NO CITY HATES ITS LANDLORDS QUITE LIKE BERLIN

ACTIVISTS SAY THE NEW FIVE-YEAR RENT FREEZE IS MERELY A GOOD START. WHO’S UP FOR EXPROPRIATING SOME PRIVATE PROPERTY? BY CAROLINE WINTER AND ANDREW BLACKMAN

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On the ground floor of a tan stucco building in the Schillerkiez neighborhood of Berlin sits an anarchist bar called Syndikat. Its windows are plastered with anti-Nazi and anti-gentrification stickers. Motörhead and German punk bands play on rotation, and a small draft beer costs less than €2.

Since 1985, Syndikat has served as a kind of cigarette-smoke-saturated living room for misfits, students, immigrants, and hard-up neighbors. In September 2018, however, an eviction notice from the bar’s landlord, Firman Properties S.a.r.l., appeared in the mail. That’s when Syndikat’s co-managers took on a surprisingly difficult challenge: finding out who owned their building.

“We’ve had a few owners, but the most recent had an address in Luxembourg,” says Christian Schulte, a 42-year-old sociologist with a septum piercing who’s helped run Syndikat for 13 years. “When we finally found the company’s number, no one ever picked up.”

Wondering exactly who he was dealing with, Schulte enlisted friends near the Luxembourg border to drive to the company’s headquarters. At the address listed on the bar’s lease they found an unremarkable commercial building housing a shoe store and a tanning salon—and an intriguing mailbox. On a sheet of paper posted nearby was a list of 76 companies associated with that mailbox, most of them apparently property management firms. Among them was Syndikat’s landlord.