The legendary live club S036 is right next door; opposite the tourist and hipster hangout Bateau D’Ivre. The not always reliable bus line M29 headed for the Heinrichplatz stop here. Until the day before yesterday.
Almost exactly 26 years after the death of the singer and songwriter of the Berlin band Ton Steine Scherben, “Heinrich” had to give way at the weekend. Rio Reiser is now the new Kreuzberg top dog.
In the presence of Minister of State for Culture Claudia Roth (who once looked after the late shards as band manager), the scene-historically relevant place was officially renamed yesterday, Sunday (21 August).
In a celebration with a local atmosphere of the former postal delivery district S036, to which several thousand people gathered during the course of the day, there was live music and the Kiez-notorious moaning “about the political bigwigs up there”.
Born in Berlin in 1950, Rio Reiser’s real name was Ralph Christian Möbius. He died after a very successful solo career (“King of Germany”) in August 1996 at the age of only 46. The part of Kreuzberg that was in the farthest corner in West Berlin, with outdated buildings and apartments that were sensationally cold in winter, was the scene of doggedly led street fighters. The “Rauch-Haus-Song” (1972) by Ton Steine Scherben, for example, deals with a squatting on the neighboring Mariannenplatz. The anarchist Georg von Rauch was shot dead by the police in the Schöneberg district in December 1971 as part of a manhunt.
Von Rauch is considered the first pre-RAF dead in the old Federal Republic.
With his violent death, the militant scene in (West) Berlin became more and more radicalized. From the late 1970s there were massive street battles, in which “tubs” (emergency vans) often burst into flames and the streets were littered with boulders and the remains of Molotov cocktails, as in Belfast or Londonderry.
Ton Steine Scherben and Rio Reiser provided the official soundtrack of this wildly rough era with their songs. The fact that, after the march through the institutions of many left-alternatives from 1968, there is now an honor from “the very top”, one can call it “irony of fate”.
After all, the new Rio Reiser Platz is in the middle of a neighborhood that has been hit by massive gentrification with adventurous rent increases for residential and commercial space.
The generation of heirs represented there in vegan sneakers doesn’t want to know anything about the shard chant “Destroy what destroys you”. The house music anthem “Only The Strong Survive” has long been the more appropriate slogan for Kreuzberg Süd/Ost.
During her speech, Claudia Roth dropped the truism: “For Rio, the private sphere was always political”. It is pointless to speculate whether today’s Rio Reiser would be happy with such an appreciation in view of the new “Kreuzberg conditions”.
“Although the district primarily accepts women’s names for naming streets, the honor is still possible for Rio Reiser as a person with an LGBTQ background,” says a statement from the Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg district museum.
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