To Get to the Other Side : A Journey through Europe and its Anarchist Movements

Notes
The Rote Flora is Hamburg’s main squatted social center and autonomous space. It is located in the Schanzen district of Hamburg, at 71 Schulterblatt St. The “Culture House” next door is four stories tall. The two largest newspapers in Hamburg, liberal and conservative, respectively, and the latter owned by Springer, the major German media baron. Later in the article the former is referred to ironically as the Mopo. A commercial project for the development of the plaza — or piazza — just next to Schulterblatt street. Hamburg’s urban development bureau, like HUD in the US. An institution for junkies to shoot up in a safe environment. An abandoned water tower in a park that was converted into a 4 star hotel. Asta is the official student union. A student-oriented movie theater. (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 51 : Homage to Barcelona
Homage to Barcelona Sometimes it seems like all Europe is heating up this summer. After Sarkozy won the elections in France, another tide of protests and riots swept across that country, at times uniting the youth in the banlieues who had rioted in 2005 with the anarchists, students, and workers who had rioted against the CPE, the labor deregulation, in 2006. There were more major riots in Denmark, with blockades erected once more in the streets of København, after authorities made moves to demolish an old building on the outskirts of Christiania, clearly a practice move in preparation for the real thing, their plan to evict the “free state” of Christiania itself. The Love Kills group from Craiova put on a feminist festival, and they and other anarchists from Romania organized a black bloc to attack the fascists who were protesting the Gay Pride parade in Bucureşti. A number of groups in Ukraina and Russia, including my friends in Kyiv,... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 50 : A Walk in the Graveyard
A Walk in the Graveyard Diumenge, 26 Agost L was back in Barcelona, this time to stay. Love, like all things in life, is harder with a prison sentence hanging over your head, but my days were so much richer when I could share them with her. Finally, we had more than just a week at a time to get to know each other. One Sunday we decided to further our tradition of geeky anarchist history tourism, and try to find Durruti’s grave up on Montjuic. It’s a long, hot walk up the mountain. There’s hundreds of tourists, most of them packed two high in busses, or riding the cable car. Seems we’re the only ones walking. Past the fortress of Montjuic, the traffic dies down and the tourists disappear. There’s only a few old men, along one bend of the road, who have parked their lawn chairs in the shade, to lounge the day away. The hideous Olympic stadium sprawls out below us. I wonder what used to be there, what got torn down so h... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 49 : Surviving
Surviving Lutxo lived in the room next to the computer where I did my writing. Out on the balcony, over which I always looked when thinking of what to say, thoughts trailing off into the deep blue sky... on this balcony he kept a modest plant in a pot. “De El Forat,” he told me. Lutxo used to live near that occupied community garden, and the plant had lived in it. This was a squatter plant; it had enjoyed a brief life in the free soil of El Forat, and Lutxo had rescued it just before the bulldozers came. Shallow roots but deep relationships I think we survive repression with the relationships we make — with the friends who help us endure our many evictions, our many transplantings, and the neighbors who shelter us. As I got to know the people of RuinAmalia better and found new friends, I realized I wouldn’t want to go back to the 23rd of April to change a few trivial choices that would have kept me out of the wa... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 48 : The Neighborhood Tour
The Neighborhood Tour Every neighborhood in Barcelona seemed to have at least one resident historian, an old militant who collected newspaper articles and stories, fliers and posters from protests, to add to old archival materials and the memoirs of earlier generations. The veterans of the revolution and the long resistance against Franco were dying off, the gentrification of the city left no reminders of past struggles even as the new urban architecture facilitated greater social control. The surveillance cameras, the wider streets, the buildings without balconies, the enclosed parks, the dumpsters without wheels — these were all direct responses to us anarchists and rebels and our history of riots and sabotage, yet each change erased both the memory and the possibility of fighting. In Spain the isolation of the present was even more marked than in other democracies, because for the government to have legitimacy everyone had to accept the alibi of a disconne... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

The Borderland
The Borderland My last night in Denmark I sleep on a park bench in the borderland between anarchy and the state. There is no clear boundary line. A few dozen meters one way shoppers and commuters drive home and cops ticket people for crossing on red. A dozen meters the other way people organize their own lives and property relationships hold little sway. And there in the middle, in the falling darkness, my dreams pull the world into a black hole of such gravity the very particles of existence fly apart and reassemble themselves in impossible arrangements. Time curls up on itself, the past marches back before my eyes and the future turns around and presents itself in hindsight, the possible and the definite trade masks and mannerisms. Choice... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Gulyaipolye
Gulyaipolye It’s Sunday, the 22nd of October, we’re on the night train out of Kyiv, and we have the whole coupe to ourselves. We never would have guessed we’d be here when we met two months earlier at an old squat smelling of dog piss, where we cooked together for Gratis Eten. L has come out from Nederland to visit me for a week. A strange adventure, considering we’ve only known each other for two weeks and then two months of letter-writing. It’s all the better for its strangeness. In such a lonely world it’s delightful to discover someone who is moved and angered, who dreams of the same things you do. Presently, it’s nice that she’s as much of a history nerd as I am. Our first destination on ... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

My First Contact
My First Contact I arrived in Kyiv at the beginning of October, and started looking for local anarchists. I had few good ideas on where to start. The city was huge, and it wasn’t the place you’d expect to find a radical social center. Even the tradition of having social movements, however pathetic they may be, had been pretty well mauled by the Soviets. So, I opened up the magazine some stranger had pressed into my reluctant hands way back at the Köpi. Abolishing the Borders from Below, a magazine by and about the anarchist movements of Eastern Europe, written in admittedly bad English, and published in exile in Berlin. I found it to be a treasure trove of interesting articles, written in an earnest, non-dogmatic style. Mor... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

To Get to the Other Side (part 2)
To Get to the Other Side (part 2) The clouds that hid the morning threatened rain, and the forecasts promised it. But just before I got to Ukraina that day, the 29th of September, with little more than mist to impede my passage, the weather broke and I was rewarded with the Ukrainian colors in the sky: blue and gold. Then the real bearers of that flag informed me I couldn’t cross into their country on a bicycle, because of regulations. So I had to wait for someone with a van to agree to ferry me across and let me out on the other side of all the gates and soldiers. Apparently there was this important line that they were all protecting. I looked really hard but I couldn’t see any line, except for the one we had to wait in, but ev... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

A Good Day (part 2)
A Good Day (part 2) Lunedi, 19 Marzo Ca Favale was a little village in the mountains east of Genova. It was abandoned thirty years ago, and now going on five years a group of anarchists lived here, restoring the crumbling buildings of stacked stone. The village sat on about fifteen acres of land. There was a quartet of chickens, two beehives, dogs, a wriggling pile of newborn puppies, a hillside of olive trees, grapevines, a couple orange and lemon trees built into a microclimate on the south side of a stone wall, terraced gardens, and about eight residents; though the number climbs as high as twenty in the summer. Most of them are Italians and German-speaking Swiss in their twenties or fifties. One of the older people there had been in the... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)