miorelli |
Introduction
This
article aims to contribute to the understanding of the so-called
“migration/refugees crisis” that the European Union experiences at present,
which came to the fore in summer 2015. The recent continuous attempts to
crossing the national borders within Europe enacted by migrant subjects, asylum
seekers and refugees on the move have tackled the Schengen and Dublin systems
and unmasked their limitations, contradictions and instabilities. In
particular, the Dublin system experienced a de
facto break-down caused by the
everyday practices of migrant subjects that decided to not stop in the first
arrival European country – where they should remain under the Dublin Convention
– and move further although they were not allowed.
Europe
emerges as a space of negotiation practices where different actors are involved
in the redefinition of borders: national states, European Union, international
actors such as UNHCR and IOM, migrant subjects, and pro-migrants NGOs and
activists.
Germany
has assumed a crucial role in this complex scenario both as country towards
which a big number of migrant subjects and refugees move, and as a central
actor within the European Union in shaping the guide-lines of the asylum and
migration management. The decision of the Chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel,
to suspend the Dublin Regulation just for the Syrian people fleeing the war
lead to several concerns within the European Union. With this decision the
German government took note of the fact that the Dublin system and its mobility
limitation devices that confined the asylum seekers and refugees to the first
arrival EU country had imploded. Nevertheless, the decision to temporarily
“open the door” to the Syrian refugees entailed a reinforcement of the national
borders within Europe, supported by an increasing racist and xenophobic
behaviour of a part of the civil society. The latter has been characterized by
a deep division between the new right-wings racist claims and a “welcome
culture” from below, which takes shape in the voluntary work supporting the
newly arriving asylum-seekers. Since the summer 2015 the concept of “Willkommenskultur” (welcome culture) has
been developed to point an heterogeneous set of norms, behaviours and values
set in the population and civil society that take shape through the
self-organised support for asylum-seekers and refugees. This article will shed
light on the experience of a group of temporary refugees who hold an Italian
humanitarian protection but attempt to live and work in Germany, namely in
Berlin, although they are not allowed under EU laws. The stories of this particular
group of people precede the events of the summer 2015 by two years, and shed
light on an experience of “Willkommenskultur”
before the concept was build. Furthermore, it highlights how the institutional
behaviour of “Willkommenskultur”
applied just for refugees form Syria works through a very selective mechanism
that does not include the protagonists of this following story.
A multi-sited case-study:
methodological path
The
protagonists of this story arrived in Italy in 2011 because of the Libyan war,
and have obtained a humanitarian protection in Italy. But no one of them is a
Libyan citizen, rather they are all people coming from different countries of
the Sub-Sahara region and they were living and working in Libya. The
humanitarian protection obtained in Italy is a very temporary and reduced legal
status: a one-year renewable document that allows to live and work just in
Italy and to move around Europe just for three months. Because of the difficult
living conditions – homeless and unemployed – most of the temporary refugees1
decided to leave Italy heading to North Europe although they were not allowed
under the Schengen and Dublin agreements. Some of them have moved to Germany,
and in the city of Berlin they gave rise to a protest to claim their rights to
freely work and move through Europe. They occupied a square – Oranienplatz –
where they lived inside tents for almost two years. After the failure of the
political negotiation with the local authorities, they decided to live as
“illegal” persons in Berlin and move back and forth between Germany and Italy
in order to renew their documents.
This
story has been the case-study of my PhD research2 that aimed to grasp the
tension between the structural mechanisms of control and management of
migration in Europe, and the crossing-border mobility of refugees with a
temporary residence permit that attempt to autonomously build their lives.
Referring to social theory, I aimed to grasp the relation between the structure
and the subjective agency through a processual and dynamic perspective. I
decided to frame the refugee issue through the analytical concepts of mobility and border, referring to the literature of border studies (Hess &
Kasparek 2010; Karakayali & Tsianos 2010; Mezzadra & Neilson 2013; De
Genova 2013; Scheel & Squire 2014), critical citizenship studies (Ong 1999;
Morris 2003; Rigo 2007; Isin & Nielsen 2008; Lebuhn 2013), and that of
“im-mobility regime” (Shamir 2005; Glick Schiller and Salazar 2013). I focussed
in my research on the “secondary
movements” of temporary refugees within Europe that are treated as “illegal”
under the European Union laws. This allowed to shed light on migration as a
non-linear and “not-one-way” movement, and to deconstruct the image of refugee
as victim or object to be integrated through a national state logic. I applied
the multi-sited ethnography that allowed me to overcome analysing the refugee issue through the
national state logic, grasping instead the European border regime as a space of
fragmented and multi-level sovereignty. The research fields were set in the
cities of Milan and Berlin not for conventional comparative purposes (Marcus
1995), but rather as two places through which it was possible to grasp the
tensions between the structural constrains of European Union and the
crossing-borders mobility enacted by the refugees subjects. During the 20
months of the ethnographic research, I had a double role both as activist
supporting refugees subjects and as researcher. This allowed me to have a
continuous exchange with the protagonists of my research referring in part to
the militant research tradition.
