Democracy on Wings

At around 4 p.m. I went to the Rathaus Schöneberg in order to vote in the referendum on the future of the Berlin-Tempelhof airport. The market, white with the plastic sheeting that shelters the tables, was in full cry, and the sidewalks between the Akazienstraße and Rathaus were bustling with people eating ice cream, going for a walk, talking at restaurant tables, etc. There was no sign of the referendum except two modest posters at the bottom of the city hall stairs, and white pieces of paper pointing one to the side entrance on the Freiherr-von-Stein Straße. There a lone trio of black-clad men from a television station stood conversing with one or two citizens, the door was open, and I uncertainly entered the door that is normally used to get to the marriage office (Standesamt).

Up the dark but broad winding stairs I went, and it was easy enough to find Room 1003. Two other voters were standing in line in a well-lit room that was smaller than many a classroom. One of the two students sitting at a white table to the right examined my notification letter and passport, and pointed me to a modest table in one corner where a grey cardboard shield protected one's privacy. With great effort, I summoned my forces to unfold the ballot and mark a cross on the circle beside "Ja," then I walked over to the table where three plump and friendly women were sitting. They checked off my name on the voter list after consulting the notification letter again, and pointed me to the metal box that served as the urn. A fourth woman stood there, somewhat listlessly holding a blue duotang over the slit, and then as listlessly moving it aside to let me drop in the ballot. My civic duty was thereby performed.

As I went out and descended the stairs, a second television trio, who had been loitering on the landing, stopped me and asked me to say how I had voted and why. Given the fact that I am generally inarticulate and rambly and don't pronounce my "s"s properly, any footage of me would probably be unusable, but I decided to give it a shot and let them decide. Besides, I was giggling internally with excitement like a giddy schoolgirl, though I probably looked poised and serious as far as this is reconcilable with evidently being in a good mood. So I agreed. At that point they swung into action; a fuzzy black microphone hovered from the left, the unwieldy black camera approached from the right, and in the middle there stood the anchor, her smile very white, broad and fixed as she asked me the question.

As far as I remember, these are the pearls of wisdom that I confidently imparted: "Ich habe 'Ja' gestimmt. Ich finde, dass eine Stadt wie Berlin mehr als einen Flughafen braucht. Eine Stadt mit 3 Millionen Einwohner [here the confidence in my tone wavered into uncertainty, because that figure might be wrong] brauch zwei Flughafen." In a nutshell: "I voted 'yes' because a large city like Berlin needs more than one airport." Walking back home, I remembered that "brauch" should have a "t" at the end (if I'm lucky, the wrong pronunciation is a colloquialism), and that the plural of "Flughafen" is "Flughäfen." Anyway, it doesn't really matter, and in any case what bothers me more is that the substance of what I said is unenlightening at best, but most probably stupid.

What the issue was, is that the government intends to close down the Tegel and Tempelhof airports and expand the Schönefeld airport into a huge one called "Berlin-Brandenburg International." Tempelhof hasn't been used by commercial passenger airlines in ages, and apparently only serves dignitaries and businessmen now. So its operation license was revoked, and the government had agreed to redevelop it into a park or something of the sort; a public initiative was started against this closure, however, and that's why the referendum happened.

I think that it is immensely stupid to have only one large airport serve all of Berlin. If something goes wrong, let's say an oil slick on the runway or whatever, there should always be an alternative site. And the convergence of all Berlin-bound flights on one spot sounds unnecessarily dangerous to me. London, though admittedly much larger than Berlin, has Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted, and (I think) Luton; even Vancouver, with probably half the population of Berlin, has YVR and Vancouver-Abbotsford.

The official information brochure that we were sent in the mail also presents more specific arguments: apparently BBI would not be large enough to handle all the flight traffic, the closure of the airport would cost Berlin millions in revenue, and ca. 70% of Berliners are for the continuation of Tempelhof as it is. None of the counter-arguments that I've read seem compelling. Pollution drifts with the wind, so what difference does it make if it originates in BBI or Tempelhof? The noise is a pity, but, at the risk of being mean, I will say that people who choose to live nearby, when Berlin's housing market is (from what I've seen and heard) wide open, should suck it up.