Hey 20 Percent,
With the Berlin state election on September 20th rapidly approaching, our friends over at WahlHEYMat, an organisation dedicated to getting international Berliners more involved in politics, has published its StimmlosTrend survey to find out which issues people without German citizenship care about. It’s totally anonymous and takes just a few minutes to complete.
And in case you’re curious how your political positions on local issues align with the 17 parties on the ballot, check out the 38-question Berlin Wahl-o-mat or, alternatively, the Kandidierenden Check, which lets you compare your views to those of your local candidates. Both tools are in German only. Thankfully, Potsdam University has built a similar site — Party Check — in German, English and Turkish. It focuses more on big-picture political values rather than detailed. I tried all three and had very different results. Quite fun!
News below!
Maurice
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Still in the dark about our big IT system
Ten days after a debilitating cyberattack on the city’s IT network, the government admits it is still a bit clueless the incident. Replying to questions posed by members of the Berlin state parliament, Chief Digital Officer Florian Hauer (CDU) said there were “no reliable findings” with respect to the attackers’ identity, timing and methods, or exactly what data they were able to access. Two departments were taken offline for a week. American cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike is investigating. “The state IT system is very large,” Hauer said. “We are surprised how large it is.” While the affected departments are now “basically functional”, he warned it’s “too early to give the all-clear.”
Speaking of IT
Berlin’s Finanzämter (tax offices) have faced hundreds of hours of downtime annually thanks to IT failures. There have been 139 severe outages since 2023. Last year saw 64 serious incidents including 14 “total system crashes”. The government provided the data at the request of SPD parliamentarian Sebastian Schlüsselburg, who argued that the IT problems hampered the state’s ability to collect taxes. He said 76% of major outages affected enforcement and yet the administration claims no revenue has been lost due to IT issues. Last week it was revealed that Berlin is owed €870 million in back taxes.
Vests not bulletproof
“Scandalous!” “A failure!” Berlin’s interior affairs minister Iris Spranger (SPD) has vented her anger at German defense corp Rheinmetall for allegedly supplying the Berlin police with defective ceramic plates used in bulletproof vests. The vests were found to be no longer bulletproof during routine checks. Berlin purchased the kit in 2017 with a 10-year guarantee but now it has to be taken out of service. Spranger is demanding immediate compensation and threatened to sue. 2,000 new plates have been ordered from another supplier.
Celebrity bathroom incident
Meanwhile, some real news: US comedian Zarna Garg got stuck in the bathroom of the Hermès store on Ku’damm for an hour. The Berlin fire deparmment finally freed her. Her family made an amusing reaction video.
Events this week, curated by The Next Day Berlin
🎸 USU pres.: Papangu + M. Takara & Carla Boregas
Tuesday 25.08 · doors 7:30 pm · Neue Zukunft, Alt-Stralau 68 · €20
Papangu formed in João Pessoa in 2012 and their sound sits somewhere between sludge metal and the syncopation of the Brazilian Northeast, closer to Hermeto Pascoal than to any metal band you'd expect. Celestial, their new record, is a statement against AI generated music, made fully analog. Carla Boregas and M. Takara open, drums against synths, playing as a duo since 2018.
📽️ Good Bye, Lenin!
Thursday, 7:30 pm · Stasi Museum, Ruschestraße 103 · free
Closing night of the Campus-Kino, played outdoors in the courtyard of the Stasi headquarters. English subtitles, film quiz at 7:10.
💬 75 Jahre Berliner Festspiele
Thursday-Sunday · Haus der Berliner Festspiele, Gropius Bau, Philharmonie and the Ringbahn · talks free, concerts and tours ticketed
Seventy-five years folded into four days. Adam Tooze and Nesrine Malik open Thursday on what a multipolar world does to liberal institutions. Angela Merkel sits with the curators on Saturday. Sunday closes with Gabriel Boric, Signal's Meredith Whittaker and eco-philosopher Corine Pelluchon on what we need to know next
📻 Refuge Worldwide Free Open-Air
Sunday, noon · Beach Neukölln, Treptower Str. 39, 12059, v · RSVP & donation
Two stages, one on the sand and one for families, poet James Massiah, four food stalls.
☝️ Save the date: The next 20% Berlin News Quiz is on Wednesday, September 16th
🍺 🥨 Germany-wide news 🥨 🍺
🚨 Germany investigates Russia links to weapons cache discovered in woods
🏛️ German neo-Nazi suspected of deadly 1970 arson at Jewish retirement home
🌍 UK, France, Germany, Italy and Canada condemn Israel's West Bank settlement project
🎭 Bauhaus Manifesto: Broad alliance promoting artistic freedom
Factoid
Once of the major issues in the Berlin election next month is whether or not the government should follow up on the successful 2021 citizens’ referendum on expropriating large landlords. Voters are split down the middle, with 43% in favour of forcing corporations to sell their residential properties to the state and 44% against. Unsurprisingly, 82% of Die Linke supporters favour the move, while 88% of CDU folks oppose it. Die Linke tops the polls, just ahead of the CDU.
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Do you want more political ads using Russian made by persons who worked in Russian political institutions? I would probably not write this comment if the ad included Ukrainian. But after 4 years of war, putting Russian on a poster celebrating Berlin's diversity while omitting Ukrainian is politically loaded, whether that was intended or not.
Thank you for plugging StimmlosTrend and Wahlheymat. We have a bunch of volunteers and members working very hard on this, and we've managed to translate our survey into Arabic and Turkish, I'm told. According to the stats, it looks like this thing is getting momentum. There will be a write up in the Berliner Morgenpost, once we have had a chance to process the data coming in. So look for that. We're just waiting on another update on August 30th.