Displacing
Lampedusa: the Oranienplatz protest in Berlin
During
the year 2011, in total 55,000 migrant subjects arrived at the Italian coasts
because of the so-called “Arabic Spring” and the subsequent Libya war. Around
30,000 people landed in Italy escaping the Libya war and they were all
“Sub-Sahara migrants” that where working in Libya and didn't have the plan to
come to Europe. The Italian government responded to this “new” migration
phenomenon by declaring a state of emergency, and consequently issued legal
measures and devices characterized by an overlapping of humanitarian and
securitarian guide-lines. This emergency program called Emergenza Nord Africa (North Africa Emergency) developed a new
reception system that worked parallel to the official one. Under this parallel
emergency system, new reception centers were opened using old or less
frequented hotels run by NGOs or social cooperatives that were dealing for the
first time with the asylum issue. In December 2012, the Italian government
decided to hand out a one-year humanitarian protection to all the people
escaping the Libya war, the reception structures of the emergency program were
closed and the temporary refugees were kicked out. Thus, the majority of the
people with humanitarian protection found themselves on the street without any
home or work, and without knowing where they should go. Furthermore, a part of
Italian local authorities omitted to inform temporary refugees about the rights
and the restriction of their humanitarian protection; notably, they informally
encouraged them to leave Italy because of the economic crisis, omitting the
fact that they were not allowed to work in other European countries. Thus, the
temporary refugees started to move around Italy building on their social
networks and ties they had created during the migration experience, looking for
a job and a place to stay. Some of them found a very temporary and precarious
work in the seasonal agricultural sector, where usually the migrant subjects
are illegally employed. The following narration of Essien, a young man from
Nigeria, well sheds light on this experience:
„I have done the asylum
seeker camp in Gavirate. I was working
at the restaurant as dish washer, and it was black job. In Italy you can find
just black job [he smiles]. Then, once they closed the camp, they sent us away.
I went to Foggia to work in the
fields. I had many friends there, so I called them and asked if I could work
with them. They told me that I could go there and find some work. I stayed in Foggia six months. I did the grape
harvest and also picked peppers and tomatoes. I took a lot of jobs there. But
very bad! I slept in the fields, we looked for some cardboard and then wood,
and we built a hut. That’s where we slept. But with this life you're dead! [he
laughs] You work an hour and they pay three Euros. You can spend one year like
this, but not a lifetime. Then my residence permit expired and so I came to
Milan to renew it and look for work.“
(Interview with Essien in Milan, April 2014)
A
population of errant subjects on the move
around Italy emerged that experienced the big cities such as Milan, Turin
and Rome as transitory places where
they could rest for some months and re-orient their life projects and migratory
paths. The protagonists of my research traced fragmented circuits that
criss-crossed the Italian territory and were stretched throughout the whole of
Europe. Indeed, some of them decided to leave Italy and try to build their
lives in other European countries, as the following narration of Cheryll, a
young man from Mail, explains:
We are sitting in the train
Station, and Essien is playing with his phone. We speak a lot, and Essien
starts to tell me about his life […] At
one point, Cheryll comes close to us and starts to tell me his story. ‚ […] I
have a friend with whom we have done the same camp in Italy. Then we got the
humanitarian protection, and he decided to go to France. He arrived there, and
now he is working there without problem! I visited him in Paris! He has a job
and a house. Me too, when I received the humanitarian protection I decided to
move to Malta, because my brother is living and working there […] Also my
brother has humanitarian permit form Italy! Like me! He works in this vineyard
since one year without problem. He pays also a rent for a house, without
problem. So I went there, in order to find a job. My brother helped me to find
a job, it was a black job. But once it finished, I didn't find nothing else.
And you know, I didn't want to stay with him without doing nothing! I felt so
ashamed! So I decided to come back to Italy, and find my way!‛. (Shadowing with Essien in Milan, March
2014)
The
story of Cheryll is just one of the many stories of my research protagonists
that left Italy towards other European countries and undertook hence “secondary
movements” across Europe. A number of my research protagonists headed to
Germany, in particular to Berlin. At the time when they moved, around January
2013, many refugees protests occurred, which were scattered over several German
cities and had as focal point the occupation of a square in Berlin: the
Oranienplatz.
