2023-10-14 20:14:56
The fundraising campaigns of the “Don’t look away” initiative are to be removed. The rest of the help scene keeps its distance, also because of the club’s right-wing statements.
A “help scene” for homeless people has been established at Hamburg Central Station Photo: Axel Heimken/dpa
HAMBURG taz | Michael Joho and Christian DIESENER are angry. Chairman of the St. Georg Residents’ Association one, board of directors History workshop St. George the other, they sit in the shared “district office” in Hamburg’s Bahnhofsviertel. There are meters of books on the walls, with old photos hanging in between. You can look out of the window at Hansaplatz.
Next Saturday, donations will be distributed to the homeless for the first time by the “Don’t look away” association. He has to move a few hundred meters away from his usual place right at the main train station. Even the police came a few weeks ago and cleared away tables and gifts.
Nobody talked to Joho and DIESENER, they heard it from the radio. The two are old champions of district work in St. Georg and have been campaigning on pushing homeless people out of public spaces for decades. And this time too they emphasize that nothing stands in the way of distribution in St. Georg. But the district’s action is hasty and ill-considered, says Joho, and it contradicts “an unwritten rule” that socially burdened places should not be additionally overburdened.
And Hansaplatz is such a place. The city has repeatedly taken action against the drinking and drug scene there, temporarily stationing police permanently, dismantling seating and, most recently, installing a new type of AI-supported video surveillance.
Christian DIESENER, St. Georg history workshop
“Why should what is unacceptable in front of the train station be acceptable here?”
“Why should what is unacceptable in front of the train station be acceptable here?” asks Diesner. Even though there is currently talk in public discourse of an increase in homelessness, it is not comparable to the explosive 1990s, he says. Children couldn’t go to the playground without coming back with heroin syringes in their hands.
At that time there was a round table with the police at which an unofficial agreement was reached: the police had switched to a less repressive practice. The goal was equalization and integration instead of repression. With success: the “Drob Inn”, a drug advice center with a consumption room at the main train station, is one result, says Joho. He would like to see a similar approach today. If decisions continue to be made without taking residents into account, there will be “a nasty wave of frustration and disappointment”.
District office in criticism
The Hamburg Mitte district office has to accept criticism from all sides: “City wants to push out helpers” was the headline Hamburger Morgenpost“District office takes action against distribution campaign” from NDR, “That doesn’t solve problems” wrote The time. The end of homeless assistance on Heidi-Kabel-Platz, right in front of the exit from the main train station, fit in well with the city’s plan to put the train station in a better light as Hamburg’s business card. A weapons ban has been in force for the entire main station since October 1st, and an alcohol ban is to follow next year.
Hamburg Central Station is home to numerous homeless, alcoholic and drug addicts. A kind of “help scene” has developed for them over many years, with several clubs and initiatives distributing donations and advising people.
In mid-September, the police evicted the “Don’t look away” distribution campaign on Heidi-Kabel-Platz because the club did not have a valid permit. The Mitte district office announced that the move to Hansaplatz came about at the suggestion of “Don’t look away”. The association, on the other hand, had assumed that his award would be temporarily tolerated. He describes the transfer as “forced” and is seeking a petition and legal action against it.
One reason for this can be found in the name of the association: immediate help is just one of its goals, but at the same time it wants to draw attention to homelessness as a political problem. And that works best where as many people as possible come together. This creates usage conflicts, which the district office wanted to defuse with the relocation.
In the conflict, “Don’t look away” stands alone. Of the six initiatives that distribute donations around the main train station, the majority have been in good contact with the district office for years and are currently willing to talk, according to its press office. The “Zwischenstopp Straße” initiative, for example, is regularly available with donations in front of the Saturn branch opposite the train station. Several initiatives coordinated their work via a WhatsApp group, says a volunteer. However, “don’t look away” is not there.
Entirely intentional: their clientele consists mainly of pensioners, says the club’s chairwoman Jule Wennmacher. A distribution closer to the Drob Inn and together with drug addicts is therefore out of the question for your club.
Right-wing posts on Facebook
There are also political differences: “Don’t look away” claimed in Facebook posts in September that refugees received more extensive social benefits than “Germans living in poverty,” like that Hamburger Abendblatt reported. The entries were deleted shortly afterwards. However, for those involved in one of the other initiatives it is clear: “One need has nothing to do with the other.” Wennmacher’s statements are “right-wing radical talk” in which refugees are pitted against German pensioners and the homeless.
Your posts were misunderstood, says Wennmacher to the taz. She finds classifying her club as right-wing “completely absurd”. Finally, “refugees” also took part in the distribution operations.
In the same breath, Wennmacher names migration as a topic “with which there are certain problems”. She believes that those arriving in Germany have the right to be cared for, but repeatedly emphasizes that pensioners and homeless people, for example, are “disadvantaged compared to refugees” when looking for accommodation. An assessment that, in her eyes, “doesn’t mean that I think right-wing.”
Then on Tuesday a new post: “Romanian, Bulgarian, etc. gangs” that would run “business” at the main train station are not guests at “Don’t look away,” the association emphasizes.
The expert on anti-Eastern European racism, Jannis Panagiotidis, from the University of Vienna, sees the post as serving the image of the “stereotyped South-Eastern European ‘poverty migrant’ who supposedly only comes to Germany to take advantage of the welfare state – or is simply a criminal.” For him a clear case of anti-Eastern European racism and antigypsyism.
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