9/23-24: Hamburg, Copenhagen

For a brief few hours in Hamburg we walked through the red light district, surveyed the vast expanses of falafel shops, and played a show at a squatted bar occupied equally by punks and homeless people playing backgammon and foosball, but we had to get up early to catch the train to Copenhagen, so our Hamburg stay was unfortunately limited.

Everyone we talked to in or about Copenhagen told us stories of the old “youth house,” Ungdomshuset Jagtvej 69, a now legendary squatted social center, which had been evicted 2 years earlier in a devious turn of events when the city sold the building to right wing Christian fundamentalists. The event was a strong testament to the power of militant street action, as upon eviction the anarchists in Copenhagen rioted for some three months until eventually the city gave them a bigger building as a replacement. Between the various accounts we heard, we learned that anarchists and squatters from all over Europe had converged in Copenhagen, and after the initial three months, riots continued to break out weekly for several months to come. Various passersby would join in on the riots even if they hadn’t been involved with the squat, and anyone who didn’t know about Ungdomshuset beforehand, knew all about it after. A friend told us he’d be eating at a cafe and he’d look outside and be like “oops, a car on fire… must be a riot today.” Eventually the Copenhagen police called in Swedish officers to help handle the situation, but the victory was clearly in the hands of the squatters. Not only did they get a new bigger building, but the riots were really important for the international squatter scene. In other cities where there was repression against established squats, cities were forced to rethink their stategies out of fear of the precedent set in Copenhagen. On top of it all, when the Christians tore down Ungdomshuset they couldn’t find any contractors to rebuild it because no one wanted to risk having their construction supplies sabotage. The lot still lays vacant, and tags of “69″ (in reference to the youth house’s address) remain all over the city.

Hearing about the riots served as a good lesson about the importance of combining militant street action with establishing meaningful anarchist institutions. The fact that Ungdomshuset had been a center of activity for so many people in Denmark showed how important community investment was to creating a successful militant street action. Almost everyone we met in Scandanavia had at least been there, if they hadn’t had some deeper level of involvement with the space.

I played the new social center, Dortheavej 61, which was unfortunately further from the center in town, but still very active. In addition to two show spaces and an art studio, they had weekly people’s kitchens, free yoga, and an infoshop. We were told to visit the “free state” of Kristania – a walled off neighborhood in the center of Copenhagen, said to be the largest squat in the world. Depending on who we talked to it was described as a utopic inspiring autonomous space, or (and this was more common) a hippy neighborhood where people went to buy weed. It was a cool place to visit and impressive in so much as it’s self-organized and doesn’t pay the taxes or mind the laws of the state, but it did seem that the uniting politic was less in autonomous organization but more a desire to sell pot without being hassled by the cops. Still, I couldn’t imagine anything like it existing in the states, so kudos to Copenhagen.