In
short, the Oranienplatz political protest started in autumn 2012 when some
refugees and asylum-seekers and a network of supporters and activists built up
a protest tent camp in the wake of the global political movement “Occupy wall
street”. The spark that trigged the self-organised refugee protest was the
suicide of Mohammad Rahsepar, a 28 years old asylum-seeker from Iran, committed
on 29 January 2012 in the asylum-seeker reception center of Würzburg in the
region of Bavaria. Afterwards, self-organised refugee and asylum-seekers
protests emerged in several German cities, claiming better life conditions for
asylum-seekers and fighting against the very restrictive German asylum system,
notably the law that limited their movement across the national territory (Residenzpflicht). After some months of
demonstrations locally supported by activists, NGOs and pro-migrants church
organisations, a protest march towards the capital of Germany was organized
that ended with the occupation of Oranienplatz in October 2012.
The
Oranienplatz protest emerged immediately as the center of the local refugee
protests occurring in other German cities. The days after the occupation,
several activists and migrant subjects with different legal conditions were
reaching Berlin in order to join the protest. Since the number of people was
growing each day, the network of “O-platz
people”3 decided to occupy a former school named Gerhart-Hauptmann Schule placed close to Oranienplatz.
Since
January 2013, the number of migrant subjects with Italian documents arriving in
Berlin increased steeply. Some of them were already living in other German or
North European cities, others arrived directly from Italy. The majority of them
were people that had experienced the Emergenza
Nord Africa program, and once they heard through their social contacts
about the political protest of refugees, they decided to join it. The temporary
refugees with Italian documents gathered in the cities of Hamburg and Berlin,
and they build a sub-group within the refugee protest, named “Lampedusa in
Hamburg” and “Lampedusa in Berlin”. The reference to the small island of
Lampedusa was used in order characterise themselves as those who arrived in
Italy escaping the Libya war and were successively “abandoned” on the street by
the Italian authorities. Moreover, this name aimed to highlight that the
European borders are not just on the island of Lampedusa, instead they are also
within the European territory and they appear through the mobility restriction
and prohibition of work, referring hence to the Dublin Regulation and the
Schengen agreement. For these reasons “Lampedusa”, i.e. the EU border, is in Hamburg and in Berlin.
The
following experience of Amal shows us how he got into contact with the
Oranienplatz protest:
„The first time I met
friends like me in Berlin, they immediately told me about Oranienplatz. I
thought “If I go there, maybe there is some possibility for me to stay there”.
So I was very happy, because I didn't know where to sleep. I had slept in the
train station, Hauptbahnhof … I had
no place. They brought me to Oranienplatz, and I see the place … let me say
something: in Africa, I have never seen a place like this! In Africa, I never
slept in such a bad place! That was the first time, but I had no choice, so I
met there some friends, some Africans, but we didn't know each other. So I
started to talk with them and we became friends. Then, there was no place to
sleep there, the square was full. But one guy told me that they were in the
same situation like me, so even if there was no place to sleep for me, we'd
found it! He has a place, a very small mattress. We slept together in that
small mattress. After some days, I found another mattress and we built a tent
for two persons. So I remained there, with all the other people, we stayed
there, together. […] I met the friends of Lampedusa
in Berlin. The group was already existing. I remained there with them. I
found them, and they were in the same situation like me, so I thought “I have
to follow them in everything they do, I have to do like them, I have to get
together with them, I have to follow them!”. So, I remained with them, and I
became like them. I became a Lampedusa in Berlin. And we stayed! We found a lot
of friends there, they were coming to visit us every day with a lot of
supports. We organized a lot of strikes, political meetings. I have done so
many demonstrations! […] I stayed there from the autumn of 2013 until April
2014.“ (Interview with Amal in Berlin, October 2014)
In
the middle of the square close to the tent camp, an info-point was build where
it was possible to get information about the protests, places to sleep and
lawyers that could support migrant subjects.
Oranienplatz
was not just a place of political protest, but also a sociability place where
day by day a feeling of home was built through the continuous relations between
the refugees and the supporters, both daily experiencing the square as a “space
of new possibilities”. The “Oranienplatz place” developed an ambivalence since
its beginning: place of protest and place of accommodation for “people who are
not allowed to stay”. Indeed, the main slogan of the group Lampedusa in Berlin was: «We are here, and we will stay!» facing
the prohibition of settling in Germany set by the Dublin Regulation and
Schengen Agreement. Together with the political activities, other activities
were carried out within the square such as artistic workshops and German
classes.
