Berlin's radical legacy: From 19th-century labor uprising to modern tenant revolt

Berlin earned its reputation as Europe's most radical city not by accident, but through nearly two centuries of organized working-class resistance. When Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels arrived as the party's district leader in 1926, he found a city that alarmed him—he called it "the reddest city in Europe besides Moscow." That description did not emerge from ideology alone. It came from the weight of history: from the barricades of 1848, from the rise of a vast industrial working class in the decades that followed, from strikes and uprisings that had reshaped the city's political culture in ways that would echo through the twentieth century and into the present.

By the 1870s and 1880s, Berlin had become the industrial heart of Germany. Mechanical engineering, railways, ready-made clothing—the factories drew workers by the thousands, and as the working-class population swelled, so did their political power. The General Workers' Brotherhood, founded during the failed March Revolution of 1848, had planted the seeds of organized labor in the city. What grew from those seeds was a movement that pushed Berlin's politics away from the elitist bourgeois traditions that had long dominated it, toward something more populist, more inclusive of ordinary people as voters and actors in their own city. Historian Axel Weipert, author of "Red Berlin," describes this shift as a fundamental reordering of the political landscape.

The movement became increasingly radical, in part because the state made it so. Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, despite creating the first modern welfare state to undercut socialist appeal, also banned socialist and communist organizations, newspapers, public gatherings, and independent trade unions. When those laws were repealed in 1890, the ideas of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels took hold in Berlin as a genuine mass movement. The Social Democratic Party, formed from a merger in 1875, won far higher vote shares in Berlin than anywhere else in Germany before World War I. But the party's decision not to oppose the war in 1914 shattered its credibility among workers. From 1916 onward, Berlin became the center of mass strikes against the war. Karl Liebknecht, a socialist campaigner imprisoned for his anti-war stance, became a symbol of resistance. Together with Rosa Luxemburg and others, he founded the Spartacus League, an underground network that would later become the Communist Party of Germany.

The January Strike of 1918 brought around half a million Berlin workers into the streets, driven by war-weariness, food shortages, and economic collapse. The Revolutionary Stewards—a clandestine network of factory workers and trade unionists from munitions and metalworking plants—organized the strike and became the core force behind the overthrow of the Kaiser on November 9, 1918. But the revolution that followed turned violent. The Spartacist Uprising of 1919, launched to establish a republic of workers' councils, was brutally suppressed. Liebknecht and Luxemburg were murdered by right-wing paramilitary soldiers. Scores died. The political left fractured in ways it would never fully repair.

Berlin remained a cauldron of radical politics through the 1920s, especially in working-class neighborhoods like Wedding, Kreuzberg, and Neukölln, where thousands of factory workers lived in tenement buildings. On May 1, 1929, the city's police president—a member of the Social Democratic Party—banned all public demonstrations for May Day. The Communist Party defied the ban. Police opened fire on protesters in the streets and shot through windows of residential buildings in working-class districts. Over 30 people were killed in what became known as "Bloody May." The Great Depression that followed devastated the SPD's support. As unemployment ravaged the city between 1929 and 1933, men lost the factory floor and trade union bonds that had anchored them to the party. Unmoored and seeking new sources of dignity and community, some joined the Communist Party—known as the "Party of the Unemployed"—while others turned to the Nazi stormtroopers.

After World War II, Berlin was divided. East Berlin became the capital of the communist German Democratic Republic. West Berlin deindustrialized, the labor movement weakened, and the SPD shifted rightward. But the city's radical tradition did not disappear. During the Cold War, young men fleeing military service moved to West Berlin, intensifying the student movement centered at the Free University. There, in 1967, police shot and killed student Benno Ohnesorg during a demonstration against the visiting Shah of Iran. The killing radicalized a generation that led the widespread protests of 1968. In the early 1970s, a housing shortage pushed parts of the student movement, apprentices, and young migrant families to squat in empty buildings—a form of working-class rebellion against capitalist housing that drew on the city's long tradition of collective action.

Today, as gentrification sweeps Berlin, the city is home to Germany's strongest and most radical tenant movements. In 2021, 59 percent of voters approved the expropriation of property from private real-estate companies. Labor historian Ralf Hoffrogge, who participated in that campaign, has written about how the housing crisis has become a catalyst for what he calls a "socialist renaissance" in the city. The framing has shifted—it is no longer Berlin tenants against Berlin landlords, but tenants against global capital—yet the underlying logic remains unchanged. Workers and the dispossessed are organizing collectively to claim their right to the city. The question now is whether that organizing can sustain itself, and what form it will take as Berlin continues to change.