Photo by Daniel Tiffany. Used with permission and thanks.

Unpleasant news from Berlin, where, in the culturally simmering neighborhood of Kreuzberg, the Kalabal!k anarchist library has been raided by police. The library is part of Reiche 63a, a left-wing housing collective run by the Self-Governing Comradeship of East Berlin.

Constanze Nauhaus reports for Der Tagesspiegel that the raid on Kalabal!k was one of a wave of searches executed across the city last Wednesday morning, leading to the seizure of some illegal weapons, the confiscation of an unspecified number of flash drives, and two arrests for defamation, stemming from a series of homemade “wanted” posters that had been posted around Kreuzberg. The posters called back to the enthusiastic protests that greeted last summer’s G20 meeting in Hamburg, declaring that officials involved in efforts to suppress those protests were “being sought” on suspicion of “forming a terrorist gang for the purposes of attempted homicide, grievous injury, violence, and kidnapping.”

In their own statement on the raids, library members decried the action, undertaken “as though we didn’t have enough cause already for anger at prevailing conditions.” They alleged that police had forcibly taken DNA samples from the arrested men, and added that, while disruptions to the library were minimal, in the private homes raided at the same time, authorities had “clearly enjoyed leaving behind the greatest possible chaos.”

The statement ends with a defiant quote from a recent call for “Chaos and Discussion Days”: “We will not negotiate with the state whose rejection and destruction we are demanding. Least of all when we can show our solidarity with those this state has imprisoned behind bars and high walls.”