„We started on pieces of
paper – from the very first [German] words and sentences caught around the
table inside the Info-point tent, without any teaching program – just in the
precariousness so hard to be disentangled of that sort of Lampedusa-isle in the
middle of Berlin, between the dust of the tent, the cardboard boxes of cloths
and books, the thousands of interruptions, questions and discussions, and among
the coming and going of many people.“ (Beatrice
Borri, in GliAsini 2015, p.88)
Several
concerts, parties and other social events were organized by the supporters
network and the migrant subjects active in Oranienplatz. Thus, the political
protest activities were alternating with fun activities, making hence the
everyday life of Oranienplatz people very busy.
„In O-platz you can find everything: friends, home, you can ask if
there is some job. If you are looking for something, you go to Oranienplatz.
And if you don't find someone there, you go to Kotti Café and you find always
someone. And also if you want to give an appointment to friends, it is always
in O-platz. Maybe the people don't remember the name of other places and
streets, but everyone knows where is O-platz.“ (Participant observation with
Obasi in Berlin, July 2015)
Spaces of new possibilities:
provoking juridical and political fractures
The
Oranienplatz protest was treated by the local authorities as a problem of
public (dis)order, since the main square of a central neighbourhood, Kreuzberg,
was filled with loud voices claiming everyday for the rights of movement and
right to stay in Germany despite Dublin and Schengen Agreement.
In
the summer 2013 there were around 80 people with Italian documents sleeping in
Oranienplatz and around 200 people sleeping in the occupied school.
Oranienplatz quickly became a central point also for the other protests that
were occurring in Berlin at that time, as for example the protest of a group of
activists from Chad, or the protest against the government in Sudan, that
against the situation in Nigeria, or protests of older networks of refugees
that arrived in Germany several years before. Everyday there was a political
meeting, and everyday there were more or less 100 people living the square,
also in order to prevent a possible eviction or police intervention. Indeed,
the first year of the protest the only institutional intervention was the
attempt to evict the protest camp issued by the Interior Minister of the
Berliner Senate, Frank Henkel (CDU). The complexity of power relations and
different interests that intersected with each other in the “Oranienplatz
situation” cannot be explained in depth here4. Still, it is useful to underline
the crucial role of the conflicts within the coalition of the Berliner
government that at this time was constituted by the SPD (Social Democrats) and
CDU (Christian Democrats). The major of the Municipality of Kreuzberg, Monika
Herman, belongs to the green party that was excluded from the government of the
City; and at the beginning she was fighting against the evictions of the square
and school supporting the refugees' protest. Moreover, the major of Berlin,
Klaus Wowereit, and all the politicians of the SPD assumed at the beginning the
position of passive observers, entailing thus an impasse that has been lengthened over many months. The central
contested issue was the claim of the “Lampedusa group” to have the right to
remain in Germany and have the access to the labour market. The local
government felt legitimate to not intervene and even to even not start to think
about a solution for these people, since the Italian government was the real responsible
of that group and their condition. Thus, the local authorities sent back the
“Lampedusa claims” to the national and European level, i.e. to the Dublin
Regulation and Schengen Agreement, which in turn diverted the “Lampedusa
claims” back to Italy.
The
situation changed after one year, when the Berliner Senate was forced to open a
space of political negotiation since the daily noisy presence of the “O-platz people” had become “not
acceptable” any more, being daily on the local media that pressured for a
solution. The negotiation occurred between January and April 2014, and in April
2014 the “Oranienplatz Agreement” was signed. During the eighteen-month period
the Kreuzberg's square experienced a suspension of the EU and national laws,
being for a short time a “small space of possibility” for political change.
Indeed, during the long time of political protest many Italian humanitarian
documents had expired, and hence according to the laws the people should have
been treated as “illegal” and thus deported to Italy. Furthermore, some of them
had applied for asylum in several German cities, thus, by living in
Oranienplatz they broke the national law of mobility restriction and also the
Dublin Agreement. The temporary suspension of the law was reached by the
self-organised protests of the refugees, which managed to temporarily open up
an “interstice” in the juridical and
political system. A “space of possibility” was opened up that aimed to change
the EU asylum and migration law from below, claiming for a new idea of Europe.
