Credits
Put me in your suitcase, let me help you pack
cause you’re never coming back,
no you’re never coming back
— Devandra Banhart
Dedicated to Lisanne, for being brave and crazy enough.
We’ll always have Gulyaipolye.
Special thanks to all the people who opened their doors to me, all the people who brought solidarity alive when the going got rough, and to my family, for supporting me in these fiascos with love and hopefully not too much stress. Thanks to x, for the criticism that made these writings worthy of being a book, to Gabriel and Liza, for proofreading, and to Andrey (taipoint.org), for the beautiful website.
Photo Credits
John Gelderloos (watchtheiceme... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
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 manner... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Berlin
The 4th of July was a hell of a day to get out of the States. I’d originally planned my trip to last from May Day 2006 in Berlin to May Day 2007 in Barcelona, but I left late, and so it was another sort of holiday that marked my arrival. My older brother met me at the airport. Carl had been living in Berlin for two years, teaching English. At the end of the month he would leave to go to Palestine as a volunteer teacher, around the time Israel was bombing Lebanon. In the meantime I could stay with him in his little apartment in Moabit. The neighborhood shares the name with the huge prison that still holds some members of the Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF: Red Army Fraction), an urban guerrilla group that attacked German c... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Ungdomshuset
In December 2006, a few months after I had left København, Denmark’s capital experienced the largest public disturbances the country had seen since World War II. And it all revolved around an anarchist social center, Ungdomshuset — literally, “youth house.” Denmark is a relatively prosperous country, most people aren’t afraid of going hungry or homeless, yet when the city government moved ahead with plans to evict and demolish the building, thousands of people put their lives on the line to fight back. For many of them, it was the only noncommercial cultural space they had — the only space where they were truly free. Perhaps they had gone to their first punk concert here year... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Leaving Christiania
By the time I packed up my bike, the clouds covering the sky over København were promising a storm. I was sad to be leaving after just a few days, but to really be able to participate meaningfully, I would have to stay months longer. For some reason I felt compelled to move on, and wasn’t too comfortable with the people who were putting me up. They were real friendly and welcoming, but all they did was smoke and party every day and every night. It seems to be a common problem of the autonomist strategy that once you occupy a place and set up a bubble of freedom, some people are going to be content just living free, acting like they have already won. I could sympathize.
It was impressive, Ch... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Adrienne Gernhäuser
Perhaps because American society suffers from such a strong case of amnesia, I find histories of resistance so intriguing. The Red Scare destroyed anticapitalist movements in the US, erasing them to a degree unparalleled in Europe, and creating a disconnect between present and past resistance, a lack of continuity and perseverance. Furthermore, the social fabric is made of such thin stuff, the real estate itself so impermanent, that physical and social markers of past rebellions do not remain. Looking at the morass of shabby duplexes in the town where I was born reveals no hint of the fact that it was a hotbed of immigrant Italian anarchists a century earlier. The industrial farms draped over the rolling ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Arriving in Hamburg
The storm I left behind yesterday in Denmark finally caught up with me in beautiful Lübeck. I was exploring the city center when the clouds unleashed a heavy, furious rain that soaked me and all my things before I could run back to the place I had locked my bike, along a canal west of the Innenstadt. Couldn’t find anywhere to stay in Lübeck, or in the suburbs, so I kept biking along until I was drowned in darkness and the city was lost behind me. A roadside map indicated an autobahn overpass ahead. I thought I might sleep under the bridge in case it rained again, but when I arrived it proved impossible to climb down there with my bike. I finally settled on a little bus shelter surrounded by fa... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Affenstrasse
My first night in Hamburg, I took the advice of an Italian punk from Köpi and made my way to the St. Pauli neighborhood and its bevy of sex shops, bars, and falafel huts, all plastered with the skull-and-crossbones stickers of the local soccer team with the famous anti-fascist fan club. At the epicenter of peeling layers of graffiti and wheatpasted posters, the bulk of them punk and antifascist, stood Hafenstraße, where I was told to look for a place to stay. Initially, led astray by the Italian’s accent, I was searching fruitlessly for “Affenstraße,” Monkey Street, which sadly does not exist. In half an hour at a punk bar surrounded by former squats I scored myself a room, for the rem... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Four Stories of High Culture
A Declaration of the Rote Flora[1] to the Commercial Culture in the Schanzen District
Translation of an article that appeared in Zeck, the magazine of Rote Flora, no.133 July/August 2006 pp.5–6. Thanks to Filip for helping with some difficult words and inside references that only a Hamburger would know.
I. What the Schanze Has Lacked until Today Is Obvious, According to the Press: Culture
Reading the future in the grounds left at the bottom of overpriced Macciatos hardly reveals a cultural milestone in this desolate wasteland between Altona, St. Pauli, and Eimsbüttel, which now receives that which was so long missed. Now everything will finally be different, now the Schanze too get... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Between the Weser and the Ems
Lonely days of biking past stubbly fields, rivers and canals, land stretched flat and low towards the elusive sea, which suggests itself in the salty air and drunken earth though it hides far beyond the horizon. I navigate from one village to the next with a compass and list of waypoints copied out the night before. Bike all morning in a serene trance digesting dreams and birdsongs, roadside visions, tender thoughts of friends; stop around noon to fill up on bread and apples and cheese. I cycle through the afternoon heat with angry strokes, pushing past the fatigue and soreness, cursing cars that cut me off or fill my lungs with smoke, reviewing all the failures, all the disappointments of the year go... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
“Weet je waar een kraakpand is?”
