Snapshots of Berlin on the Eve of the Federal Election

For the second weekend in a row, I've gone to the crash course in darkroom photographic techniques.

This week I did make black-and-white prints from the negatives I'd developed last time. I was pleased with my prints. The borders are topsy-turvy at times or the margins too large, and as I'd often photographed 19th-century buildings they were old-fashioned and it looked like I'd just filched a few images from a Victorian album. But as long as the photograph itself is clear and its motif modestly dramatic, I'm happy. For example, I'd forgotten that when shooting the arch over an U-Bahn entrance, birds had been flying in the background, and by happy coincidence they looked (at the instant they were photographed) like proper birds instead of like amorphous extraterrestrial projectiles...

I wasn't especially pleased about being out-and-about before 9:30 a.m. on a Saturday, but after two more weekend classes I can wallow in my indolence. Besides I saw a purple crocus, snowdrops, and yellow winter aconites on the way home, as well as lingering pools of snowdrifts and a red crabapple tree.

Tomorrow will be the day of fate in Germany — in other words the federal elections. It wasn't too noticeable today except insofar as a Green Party supporter was handing out leaflets at a street market in my neighbourhood.

I'm a little worried that yesterday evening's news that a 19-year-old Syrian refugee has stabbed a Spanish man at the Holocaust memorial here in Berlin will lead to more votes for the far right. While I go by there reasonably often, I'm still not afraid of being stabbed myself, and I really think that Berlin would not be Berlin without its cultural mix and (idealistically speaking) respect for international humanitarian law.

A Winter's Walk Through Germany's Snowy Capital

Two bright spots in my existence lately are, firstly, no norovirus infection for me, which meant that I could attend my final exam, on the history of Romance languages, which I passed with a little over 70%. Secondly, the end of the university semester.

On Saturday, I went to an intense weekend workshop for developing black-and-white films and making prints. It was a snowy day and the workshop took place at a picturesque pre-war square, which was convenient as I only had colour films along and had to buy and shoot a new roll with the hybrid digital-analogue camera that my mother bought for me when I graduated high school. (I used the camera regularly when I was a toddling undergraduate at the University of British Columbia, taking shots of the old and new buildings and sunsets etc. on campus. But since then I have felt too broke to be able to regularly afford to buy film and pay for it to be developed.)

Today I was planning to travel to a steelmaking town on the outskirts of Berlin to report on the possible effects of the steel and aluminum tariffs that might be impending in April, and the aftereffects of the last round of tariffs over 4 years ago. It's a town where, last autumn, it was also announced that a transportation manufacturer would close up shop. But now it's looking likelier I'll do it later this week.

First of all I needed to finish writing an essay for my Spanish & Portuguese literature class, so making progress on that took up some time this morning. Secondly, I wanted to photograph the makeshift memorial of candles, photographs and flowers on Unter den Linden in honour of Alexei Navalny, 1 year and 1 day after his death. Thirdly, since economics have never been my strong point, I'm feeling a considerable impostor syndrome about the ambitious steel works reporting plan.

In the end, at least I did make progress on the essay and take photos at the makeshift memorial.

On the way, I passed by the Berlinale film festival hub at Potsdamer Platz, and heard the delighted screams of fans at the red carpet during the premiere of Vivian Qu's film Girls on Wire. When the celebrities had passed along the carpet, the fans scuttled in groups as fast as their feet could carry them to the security tent. Presumably they still needed to show their tickets and enter the film screening itself.

Today's red carpet event, although I didn't follow it in detail, felt pleasantly wholesome. I'm still a diehard red carpet event skeptic, because seeing one in person (from a distance) in 2023 disenchanted me and I've never seen the need to revise that opinion since.

That said, later I felt gloomy and foreboding while treading across the snowy expanse in front of the Reichstag parliament building. It's not even so much the forthcoming federal elections and the impending rule of the CDU party. It's rather that after 4 years of glorious freedom during the last Trump administration from being too affected by his particular brand of mayhem, it feels like the grubby mitts of his regime, and possibly of Russia's 'democratic' leadership, are also being laid on Germany and Canada.

After J.D. Vance's speech to the Munich Security Conference last week (apparently the absence of white supremacist thought at the prow of European public discourse is a sign of the European Union's lack of freedom) and the American/Russian/Saudi den of dictators deciding Ukraine's future, it's not just European heads of government who are croaking of impending doom.

I hoped as I walked that I will still be able to tread across the lawn of a free parliament in a free Germany in two years' time. (I also hoped that I wouldn't fall and break my face on the ice; the area around the Brandenburg Gate, Tiergarten Park, and Reichstag is often embarrassingly bad for tourists to maneuver. In this case, the worst case scenario is that they are never able to travel anywhere again because they've slipped on the vast rinks of compacted snow and ice, cracked their skull and died.)

Less doomily, it was quite satisfying to walk past the US embassy with a Canada t-shirt underneath my coat, and to waltz into the Ibero-American Institute on the way home to familiarize myself with the maligned culture and history of Latin and South America.