I
apply here the concept of “interstice” following the urban studies that grasp
the “in-between” and blurry space within the city (Brighenti et al. 2013). An interstice is a small space that
inherently signifies a power issue. It is a rupture and it sometimes implies an
opening up enacted by “interstitial subjects”, which represent minority
populations that often struggle for their right to the city. According to some
authors (Philippopoulos-Mihalolpoulos 2013), an interstice must not be
understood as a “space in between”, but instead as the “space in the middle”
that refers to a space of struggles. Thus, this concept aims to shed light on
the active role of the marginal subjects and on the dynamism of the power
relations. I understand the Oranienplatz protest as a threefold interstice: it
is urban, juridical and political. Indeed, the federal region Berlin was not
juridically responsible for the major part of the Oranienplatz people. The
asylum seekers who had applied asylum in Germany had done it in other regions.
The refugees with Italian documents were officially under the responsibility of
Italy. Thus, a juridical problem
should be overcome through a political
agreement. The informal – but obvious – declaration of Berlin to take a de facto juridical responsibility on
these “people cases” was stated through the Agreement signed in April 2014. A
list was created that should include all the refugees that joined the protest
and give them access to the German asylum reception system. The Berlin local
authorities insisted to analyse the situation of the people on the list
case-by-case in order to decide individually who should receive the access to
German system and who not. The access for all, a “collective solution” to the
problem, was deliberately avoided by the Senate, which feared and therefore
strongly opposed the creation of a precedent juridical case. The list was also
a management tool useful for the Senate in order to categorize the very
heterogeneous and turbulent O-platz
migrant population, which was in continuous change as the people were
constantly on the move throughout Europe. Although the Senate attempted to
categorize the people in order to manage them within the German asylum system, de facto the list was drawn up without
clear criteria: people who never participated in the political protest have
been included, but other, which were part of the Lampedusa group and outside
Berlin at the time of the list writing, have been excluded. At the end, the
limited time in which the list remained open was the only criteria. Thus, the
Oranienplatz list was like a sliding door through which just a restricted
number of people – around 462 – got the access to the Agreement. They should
consequently have been given access to the German political and juridical
space.
After
the Agreement the square was evicted and the
O-platz people where divided and distributed to several residence centers
scattered in Berlin. The following narration of Amal highlights how my research
protagonists experienced again what they had experienced in Italy almost two
years before: a very fragmented and precarious life, with continuously changing
places to sleep.
„When the Senate decided to
close Oranienplatz and the school, they gave us another place, and we slept there.
But after two months, they told us that we had to do the interview at the Ausländerbehörde. We asked why, and they
told us that we had to apply for asylum. But a lot of people already had an
Italian document, Italy is a European country, isn't it?! So we wanted the
right to work here in Germany with the Italian document. Moreover, if you do
the interview again, after six months they deport you back to Italy. So, we
disagreed. They told us “ok, who doesn't want to do the interview has to leave
the house”. The houses were in Osloer Straße and Frankfurter Allee: Caritas'
houses. Those who disagreed to do the interview, they kicked them out! [...]
Yes, me too! They told me some time before: I had the appointment for the
interview, and they told me that if I wouldn't do it, I'd had to go out from
that house. You know, if you do the interview they send you back to Italy ...
they even take your Italian document! So, I said no! Some of my friends went to
do the interview, and after two months they told them: “you have done the
asylum application in Italy, so you have to go back to Italy”. Like this! I
stayed with the supporters, in the solizimmer.
First time, just one night. Then, I went to another place and also there three
or four days. And then, again, to another place for two weeks. Some of us are
living like this, today here, tomorrow there, three days like this, two days
like that, some of us live like this. What else you can do? After some time, I
lost some contacts with friends ... I think they left Berlin, some of them came
back to Italy, others further to France or to Belgium. Many got the deportation
letter to Italy. I don't know where they are. But a lot of people remain in
Berlin.“ (Interview with Amal in Berlin, October 2014)
Amal's
narration introduces what happened after the Agreement. The people who accepted
to go to the Ausländerbehörde and
made the interview received the deportation letter to Italy after some months.
The letter stated that this person was holding an Italian document, and thus
did not have the right to stay in Germany and would be forced to go back to
Italy. Exactly this juridical problem was the starting point of the political
negotiation that should have been resolved by the political solution. Thus,
after these months it became clear that de
facto the Oranienplatz Agreement was fake, since every person who went to Ausländerbehörde received the
deportation letter. The refugees holding an expired Italian document were
accused of their “illegal” stay in Germany; those who held a regular Italian
document were accused of “illegally” crossing the borders, according to the
renewal date on their document; and those who had to renew soon their Italian
document were rejected with the reason that they first should renew their
document. Thus, for several technical bureaucratic reasons all the migrant
subjects obtained the deportation letter to Italy. Furthermore, at the
beginning of September 2014, the senator Frank Henkel declared the Oranienplatz
Agreement not valid because he had not personally signed it.