Maandag, 7 Augustus
Yesterday afternoon I arrived in Groningen, where I had some faint notion to spend a month, gain some appreciation of the anarchist movement in the country, and try to learn Nederlands (the word “Dutch” is actually a bastardization of “Deutsch,” which means German, whom some time ago the English evidently mistook for Nederlanders). Right as I was biking into the city I suddenly began to wonder why exactly I thought Groningen was the city to find anarchists in. I didn’t know anyone there and had never heard the place being mentioned in connection with radical activity. All around me I saw a thoroughly mediocre city startlingly devoid ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Noorderhaven Canal
Sunset over Noorderhaven canal. Orange fire fights to find gaps in the algae-green carpet lying atop the water. Weather-worn houseboats moored on both sides have been there since before the first photograph, some of these same boats since before the first television commercial, and they will be there still after we’ve torn all the advertisements down, or they’ll be turned into floating billboards by some wallflower of a man regarded as a genius in his field. (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
She Shows Me
She shows me the piece of metal on the string around her neck. It’s the inside of a lock she broke open on one of her many squat actions. Her nose crinkles as she tells me how she got it. “Look, here, and here,” she points out the marks a crowbar left on the door frame two years earlier. And on the wall, stenciled spraypaint demanding: “Make Capitalism History.” This too has a story. : when Bono inserted himself at the head of the antiglobalization movement under the slogan “Make Poverty History,” local anarchists went out into the night to cover the walls with their response.
We’re taking a tour of Groningen’s former squats, a dozen of which my new friend... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Action Tour Against the Squatting Ban Begins with a Squat in Leiden
Translated from an article on Netherlands Indymedia, with invaluable idiomatic assistance from L
Activists have just occupied the office building on the corner of Stationsplein and Schuttersveld in Leiden. The building, which is located right near the infamous hole of the speculator Van de Putte, is on a long lease with Bonavella Holding B.V. from the same speculator. The squat-action, which also signals the start of an action tour through the whole of Nederland, addresses the role speculators like Van de Putte play, and also the planned squatting ban of the Balkenende II cabinet. The activists intend to continue holding actions during the rest of the week,... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
The Martini Tower
The church tower
is the tallest building in this flat city.
They used to let people to the top
and charge them for the view
until one pragmatic local
threw himself off
and hit the cobblestones
in front of the German tourists
drinking in their cafés
on the market square. (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Citizens Afraid, Government Happy
Translation of an article in the Dutch anarchist magazine Buiten de Orde, no.19 issue 2.
Present day Dutch politics is ruled by the codeword “Muslim terrorism.” Laws are changed, civil rights are trampled, and prohibitions are applied. But we’re not familiar with any Muslim terrorism in Nederland. A brief examination of the how and why of the existing Muslim policy.
The Beginning of “Muslim Terrorism.”
Since 11 September 2001, Muslim terrorists have been talked about in politics and in public space. From that date a discourse has developed in which citizens are deluded with the frightening prospect of Muslims taking power. “Western democrac... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Leaving Marks in a City of Glass
Groningen was a solidly bourgeois city, though the surrounding province is the poorest in Nederland and constitutes the country’s socialist belt. Nonetheless, one noticed little sense of conflict, which was typical for a society that prided itself on compromise. The city center was a well organized ballet of bicycles and busses, open air markets and cute little stores, student fraternities and restaurants. The few cars in circulation unfailingly came to a stop by the time a pedestrian put her foot down on the crosswalk. Serene canals spiraled around the center, remnants of the city’s defense system from centuries before. Groningen’s current defenses were less obvious, though they... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Storming the Ghetto
While many anarchists are trying to leave the ghetto, the wealthy are always trying to recolonize it. They have the Midas Touch, and everything they possess becomes a dead thing. But the ghettos to which they expel the outcasts and rebels stew and bubble with life. Innovative, rejuvenating, they give birth to new cultures and feed resistance eternal. Then the artists and hipsters move in, trying to capture that vitality, and then the investors, trying to profit from it, and they bring the police with them, and development, and death. It happened to Hamburg’s Schanze and is advancing on St. Pauli; Berlin’s Kreuzberg was lost this way; and in Groningen the process is so far advanced that it has devo... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Emergency Call-out for Mobilization and Declaration of Solidarity
translated from Nederlands
Protest on the initiative of refugees in the deportation center at Ter Apel.
5 June, 2005, 13:30, Ter Apelervenen
The refugees being held right now in the deportation center (DC) Ter Apel want to SELF-organize a demonstration on Sunday, 5 June at 13:30 at the deportation center on Ter Apelervenen, against the injustice they have been subjected to as hostages in a years-long asylum process. There is a petition in their name filed by GreenLeft and the Socialist Party (SP) Ter Apel/Vlagtwedde to seek the protection of the refugees and permission for the protest.
