Oh God, what’s not to say about Tacheles? His­tor­ical mean­ing, present con­tro­ver­sies and a sig­ni­fic­ant part in Ber­lins urban and cul­tural evol­u­tion. You could prob­ably write nov­els on the sub­ject of art houses and punk squats and poor piss clubs in Ber­lin, but the Tacheles does kind of stand out. It was one of my first (if not the very first, I can’t remem­ber) going out experiences.

… not a good one, by the way. But I know that many young stu­dents come to the Tacheles to have a cheap and good time party­ing. There’s some­thing about urine pestered hall­ways and tagged walls and broken win­dows that attracts the kids from out­side Ber­lin, and the Tacheles has much of all that. It’s new to them (and it used to be new to me): that some­thing as dirty and wild as this could be con­sidered art or even be approved by adults. It’s an insane new world. I keep for­get­ting that that’s not taken for gran­ted every­where (espe­cially not in the rest of Germany).

But yeah, I know. I’m not doing it any justice. It did have an import­ant mean­ing, I’m not sure of it’s cur­rent cul­tural rel­ev­ance though. It’s an art house and an exhib­i­tion space, but the times of non-profit and sub­cul­tural import­ance are long gone and maybe it’s time to move on to other, bet­ter, big­ger, more sig­ni­fic­ant things. Not that I sup­port tear­ing this his­tor­ical land­mark down or any­thing — not at all. I’m just say­ing: do not worry. We’re not run­ning out of any­thing. There will be more, there will be bet­ter, and we will make new his­tory and give birth to new legends– let the eld­ers rest in peace.

The word “Tacheles” (Yid­dish word for “plain, hon­est, straight­for­ward talk, pur­pose”) is based on cen­sor­ship prob­lems in the GDR. As a res­ult of lim­ited free­dom of speech, musi­cians, dir­ect­ors and artists were not per­mit­ted to openly express them­selves, and they were forced to con­ceal the true mes­sage of the work. The use of Yid­dish is prob­ably a res­ult of the building’s loc­a­tion in the old Jew­ish quarter (now the Sch­eun­en­vier­tel). (source)

The future of the Tacheles ruins is uncer­tain. Rumors had it that the own­ers of the expired lease were going to be (force­fully, Ber­lin style) evicted on Wed­nes­day morn­ing. I went early in the morn­ing to take some ‘last’ pic­tures before I’d never have the chance again, but there was no actual evic­tion going on and we’ll have to wait and see what hap­pens next.