The
behaviour of the local institutions of Berlin entailed these two consequences
for the O-platz refugees: on the one
side, it produced the invisibilization of their presence, on the other side it
lengthened the temporariness condition that strengthened their “transit
experience”. The political and juridical invisibility was ensured through the
border of the legal status. Through the bureaucratic practices of the Ausländerbehörde that were justified by
the technical application of the laws, the political Oranienplatz Agreement was
de facto cancelled. The protagonists
of the Oranienplatz protests became hence again “illegal” according to the
institutions. Although the protagonists of Oranienplatz protest experienced the
same condition as the undocumented migrants, their juridical situation was
different. It was an in-between blurred position: they were “documented
migrants”, but not authorised to stay in the German territory, and hence
“illegal” – but just outside Italy. As usual for the undocumented migrants
(Ambrosini 2015), also in Berlin the presence of the “unauthorized” subjects
has been tolerated on the condition that they remain invisible and silent.
This abandonment policy has been accompanied by the policy of control: the
Lampedusa group was split and many subgroups were built on the basis of the
lists: the occupied school list, the O-platz list, and several lists related to
some internships organized by the supporters. Who remained outside these lists
was again treated as “illegal” person to be deported and detained. The lists
worked as internal borders that filtered and fragmented the O-platz people.
Indeed, some of these people, who fell by chance through the filtering net,
were detained and deported to Italy or even to their origin country, which they
left many years ago and to which they often did not have a relation any more.
The
policy of abandonment and control issued by the Berliner Senate sheds light on
the wider global tendency of managing migration and in particular “refugees”
through the «humanitarian reasons» (Fassin 2011) that interconnect compassion
concerns with securitarian devices. The refusal of responsibility for this
group of people enacted by Italy first, and Germany thereafter, strengthened
these refugees' hypermobility across Europe, which has to be understood as
half-voluntary and half-forced. In the months after the O-platz Agreement the
responsibility of the “Lampedusa people” living on the street progressively
fell back to the supporters networks, which would provide the basic needs for
these “errant orphans”5 on the
move.
Which place for errant orphans? Kreuzberg as the autonomous
island
In
order to understand why the protest of Oranienplatz resisted for so long, it is
important to give a brief historical context on Kreuzberg, the neighbourhood in
which the protest was embedded. Indeed, this neighbourhood has an old tradition
of left-wing political fights and house squatting movements, which started in
the middle of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s. Moreover, migration and
ethnic issues and the consequent discriminating and racism phenomena are
embedded in that neighbourhood. Indeed, the expression “Ghetto Kreuzberg”
emerged in the 1970s and was usually compared to US ghettos such as Harlem
neighbourhood in New York (Stehle 2006). Thus, this Berlin neighbourhood has
been treated for long as different from the rest of the city, a separate place
with its status of a “special island” as the main characteristic for different
reasons in different epochs. Since the post-war time, the neighbourhood has
been considered the main place in Berlin with a dynamic subcultural activity.
In the 1960s it was considered the alternative cultural neighbourhood, dwelled
by a Bohemian population and the similarity with the neighbourhood Montmartre
in Paris was often underlined. During the 1970s and at the beginning of the
1980s the alternative culture turned towards a more radical left-wing political
culture through several social struggles and squatting movements. During the
1980s the Punks' culture emerged that saw Kreuzberg as an “Utopic island”
isolated from the rest of Germany and the world. The “myth of Kreuzberg” has
been built in that time, when the image of a free and separate world was
rising: “freie Republik” and “freies Land im unfreien Staat” were the
mottoes that characterized Kreuzberg at that time (Lang 1998). Kreuzberg has
therefore long been seen in the city's imaginary as “external world” and lived
by its inhabitants as a separate place criss-crossed by alternative subcultures
and political fights – anyhow the global economic forces and political
transformation penetrated also in the canals of this Utopic island through
processes of gentrification.