The first contacts between the refugees and people in solid... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Domela Nieuwenhuis and Appelscha
In Friesland, a northern province with its own language, there is a small village outside the city of Drachten called Ureterp. L told me how way back in the day there was an anarchist group in tiny little Ureterp, and between them all they managed to get a pistol, which they took turns religiously guarding and cleaning. One day, while a member of the group was cleaning the gun he shot himself and died, after which the whole group was discovered. We wanted to visit the cemetery where he was buried in a sort of pilgrimage to tragicomedy, but couldn’t find his name.
A more famous anarchist in Friesland was Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis, a contemporary of Pyotr Kropotkin and Emma Goldman. ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
To Get to the Other Side (part 1)
On Dinsdag, 5 September, I packed my bags once again, saddled up my trusty bicycle, and left the little home I’d found in Groningen. Saying goodbye was difficult. Joop had become a good friend, and then there was L. I had only just met her a couple weeks earlier, as we cooked together for Gratis Eten, and I was pretty sure I was falling in love. But she had her own life, and I had to leave town. My path led southeast, through Stadskanal, and to the border at Ter Apel. There wasn’t even a control point, just a sign — EU deregulation at its best. Passing over the unfenced frontier, I was flooded with a feeling of nostalgia, and an irrational and sudden fear of Germans. I slept ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Pawel Lew Marek
(text adapted from two articles in issue #29 of Abolishing the Borders from Below, May 2007).
Recently, Polish anarchist Michal Przyborowski put out a book on the life of Pawel Lew Marek, illuminating the anarchist movement in Poland before World War II and the crucial participation of anarchists in both the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943 and the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. Pawel Lew Marek was born on the 16th of August, 1902, near Przemysl in southeastern Poland. As a youth he threw himself into union organizing and labor unrest. These were years of instability and tension. The Soviet Union was trying to cement its control over communist movements around the globe, but in Poland, which had just fought a war f... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
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... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
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-dogmat... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
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... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Snowing Again
Вторник, 7 Ноябрь, Київ
In Kyiv, it’s snowing again, just a week into November. I love it. But it’s easier to become house-bound in such cold. Read books, write, study Russian, compose a letter to a friend. Pet the cats. Nothing to draw me outside but more sightseeing. I’ve only met two anarchists in a month. This is the drawback of not having to rely on the generosity of strangers for housing: you don’t have to leave your bubble. But it’s just as well because my two new friends live with their parents and couldn’t put me up. Right now, they’re both traveling. Actu... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Wrapped in Fog
Voskrisenya, 17 Dekabr’
Uniformed Soviet-style, the woman behind the glass at the train station rolls her eyes when she hears I am a foreigner. No helpful hand gestures, no speaking slowly, no writing numbers down on paper. The people in line behind me start crowding, elbowing, edging in past me, even though the previous person negotiating three tickets to Almaty took twice as long. Outside, too, the city is aggro, a jackhammer heartbeat clashing with its candy coating, ostentatious and metallic as a cellphone ringtone playing “Ode to Joy.”
The chatter of machines and mouths fills the air. Russian, Ukrainian, Surzhik — the local dialect combining the two. The languages are delic... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
New Fascist Attack in St. Peterburg
15-1-2007. A collective translation from an anonymous article in Russian put up on Indymedia.
On the 14th of January in St. Peterburg, after the traditional action “Food Not Bombs” (FNB, serving a free meal for everybody who needs it), a group of 10 neonazis armed with knives attacked one of the activists. He was taken to the district hospital with 21 knife wounds. It should be noted that during the action there were already about 7 nazis watching from nearby. The victim is in critical condition. He lost much blood, and has taken damage to vital organs. He was operated on yesterday and today he needs a blood transfusion. Police instituted a criminal investigation under clauses ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Olga Taratuta and Alex Grossman
Abram Solomonovich Grossman, also known as Aleksandr, was a Jewish Ukrainian anarchist who joined with Italian Errico Malatesta in opposing the syndicalist currents in the movement. “The essence of revolution is not a strike, but mass expropriation,” he wrote. One of the chernoznamets, a group of anarchist-communists who favored violent direct action, he spent two years in prison before the 1905 revolution, went to Paris and wrote for the anarchist journal Burevestnik for a while, then returned in 1907 to lead the Ekaterinoslav battle detachment. In February 1908, he was cornered in the Kyiv train station and shot to death while resisting arrest.
Olga Taratuta was imprisoned as a ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
Ideas about Sex at the Illegal Festival “Gender Paths 2”
An article written by my friend Vlasta, which I translated from Russian for Abolishing the Borders from Below #28.
“Gender Paths,” occurring once a year, is an attempt to bring together all people interested in gender — primarily from Belarus, Russia, and Ukraina — in one place; this time in the city of Minsk, from 8–10 December, 2006. I would name its distinguishing features as illegality, a full schedule, the diversity of visitors and participants, and the absence of censorship on the part of the organizers. Here it felt wonderfully like studying with artists, as well as punks, anarchists, and other subcultural elements. The... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
