Berlin Blog

-The Carnival of Irreverence

I'd not been walking too far down Kreuzberg's main thoroughfare when the awful feeling of being watched crept over me. Sure, being watched along Oranienstrasse wasn't a particularly unusual event- what with its cafes, bars and pizzerias spilling out onto the street, allowing its customers to watch the world go by in between milling over the various alternative-type wares sold there- but this felt to me a far more ominous species of people-watching. So with that animal instinct famed us, my eyes were led with a sense of dread on towards the source, up on high, down along the thoroughfare.... And yes, there were the eyes I'd felt- 'the-eyes-of-a-killer' as Paul Merton once put it- those of Pope Ratzinger staring down at me from a poster spanning all 19 floors of some newspaper offices; there accompanied by the German tabloid Das Bild's craven headline: Wir sind Papst, or We are the Pope. The pope's arms were outstretched in accompaniment to this, though not so much in giving the impression of motioning down divine grace for his fellow Germans, but rather, as if to bring down lightening in a manner akin to his uncanny lookalike, the emperor from Star Wars. Bringing down papal wrath upon we atheistic types within Berlin's radical enclave.

Now the provocateur who'd set the poster facing-off against Berlin's Kreuzberg district was the the aforementioned Das Bild; a positioning of the poster that couldn't have done more to enrage Berlin's various radicals already already united in affront at the papal visit; an extraordinary unification of anarchists, leftists, feminists, and LGBT-activists that the Pope's particular brand of authoritarianism, political reaction, and sexual and misogynistic bigotry, seems especially well placed to achieve. The poster was a red rag to the bull then, whose equivalent for the tabloids themselves could only be, say, during one of their periodic bouts of frenzied anti-paedophile hysteria, walking up to their offices in a t-shirt reading: love all the paedos. And indeed, such everyday expectations of the tabloids so-called morals is what makes Das Bild's craven popery-worship so surprising. For if paedo-steria is as standard a tabloid fare as, say, brazen page 3 breasts or celebrity sex scandal, then one would have thought that they'd have paid particular attention to one of the most disturbing of papal criticisms- that is, of course, of his involvement in the church's child-rape scandal. Indeed, in a variety of countries there is clear documented evidence of the present pope doing everything in his power as Vatican enforcer to hold-up and eventually quash investigations into such abuse, allowing for what amounted to a child-sex racquet not merely to go unpunished, but in many cases to continue flourishing. It was indeed such an overzealous defence of his church above all else- even the welfare of children- that earned him the affectionate nickname: God's Rottweiler. Behaviour that managed to bring out ample numbers of mothers and Hausfraus onto the streets of Berlin, wielding the simple slogan "Nie Wieder", or "Never again"; women you wouldn't ordinarily expect to see alongside Berlin's more anti-establishment communities.

Now, of course, all of this about the pope is common knowledge, and I only risk banality in repeating it because, as Das Bild's action emphasises, we know it but seem to forget it every time His Popeyness does us the honour of a visit. As if the sight of someone who might otherwise be a cuddly-wuddly old man- the eyes excepted- or in the misguided sense that 'its nice for people to have some spiritual trappings in the modern world'- even if it's a spiritualism baptised in the tears of traumatised young children?- were sufficient to make us forget. But the truth of Das Bild's own blindness to the allegations against the pope is no doubt owing to its jingoistic nationalism- in the national triumph of a German leading the world's largest, all-powerful church. It is this that saves the pope from the fate meted out to others accused of helping to protect paedophiles; that rather than having his paparazzi-caught leer spread over the tabloid's front page, we get his glossed image celebrated on a 19-story high-rise block

As for the rest of the crowd assembled for the protest on Potsdamer Platz, the LGBT crowd were predominant, many decked-out in camped-up papal and nun garb- an act of defiance against a Church with a long history of making lives hellish for so many so-called 'deviants'- persecution we've seen the church forgo when the most monstrous forms of 'deviance' involves its own priests. It was therefore Berlin's lesbian and gay communities that led the rest of us in a glorious carnival-of-irreverence on the square, with provocative dancing, speeches, and street theatre- no doubt reflecting the kind of 'liberal society' that the pope has, almost unbelievably, gone as far as to blame for the corruption of his paedophile priests. But the more politically astute among the protesters made an especially nice allusion in this respect. Their message was clear: not only is the vision of a world free of intolerant, tyrannical dogma desirable for the church's flock, but so too for the present enforcers of that dogma itself. That the priests and cardinals themselves, with their desire and self-expression freed from the repression and distortion of papal dogma, might just have a chance of preventing the festering of perversions that have so frequently led their own low fall from grace, together with the awful, traumatic consequences that result.