MadNihilist
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10:15:27 am on November 14, 2009 | # |
The Many Lives of Tempelhof Airport
On 20 June this year, 5,000 Berliners attempted to gain access to their city’s famous airport, which had been closed in October 2008. Marching under the slogan ‘Squat Tempelhof’, the stated aim of the demonstrators was to turn the Nazi-built airport over to public use. Their attempts appeared to be a failure. The Squat Tempelhof protestors had handed the initiative to the police when they announced their decision to invade the 400ha site in a press conference a month earlier. In addition, the police and Berlin’s mayor, Klaus Wowereit, had been subjected to criticism for allowing Labour Day demonstrations on 1 May to get out of hand. They weren’t going to let that happen again.
On the surface, the inabilitity of Berlin’s famous anarchist/leftist squatter community to invade the vast Tempelhof symbolises the dissipation of their power. In the 1970s, it was a powerful group, particularly in the neighbouring Kreuzberg district. When the Wall came down in 1989, thousands of young people poured into the city from the rest of Germany and into abandoned properties in the former East. Tempelhof was the next step: a building with huge political significance as well as massive potential as a public facility. The unsuccessful campaign to squat the airport was only the most recent in a series of democratic attempts to keep it open. A city-wide referendum narrowly failed to reach the necessary quorum when Wowereit declared that, as the vote wasn’t constitutionally binding, he was going to ignore it anyway.
From the Mayor’s perspective the building is something of a millstone. The terminal is said to be the third largest building in the world, after the Pentagon and the Palace of the Parliament in Bucharest. Yet the field itself, hemmed in by the city, is too small for international jets. In its final years, Tempelhof operated at an annual loss of up to €15m (about £13m). The city has stated that this money is needed for construction of the planned Berlin-Brandenburg International Airport: an expansion of Schönefeld Airport built in the former East. Protestors point out that the listed Tempelhof building will still cost one million euros (£680,000) per month to maintain when mothballed: the more likely reason is, they say, that private partners funding the extended Schönefeld have stipulated there shouldn’t be any competition to the new airport.
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