As the city fabric is restored or renewed, and Berlin comes to look more and more like other northern European capitals, Tacheles stands apart as if from the Dark Ages. Its bricked up windows, shrapnel-beheaded statues and graffiti-layered stairwells preserve a memory of both degenerating East Berlin and anarchic, western Kreuzberg. Yet it feels alive, for both good and bad reasons. I’ve seen few dirtier places in Berlin, and no where occupied by such a broad mix of passionate, creative people (60 artists from 19 different countries work in its 30 studios at the moment).
About three years I first started visiting its snug whisky bar, perched on a bomb-blasted ledge (worry not, it’s now re-glazed). Its windows overlook Tacheles’ vacant backyard, created by the collaboration of the USAF and East German civic planners. Here are welders’ studios and sandy ‘beach’ bars, a tin rocket-ship-cum-dormitory and Martin Reiter’s art bunker. Reiter, a resident artist since 1993, created the one-room, concrete shelter ‘to protect art’ and resist the encroaching tourist hotels and offices blocks. A Canadian resident later painted it pink.
Last week I met Reiter, and the co-op’s spokesperson Linda Cerna. I’ve interview Reiter for this month’s Meet the Germans artist profile. As he and Cerna told me, the future of Tacheles is under threat – from a public bank. In 1998 the Fundus Gruppe – a private property developer – bought the Oranienburger Strasse site and won approval to build a €400 million luxury development. The economic crisis scuttled its plans and HSH Nordbank forced the project into receivership. Now despite the support of Berlin mayor Klaus Wowereit and 70,000 petitioners, and Tacheles’ importance for both Berlin’s cultural development and its image, the bank wants the building to be demolished.
The story does little to enhance ones faith in the banking industry. HSH Nordbank, formed by the merger of Hamburgische Landesbank and Landesbank Schleswig-Holstein, is 85% owned by the city of Hamburg and state of Schleswig-Holstein. During the financial crisis the bank needed to be bailed out by public funds, tapping the government for €3 billion in capital and €10 billion in guarantees to cover potential losses. Today in an attempt to rebalance its books – it lost €670 million last year -- HSH Nordbank wants to cash in some of its assets, including the the Tacheles/Oranienburger Strasse property. In a remarkable paradox a bank that was saved by public money now wants to close a non-profit organisation against the will of 70,000 public petitioners and mayor Wowereit.
‘I would like Tacheles to be a guerrilla movement,’ Reiter told me. ‘But it’s a bastion. We’re under siege. Only the rules have been flipped here. The rebels are on the inside. I look forward to the day when bankers and lawyers stand on the pavement, waving placards and shouting “Artists out!”’
He laughed and added, ‘The bank operates as if there’s only one set of rules in the world. They can’t handle the idea that Tacheles is not interested in making a profit. We simply want to remain an independent, public art house, providing working space for artists. We don’t work according to their rules. We’ll force them to play by our rules.’
As I write in the interview, Tacheles is a seedbed of radical creativity, which can help to galvanise and shape tomorrow’s Berlin. Rather than eliminating it, HSH Nordbank should be encouraged to work with the counterculture, to ensure that Berlin continues to grow as a dynamic, accessible and creative European capital.
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