[Reader-list] Recession fuels anger against wealth

[Ananth S]

Arsonists Torch Berlin Porsches, BMWs as Recession Fuels Anger
By Brett Neely
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=aoFmLZ.4beXE&refer=home
Feb. 27 (Bloomberg) -- When Berlin resident Simone Klostermann  
returned from vacation and couldn’t find her Mercedes SLK, she thought  
it had been towed. Police told her the 35,000- euro ($45,000) car had  
been torched.

“They’d squirted something flammable into the car’s engine block in  
the gap between the windshield and the hood,” said Klostermann. “The  
engine was completely destroyed.”

The 34-year-old’s experience isn’t unique in the German capital. At  
least 29 vehicles were destroyed in arson attacks this year, most of  
them luxury cars, according to police. The number is already about 30  
percent of the total for 2008. The latest to go up in flames was a  
Porsche, on Feb. 14, two days after a Mercedes was set alight in a  
public car park.

While youths in Athens protest by throwing Molotov cocktails, in Paris  
by toppling barricades, and in Budapest by hurling eggs at  
politicians, protesters in Berlin rage at their economic plight by  
targeting the most expensive cars -- symbols of German wealth and power.

A group calling itself BMW -- the initials stand for Movement for  
Militant Resistance in German -- has claimed responsibility for  
several attacks in left-wing magazines and Web sites, police spokesman  
Bernhard Schodrowski said.

One-third of the incidents are classed as “political,” prompting  
officers to assign a special unit to investigate, Schodrowski said. No  
arrests have been made. Schodrowski attributed the arson to “a protest  
against the world economy and rising rents.”

‘Quick to Attack’

German unemployment began to rise last November after almost three  
years of declines. Deutsche Bank AG Chief Economist Norbert Walter  
predicts the German economy, Europe’s biggest, may shrink by more than  
5 percent this year.

The worst recession since World War II is fueling anger among youths  
across Europe who “perceive their future as rather precarious,” said  
Margit Mayer, a politics professor at Berlin’s Free University.

“Whether you look at the Berlin events or these anarchist groups in  
other European cities and countries, they are all making reference to  
the deepening economic crisis and how the various governments are  
dealing with them,” said Mayer, a specialist in urban social and  
protest movements.

Some groups are “very quick to attack whoever they can make out as  
responsible for having robbed them of decent life prospects,”  
according to Mayer.

The Berlin car burnings have been concentrated in up-and- coming  
neighborhoods such as Prenzlauer Berg, where Klostermann’s car was  
destroyed in May.

‘Don’t Move in Here’

There, new housing and building redevelopments are pushing out the  
squatter scene that flourished after East and West Berlin were  
reunited in 1990, said Andrej Holm, a sociologist at Goethe University  
in Frankfurt who has studied the change.

Rents that were about half the city average 10 years ago are now about  
40 percent above the average, and the car attacks are an attempt to  
drive wealthy newcomers away, Holm said.

“It means: ‘rich people, don’t move in here -- your cars will be  
trashed, we don’t want you here’,” he said.

While Prenzlauer Berg and other central neighborhoods such as  
Friedrichshain and Kreuzberg are thriving, at least in parts, Berlin  
as a whole remains Germany’s “subsidy capital” almost 20 years after  
the Berlin Wall fell, said Tobias Just, a real-estate economist with  
Deutsche Bank in Frankfurt. Unemployment, at 14.1 percent in February,  
is almost double the national average.

Oliver Kappelle, who moved with his wife and two children to  
Friedrichshain, is unfazed by the perceived threat.

One night last month, Kappelle came across a “heap of junk that used  
to be a Porsche the night before,” he said. “I was just relieved that  
he didn’t park in the empty space behind me.”

Baader-Meinhof

Berlin has a history of political protest, with anarchist  
demonstrators regularly clashing with police on the streets of  
Kreuzberg during May 1 marches. Kreuzberg, which abutted the Berlin  
Wall, is represented in parliament by the Green Party’s Hans-Christian  
Stroebele, a former lawyer who defended members of the Baader-Meinhof  
gang in court.

Likewise, arson attacks on cars are not new: a Web site, “Burning  
Cars,” was set up to track the incidents in May 2007, one month before  
a summit in the northern German resort of Heiligendamm of the Group of  
Eight industrialized nations. There have been 290 attacks on cars  
since then, among them 55 Mercedes and 29 BMWs damaged or destroyed by  
fire, the site records.

“I wouldn’t advise someone to park their Porsche on the street” in  
Kreuzberg, Berlin police commissioner Dieter Glietsch told the Taz  
newspaper in June last year.

As the frequency of attacks increases, Klostermann, a company manager  
who has lived in Prenzlauer Berg for 12 years, remains unbowed.

“I would never want to be regarded as someone who can be driven out of  
a place where I enjoy living,” she said.