The
tradition of political fights in Kreuzberg played a role in the decision for
Oranienplatz as the place where to build the refugees protest camp. Moreover,
also the more recent political struggles in Berlin occurred in that
neighbourhood: two protest camps were built close to the square in 2012. A
refugees and asylum-seekers protest camp existed on Heinrichplatz following the
protest started in Würzburg, and a second one was created at Kottbusser Tor:
the Gecekondu built by the initiative
Kotti&Co6. The Oranienplatz
protest camp existed for almost two years: thanks to the “integration” attitude
typical of the activists and neighbours of Kreuzberg, the O-platz refugees
build a feeling of home linked to this neighbourhood that lead them to decide
to remain in Berlin although “unwanted” and “illegal”. Some of them started
“commute movements” from Berlin to Italy in order to renew their Italian
document (Borri & Fontanari 2015). Afterwards, they decide to go back to
Berlin despite their “irregular” condition within the German territory. Obasi,
a protagonist of my research, explains to us why he chose Berlin as the place
to stay, although he could be “legal” in Italy:
„Berlin for me is really
better! Here there are a lot of things to do! I have many projects with the
supporters and artists, I meet so many people and associations. But they don't
pay so much, eh!” he laughs and keeps speaking: “In Italy they were paying me
more than here in Berlin! But there I have worked just six months and then they
told me that I couldn't stay there any more because
of the crisis.“ (Interview
with Obasi in Berlin, November 2014)
The
words of Obasi shed light on the process of building a feeling of home,
which emerged through the protest of
Oranienplatz and was embedded in the Kreuzberg neighbourhood. Indeed, the
occupation of Oranienplatz should not be seen only as a re-appropriation
practice enacted by subjects with political awareness, it is a more complex and
ambivalent phenomenon. Oranienplatz presented an ambivalent nature as social
place, being both a private space of derived domesticity and a public-political
space of right claiming. The public visibility and the collective character,
which usually refers to the work- and cultural-political sphere (Duyvendak
2011), was here related also to the private space of domesticity, with Oranienplatz
being also a “home” for many migrant subjects. Furthermore, many activities
were organised by the supporters' network in order to break the structural
restriction that limited the access for the “Lampedusa people” to the German
society – above all to a place for sleep and the labour market. Different
artistic projects and political meetings occurred in the everyday life in
Berlin, aiming to interconnect the “Lampedusa people” with the local
inhabitants and to find a way to earn some money beyond the national borders7.
Moreover, some theatre groups were build thanks to the active role of several
Theatres such as the Gorki theatre,
the Volksbühne, the Grips theatre, the HAU, the Zentrum für
Politische Schönheit and the Ballhaus
theatre in Kreuzberg. The social relations and the feeling of being welcomed in
Kreuzberg entailed the decision to remain in Berlin, despite the strong
awareness of the limitations because of the legal status.
„For me it was the first
time that I do demonstration and political activity. But I met a lot of
supporters and I saw day by day that they were really good people and they
wanted to help us and support us. So we started to stay together many time, we
have done all the things together! A lot of demonstration, political meeting,
many many things together with the supporters ... they are great! Also they
bring us food, sometimes clothes, like this .... I like it here.“ (Interview
with Amal in Berlin, October 2014)
„Here in Berlin I met many
different people, from different countries, and they do many things: a lot of
political meetings, political things, many! Instead, in Italy I was thinking
just to work, to job, there are no political activities, you go to work, you
work, and then you go back home and sleep. It is a pity, because also speaking
with many people that have done many different experiences ... also this means
learning and studying! The world is big, there are many things to get know and
many things that we don't know, so it is great to meet people. I sleep 4 hours
in Berlin! Yes! I have many many things to do!“ (Interview with Obasi in
Berlin, November 2014)
The
role of the supporters network was fundamental in the long term: it was a
relationships' net that avoided the “fall” of “O-platz migrant subjects” through the holes of the border control
mesh that individualizes every single story and person. Indeed, the fact that
the supporters together with the active kernel of “O-platz refugees” were always active in finding places for sleep,
artistic projects and lawyers once there was a police arrest allowed the
migrant subjects to not feel individualized and alone when confronted with the
control and management mechanisms.
The
eviction of Oranienplatz was a way to disperse and invisibilize the noisy
collective voices of refugees, and the local institutions aimed to communicate
that the dream of that small Lampedusa-island in the middle of Kreuzberg was
shipwrecked. Nevertheless, the public space of Kreuzberg continued to be
experienced as “home”, and several places were daily lived by the O-platz migrant subjects for encounter,
conversation and exchange of information. New places of sociability emerged in
the neighbourhood, such as Görlitzer Park and, above all, the crossroad
Kottbussertor. The following narration of Amal sheds light on that:
„Now that Oranienplatz doesn't exist any
more, we have other places where we meet and make political reunions. [...] The
most of the time, we are hanging out at Kotti [abbreviation of Kottbussertor,
the crossroad in Kreuzberg close to Oranienplatz]. Yes, in Kotti Cafè, but also
outside, when it is not cold. But we are also in several streets in Kreuzberg
... yes, also Görlizer Park, but I am not going there so often, but other
friends are always there. I am always in Kotti, also because we are watching
the football matches there! [...] Let's say that the place in Berlin where I
feel at home ... yes, is the neighbourhood Kreuzberg. In Kreuzberg there are
many many places to go, where we hung out during the refugees' protest in O-platz ... there the people know us
very well, we can stay there, in Kreuzberg! There are some restaurants and bars
were we can go, they know us. This is our neighbourhood!“. (Interview with Amal
in Berlin, October 2014)
The
feeling at home in Kreuzberg should not obscure the fact that my research
protagonists are still experienced a very precarious and fragmented life after
almost five years of their landing in Europe. Oranienplatz was a space of
possibility, where the “O-platz
population” attempted to open-up interstices within the restrictive juridical
meshes of European and national laws. The sort of small Lampedusa-island in the
middle of Berlin resisted for almost two years, and right in that neighbourhood
which has always been considered the “Utopic island” of the German capital. The
local institutions and the national states, namely Italy and Germany,
interconnected policies of abandonment – on the streets – and control –
treating them as “illegal” – pushing the errant
orphans – or “Lost Boys” – to look for their “Neverland” somewhere else.
