The First Days of Berlin. Ulrich Gutmair

Flyers publicized parties and exhibition previews. Sometimes music and loud voices would lure you into a courtyard as you were walking past, and you would stand there outside a house, in a courtyard, by a door, listening out for where the party was. The best plan for someone unfamiliar with the neighbourhood was to get out of the underground at Oranienburger Tor and start their tour at Café Zapata or Obst & Gemüse.

      Serdar’s cousin was the first Yildirim here. He opened his snack stand in April 1993. The small building used to be a public toilet in East Germany, perhaps even in Hitler’s day. Now Serdar’s cousin supplied the locals and the Tacheles squatters on the other side of the road with doner kebabs, boreks, multivitamin juice and beer until four or five in the morning.

Serdar’s family soon took over the kiosk next door. Magazines and newspapers were spread on the wide shelves in front of the glass-fronted stall, and tobacco and drinks passed out through the large window. Serdar was fourteen when he started to lend his parents a hand. When he first took his place at the news stand, Café Zapata had opened at Tacheles diagonally opposite, Obst & Gemüse a little further on. People used to drop peanut shells on the floor there, and by the early hours a layer an inch deep would have formed. They drank beer from the bottle standing up, as had long become the custom in Kreuzberg and Schöneberg. In the summer, squatters from Mitte would sit at the tables and on the pavement alongside guests from all over the world. Obst & Gemüse and Café Zapata were there before any other pubs had really got going in Mitte.

      ‘The Zapata and Obst & Gemüse were enough at the time. The street was busier then than it is now’, Serdar says. ‘People lived in Tacheles and in the building next door. The whole thing was all open, and anyone could just go in and out. There were hundreds of people, from England, Ireland, Spain, Italy, West Germany and East.’

      Many others were also involved in German reunification. Serdar’s list could be a lot longer. Totting up the nationalities, he left out the young Americans, Austrians, Australians, Yugoslavs, Poles, Russians, Lithuanians, Finns, Dutch and other overwhelmingly young visitors for whom Tacheles was a gateway into a different land after the fall of the Wall. This was a place where sometime sightseers became squatters, passers-by became partakers, rovers evolved into ravers and middle-class kids got creative. Tacheles was the interface between the official city and the uncharted territory of Berlin-Mitte with its squats, temporary studios and bars, improvised living-room galleries and nomadic basement clubs.

The reunification of West Berlin and the former East German capital was sealed on the dance floor and in bars, at previews and in beds in occupied houses. Everyone in Mitte came from somewhere, which was equally true of the people who’d gone nowhere. The citizens of the capital of the GDR stayed in the same place. They shut the door behind them one evening, went to sleep and woke up the next morning in a different city. The people who drove out the Politburo in the autumn of 1989 and occupied the Stasi’s Normannenstrasse headquarters during the winter were desperate to see the world beyond the Wall, but within months the whole world had come to them. The streets of Mitte echoed to the sound of English, Spanish, Italian and Russian. Given that a majority of East Germans couldn’t speak any English, most of the foreign pioneers quickly picked up a smattering of German to be able to chat, shop and order food at a snack bar.

      In his 1992 documentary film Aufgestanden in Ruinen [Risen in Ruins], Klaus Tuschen presents the early days of Art House Tacheles. He shows how an open commune develops into a cultural venue, how a social structure morphs into a subsidized institution. We watch people arguing in plenary sessions and the house’s spokesman taking government minister Rita Süssmuth on a guided tour, describing the various cultural activities in his audibly Swabian accent and informing her about the ongoing repairs. The minister is in a good mood and obviously enthused. Less impressed by the in-house developments are a group of East German punks, including a child, who feel bullied. The professionalization and institutionalization of the house are good for the artists and theatre professionals who plan to work here. The punks, who just want to live and party in the building, are already in the way. In the middle of this laboratory – a microcosm of the way Mitte is heading – a construction squad of young Brits, Australians and Americans is on the job. They sit in front of the camera in their sturdy boots and dusty clothes and explain how they want to remove all the rubble from Tacheles’ cellar so that it can host one of the first clubs in Mitte: Ständige Vertretung.

‘We couldn’t do this in London or any of the other cities we come from. That’s why this is happening in Berlin’, a reddish-haired Brit says.

      His American mate says, ‘None of what we’re doing here is forever. Whatever you do in life, it’s only ever temporary.’ But Tacheles is more than a squat. ‘It’s a monument to the East German squatter movement.’

      The Tacheles squatters bought cigarettes from Serdar Yildirim, and he made friends with some of them. From time to time, he would have a beer at Café Zapata after work.

      ‘Once, when I was taking a taxi home at four in the morning, I saw Klaus outside the shop. He’d set up his stall and was just sitting there. The weather made no difference to him. I had an awning and so if it rained, he’d move his stand over to the side of the shop where he wouldn’t get wet.’

      Serdar says that Klaus Fahnert used to sleep in an empty plot just around the corner in Torstrasse.

      ‘That’s where he used to store his books. He would comb skips for books and old lamps. He didn’t really sell them. He gave a lot of things away. Many people donated a few marks or bought him a beer. Begging wasn’t his style. He was very popular in the street, and all the kids knew him. He often ate at the snack stand, and lots of people, not just people from the bakery or the pizzeria on the corner, used to give him food. Almost every day, the nice waitress from the German pub opposite would bring him something to eat, with sauerkraut and potatoes, all wrapped up. Klaus talked to people, and lots of people liked talking to him. He was no idiot. He was pretty smart actually. He’d talk politics. His nickname was “Mr Mayor”. Joschka Fischer often came here to buy something in his funny hat.’

Joschka Fischer, the former agitator of a fairly unsuccessful attempt to organize workers at the Opel car factory in Rüsselsheim, a militant member of the Revolutionärer Kampf group in Frankfurt, taxi driver, translator and actor, was vice chancellor and foreign minister of the Federal Republic of Germany when he stopped off for something at Serdar’s kiosk in the early 2000s. He lived in Tucholskystrasse. His building was three minutes by foot heading down Oranienburger Strasse from the kiosk towards the synagogue.

      ‘He knew Klaus and would always chat to him for quite a while. That’s why I like Joschka Fischer – he didn’t look down his nose at people’, Serdar says. ‘He always had a look at the books Klaus had and would often buy something. Whether he read them is another matter.’

      Klaus Fahnert liked wearing badges on his lumberjack shirts. A TV reporter was struck by one saying ‘Stop Stoiber’ two days before the federal elections in September 2002 when Edmund Stoiber, the head of the Bavarian Christian Social Union party, was trying to dislodge the incumbent red–green government led by Gerhard Schröder and Joschka Fischer. Since Klaus was supposed to represent the homeless people of Mitte in her report and was displaying political messages, the journalist asked if he voted. To which Klaus’s answer was: ‘Your princes are rogues and layabouts. I would abhor voting for you.’ These are the only words ever spoken by Klaus Fahnert that show up on the internet.

      There’s a photo of Klaus hanging right next to the door of Serdar’s new kiosk.

      ‘Klaus was actually quite happy with his life’, Serdar says. ‘But you know how it ended?’

The vacant plots vanish

A homeless man dying, a kiosk vanishing from urban landscape: these are events of no interest to historians. Cities are sites of constant change. People die all the time. Other people get out of cars, trains and planes and seek their place in the city. Some spend a weekend partying in Berlin’s clubs. Some buy a flat and go home again – back to Stuttgart, to the prosperous shores