Early February 2025: Nausea on Many Levels

It's still a Berlin winter, although I've seen snowdrops, winter aconites, lilac twig buds, and a few shoots of bulb flowers on my walks in the past weeks.

I had a bit of a breakthrough in early January when it turned out that I have high blood pressure: at first it was near the danger zone at around 170 systolic pressure.

Now it's much better, and I was down to 138 this morning. I still need to take medication another 2 weeks or so, because the diastolic pressure is not improving so quickly.

Since then, I feel a lot less anxious. It's easy to become absorbed in things like walks and looking around and reading books and making plans. I'm no longer constantly feeling like I'm a pressure cooker on legs.

And I feel even smugger about quitting my last job. Firstly, I think it didn't improve my blood pressure; secondly I'm also a bit concerned because I'm wondering if it would have been killing me in a literal sense. But I wish that my father (who also had blood pressure issues) had felt like he deserved to go get medical care before he died: if he felt as miserable as I did, his life could have been made a lot more comfortable, even just with one type of medication, and encouragement to go and enjoy life in the great outdoors for the sake of his health once in a while.

***

That said, reading the news is not especially healthy right now, and I think I need to be much more careful how often and how long to read websites. The same goes for attending protests.

Over the past weeks I've been to observe protests against the rightward shift of German politics. The CDU is looking to gain votes by assuaging fears of, unfortunately, the majority of voters who are blaming the results of household budget cuts on migrants and asylum seekers. It didn't help that in southern Germany, an asylum seeker from Afghanistan who has, if I recall the national Tagesschau newscast correctly, been in psychiatric treatment three times, stabbed a 41-year-old man and a toddler recently.

By legitimizing discourse that casts rare occurrences as systemic cause for genuine concern, I fear that the CDU strategy is undermining democracy and the rule of law — including undermining its own strength insofar as it is still democratic and bound to the rule of law.

The first protest was a 'sea of lights' at Brandenburg Gate, with thousands of attendees, who mostly criticized the AfD and partly the CDU leadership.

Then, a few days later, the leader of the CDU introduced a motion into Parliament that suggested blocking Germany's borders, refusing entry to any asylum seeker who did not have papers with them, and jailing undocumented migrants (if I remember correctly) nonstop until their extradition.

– Regarding the jailing: In the past, as Rundfunk Berlin Brandenburg mentioned in a recent report, Berlin for example did have its own deportee detention centre. After suicides and other tragedies, the centre was closed down. Apparently, however, some politicians and many fellow citizens have learned nothing. –

The anti-migrant, anti-asylum seeker motion passed because the neoliberal FDP party, splinter Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht, and the far-right group AfD voted with the CDU.

That evening, I heard shortly after 7:30 p.m. that a protest against the motion had begun outside the CDU party headquarters at 6 p.m.. I spontaneously went. By the time I arrived, the event had evidently formally ended. But masses of riot police officers on foot were still guarding the area.

I felt that protestors were unusually determined to stay to the end of the event, instead of skipping out early to hang out with friends or do other things; I had the same feeling the next day.

In that protest, a larger mass of people filled the street between the party headquarters, down the row of embassies and foundations, past the Chinese cultural centre.

Speakers from church groups and other organizations addressed the crowd. A leader of Fridays for Future Germany spoke about needing the cooperation of critical voices within the FDP politicians' ranks and elsewhere, to help defeat the anti-migrant legislation. A sign suggested that CDU leader Friedrich Merz should not play the role of Von Papen.

Then the next day the CDU party leadership submitted the vote on a law to Germany's parliament, patterned on the CDU's motion, that would have made the new rules legally binding. Fortunately, politicians from several parties did not vote at all, or abstained, and the law failed.

So, by the time Sunday arrived, I thought that Berliners' interest in protesting CDU etc. migration policy had fizzled.

So I was surprised when I turned up late at the Straße des 17. Juni. Foot traffic near Brandenburg Gate was a little thin. But a long stream of people was pouring down the Yitzhak-Rabin-Straße from the lawn outside Germany's Parliament building, and it clustered around the Victory Column before branching off toward the CDU headquarters. It was the kind of protest where the tributary streams are already as large as most regular protests. There were over 160,000 demonstrators according to the police, so in other words it was the largest political event I have been to since the first protest against the invasion of Ukraine.

The depressing antithesis, of course, is that 66% of Germany's voters were apparently convinced that Merz's plans were reasonable. I'm not sure how that can be changed. To be honest I'm pretty irritated that people whose houses and apartments are still standing, pantries adequately supplied with food, no armed forces running around with guns, and no bombs dropping, genuinely but foolishly claim to be 'in fear of their lives.'

But German politics are only the tip of the iceberg. Following events in the United States is even more horrifying.

***

On a domestic note, food poisoning (norovirus?) has gripped the household. First J. fell sick two nights ago, then our mother and Ge. followed last night. They've been in bed all day.

Sitting here under a figurative Sword of Damocles, I'm wondering if I'll still become ill and, if so, when. My final exam for Romance Studies is tomorrow, so it is not a good time to purge my stomach or be potentially infectious.