Being the city the place where «[…] all the secret ambitions and all the
suppressed desires find somewhere an expression […] [the place] in which to
discover the secrets of human hearts» (Robert E. Park, 1952: “The city as
social laboratory”, p. 87), Berlin was for almost two years the place of all
places in which to discover the desires and aspirations of a group of
non-citizen attempting to experience Europe as a single big city.
Conclusion and
outlooks: EU-rope as interstitial
archipelago
The
story I told here allows to shed light on the complexity of the European border
regime as a space of negotiating practices, and on migration and asylum issues
as battlegrounds on which the borders are continuously negotiated and
redefined. This story can also help to better understand the today's events in
Europe, which are at present only (and falsely) discussed within the limited
scope of a “migration/refugee crisis”
and directly associated with border control and asylum and immigration
law enforcements. I showed through the experiences of the “Lampedusa people”
how the crisis can be understood as a crisis of European identity or a crisis
of the European Union structures, whose contradictions and limitations emerge under the pressure of the migration
phenomenon and its heterogeneity and complexity.
My
research protagonists could be provocatively seen as pioneers of the breakdown of the Schengen and Dublin systems that
we are witnessing since the summer 2015. Their crossing-border movements and
their attempts to build their life in the narrow structural meshes of the EU
laws have produced frictions and tensions within EU-rope. I understand these
frictions as a consequence of power relations, in which my research protagonists
opened-up interstices of autonomy. Oranienplatz was a threefold interstice,
being an urban place “in the middle”
of the city, it opened-up a political
and juridical possibilities through
the struggles of a marginal group. A different geography of EU-rope emerges,
which is built from below by the contested trajectories of refugees on the move
that create and live on interstitial islands within the turbulent sea of
European border regime. The supporter networks and groups are the only safe
harbours through which refugees are transiting and on which they base their
mobility. Now, in 2016, the “open doors” for Syrian refugees issued by the
German institutions at the end of the year 2015 are barred for the “lost boys”
that survived the Oranienplatz struggles. Although it was this early group of
refugees protesters that laid the path to the breakdown of the Dublin regime,
they are still living stuck in transit across Europe, navigating towards
“Neverland”.
 |
| Illustration of Cosimo Miorelli, part of the project Storm•i, a multimedia live story telling |
„When a man rides a long
time through wild regions he feels the desire for a city. Finally he comes to
Isidora, a city where the buildings have spiral staircases encrusted with
spiral seashells, where perfect telescopes and violins are made, where the
foreigner hesitating between two women always encounters a third, where
cockfights degenerate into bloody brawls among the bettors. He was thinking of
all these things when he desired a city. Isidora, therefore, is the city of his
dreams: with one difference. The dreamed-of city contained him as a young man;
he arrives at Isidora in his old age. In the square there is the wall where the
old men sit and watch the young go by; he is seated in a row with them. Desires
are already memories.“
(Italo Calvino,
The invisible cities, 1972. p. 8)
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Elena Fontanari (2016): Looking for "Neverland". The experience of the group "Lampedusa in Berlin" and the refugees protest of Oranienplatz. In: Gökce Yurdakul, Regina Römhild, Anja Schwanhäußer, Birgit zur Nieden, Aleksandra Lakic, Serhat Karakayali (Hg.): E-Book Project of Humboldt-University Students: Witnessing the Transition: Refugees, Asylum-Seekers and Migrants in Transnational Perspective. Preview (Weblog), https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=863130166696833325#editor/target=post;postID=3697950972162993466;onPublishedMenu=allposts;onClosedMenu=allposts;postNum=0;src=link
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