I constructed a protest sign at home: 'Nein zum Krieg' in German written in blue lettering (a nod to the colours of the UN, also a colour that both the Ukrainian and Russian flags have in common) on one side, нет войне in blue lettering on the other side (a nod to the slogan that protesters are using in cities like Moscow and St. Petersburg).
Potsdamer Platz was quiet as I walked, half an hour early, toward Brandenburg Gate. But the Tiergarten was already busy and the first glimpses of people wearing the yellow and pale blue colours of the Ukrainian flag appeared. When I reached Brandenburg Gate, a stream of people already flowed down the entire length of the street toward the Siegessäule in the early spring sunshine. Tiny white and yellow flowers and a few early green leaflets were sprinkled in the otherwise stark brown brush.
The austere pale façade and army-green tanks of the Soviet War Memorial, erected quickly after World War II as the trees of the park and the buildings surrounding were still largely in ruins, presented an irony that protestors were quick to grasp. A man in his fifties or sixties in what I remember as a battered jacket gamely stood in front of the memorial's fence for a photo-op, for example. He held a sign that said in German, 'Mirror, mirror on the wall,' captioning a caricature of President Vladimir Putin standing in front of a looking glass and seeing Joseph Stalin. A lot of the people at the memorial and in the crowd in general were German, although the Berlin expatriate community was also represented.
Aside from the yellow and blue Ukrainian flag: rainbow-coloured peace flags, European Union flags, and German trade union flags (IG Metall, for example) were also common. SPD flags and Polish flags and German national flags with the German Football Union logo stamped at the bottom also appeared. One man was wrapped in a Syrian flag; two people at least wore the red crosses on a white ground of the Georgian flag. A group of protestors had taken heat isolation foil blankets that were gold on one side and silver in another, in an eye-catching display that caught the eye of photographers, professional and amateur.
Most signs were homemade cardboard signs. They often bore the peace symbol, anti-war slogans, and declarations that 'we stand with Ukraine,' and were often written in English. A few protesters rightly made the point that we in Germany would rather freeze than depend on Russian natural gas for heating, at high humanitarian cost. (Temperatures at night are still below 0°C and I saw my breath vapor in the air when leaving the apartment around noon, but maybe the signs were a little melodramatic.) A few protesters had not heard yet that the European Union and US had already agreed to block access to SWIFT banking; they called for the access to be blocked.
Professional journalists appeared to be sparser on the ground than they had been for presidential candidate Barack Obama's speech at the Siegessäule in 2008. But eventually I saw people with tripods or with analogue cameras slung around their necks purposefully moving through the crowd. Finally a cameraman with the local Radio Berlin Brandenburg state-funded media also briefly set up his bulkier equipment at the street intersection I was standing at, to capture the gold-and-silver foil flags and then the masses of people streaming toward him from Brandenburg Gate.
In two loudspeaker announcements, the organizers passed on police recommendations to wear masks and keep the recommended 1.5 metres of social distancing. After that, face masks appeared fairly consistently. But social distancing became a problem as the mass of people grew denser.
After standing at a street corner for about an hour, I drifted back up toward Brandenburg Gate. Claustrophobia was also setting in; I felt tight in the chest until I found an opening beside two police vans at the Soviet War Memorial. After staying there about 20 further minutes, also hearing musicians playing John Lennon's "Imagine," I moved through the masses of people again. I swam against the tide with another thin line of departing marchers. Then I could exit the crowd again.
People were still streaming toward the protest as I walked toward Potsdamer Platz at 2:13 p.m. (It also turned out that public transit had been overwhelmed.) A policeman was quietly conversing through a car window with a stranded driver, where a barricade had been extended further than planned along the Holocaust memorial. It turned out later that over 100,000 people had marched in total.
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