#275: Göbbels villa, Späti seating, Nursing home emergency

The Reichstag has now housed the Bundestag for 25 years

Mauerpark without karaoke isn’t Mauerpark. Photo: Swithun Crowe via Creative Commons.

Hey 20 Percent!

It turns out, politicians aren’t all bad.

Two annoying things leapt out to me this morning in the Tagesspiegel — bureaucrats hoping to enforce noise ordinances on buskers at Mauerpark Sundays (which could potentially even affect the super-famous bear-pit karaoke) and a plan to eliminate seating outside Spätis in Pankow.

They’re not black-and-white issues to me — I like a good Sunday silence and Spätis could use a bit more regulation. But both loud Sundays in Mauerpark and Spätis are part of the fabric of this city and just ignoring that in favor of blind law-and-order seems shortsighted and unfair.

Enter the Pankow BVV, which is essentially the Pankow parliament — a collection of elected local politicians. Loud music, barbecues and a flea market in Mauerpark are as integral to Sundays in Berlin as nursing a hangover, they say in the Tagesspiegel (paywall), and must stay. Efforts can be made to concentrate buskers in certain locations, the politicians allowed, but the buskers aren’t going anywhere.

The mini-parliament had a similar reaction to a plan to regulate seating in front of many food-and-beverage related businesses, including Spätis. The plan would allow seating but members of the mini-parliament fear Spätis may still be prohibited because having beer tables and benches in front of your place would require you to have a hospitality license, which many don’t have. The politicians are now hoping for a compromise, the story is again behind Tagesspiegel’s paywall.

So, there’s hope that we can still, sometimes, have nice things.

Have a good weekend!

Andrew

PS: Saturday night me and some hilarious comedian friends will be performing below a historic electricity substation in Friedrichshain in a theater that feels like 1920s Berlin. It’s the premiere of what will hopefully become a bi-weekly, 20 Percent backed comedy show. Tix here!

The cops are here, I’m going home

So what does a lack of skilled workers look like? I mean, besides the job ads from major companies hanging everywhere in the city? A caretaker at a Lichtenberg nursing home called police at 10.30pm Monday because her shift was ending and there would be no replacement qualified to provide the 170 residents with medicine, according to Tagesspiegel. The woman had tried to contact management but couldn’t reach anyone — the police, fire department and even an official responsible for responding to catastrophes showed up at the home. Domicil, which runs the home, was eventually reached and a suitable replacement was found — the company said a computer error had been responsible for the mistake and — to their credit — praised the employee for responding correctly to the (dire) situation.

The €29 monthly ticket is here if you never leave Berlin

A monthly AB ticket will cost €29 per month beginning in July (if you subscribe for a year) as part of a campaign promise made by the center-left SPD, which runs our fair city-state together with the grumpy CDU. It only makes sense for people who never leave the ring because you can get public and regional transport throughout Germany for a flatrate of €49 a month — but who leaves the ring? Politicians elsewhere hate the €29 ticket because Berlin is partially funded by richer German states and they would rather we don’t use their money for cheap public transport. The €x9 ticket concept goes back to the pandemic when politicians rewarded us for being artig (well-behaved) by giving us nationwide public and regional transport for just €9/month for three summer months in what was the best German invention since the pretzel-flavoured Brötchen.

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What to do with Nazi architecture

BIM, the property management wing of the Berlin government, is Friday debating what to do with an abandoned East German college and an adjacent hunting villa that once belonged to Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Göbbels. The problem: The former Freie Deutsche Jugend leadership college and Göbbels villa on Bogensee north of Berlin cost about €350,000 per year to maintain and have racked up additional maintenance costs of as much as €5 million, according to RBB24. The buildings no longer have water or electricity and making them usable would require an additional €350 million — better to spend €45 million getting rid of them all and returning the area to nature, argues BIM. The federal government and historical preservationists would rather maintain the ensemble.

Factoid

The last time I was in there was, like, 20 years ago. Photo: Antonio Bonanno via Creative Commons.

On this day in 1999, politicians met in a refurbished Reichstag to do political things for the first time since 1933. The Bundestag, Germany’s lower house of parliament, had moved from Bonn to Berlin following re-unification and I can’t believe I’m old enough to remember all of it. The vote in 1991 to relocate the German government from a non-descript city on the Rhine to Berlin was knapp (close) — 338 for, 320 against.