Have you ever squatted an airport?

Not content to bolster the Germany economy by refusing to go to classes for which they already paid, Berliners spent Saturday employing several thousand police officers in protecting a meadow from the terrible threat of people sitting in it.

For months posters and stickers have covered the walls of subway stations and bathroom stalls across Berlin, asking a simple question: Have you ever squatted an airport?

Squatting is a German—and perhaps, European—institution. Wherever there are abandoned buildings, there shall be squatters with their socialism and their anti-establishment punk music and their drinking of beer in the streets. (This isn't actually a symptom of squatters as much as a totally legal pastime practiced by the majority of Berlin. As an American unable to enter the public sphere with an open alcoholic beverage, I say, awesome.) Some squatted buildings have become neighbourhood institutions, with established bars, free concerts, and meals cooked by the occupants and served to anyone who needs food.

The airport is the Nazi-era Tempelhof, used most famously as the base for the Berlin airlift in 1948-49, when the Soviets blockaded the city and the West ran planes in every two minutes with food. The empty tarmac and surrounding fields, nearly 300,000 square meters, now sit largely abandoned, in the center of Berlin but cut off from public use by large barbed wire fences. City officials claim they will reopen Tempelhof as a public park, but an architectural competition instead implies a future of high-end housing and subsequent gentrification.

And so, in the culmination of months of planning and advertisement, thousands of people showed up at Tempelhof Saturday afternoon with the dastardly plan of climbing a fence and sitting on the ground to reclaim the tarmac as public space. Instead, they met some 1800 Berlin police officers in full riot gear spaced around the entire airport, charged with preventing what has been coined "a leftist militant attack." (Guess which side came up with that one.) Would-be squatters wandered around the fence, sat in groups on the ground outside the fence, and were occasionally arrested.

But by the time we arrived--around midnight--the situation had deteriorated into a grudge match between demonstrators and police. Whereas earlier the squatters' concern lay in gaining the field, now the interaction focused on antagonizing the police (and vice-versa). We walked into the street that runs between Tempelhof and an adjacent park and were met with a line of riot police slowly pushing a crowd of hundreds back down the sidewalk. White-helmeted police stood every five meters facing into the park, keeping any would-be squatter from even crossing the street towards the fence, much less scaling it.

Consequently, the protesters were funneled into the darkness of the park. We joined some friends and stood in a circle in the field as belligerent demonstrators yelled at the police and stagnated. Some protesters lit fires in the grass with scraps of paper, summoning a turtle-like huddle of a weary-looking police to extinguish the flames. Demonstrators threw insults but little else (clever quips included, "Those who fail school become police!" and "Piss off!"), but video cameras with lights ensured that everyone in the vicinity was recorded for posterity and police records. On the upside, I had no German record to be marked as a "leftist militant;" on the downside, I probably have one now.

Not really having much to do in the dark field besides killing my camera battery using the flash as a flashlight, we wandered out of hostile territory to sit in an anti-establishment bar with dozens of other demonstrators. We may not have taken the airport, but at least we can still drink beer in the street.

Photos!