Thu 15:30 – 18:30 and by appointment under station-urbaner-kulturen@ngbk.de

Presentation with contributions by Selma Alaabed, Mustafa Alborighef, Abdullah Alkhatib, Marija Baksa, Manuel Haist, Jerome Mard, Toni Maurer, Lerato Mkwanazi, Rayan Mussallam Al Masri, Leonie Odelga-Tschernev, Gonca Saglam, Lea Sahli, Jana Sebald, Marc-Alexander Skott, Laura Wagner, and Simon Wilz (students from ASH Berlin).

“The comity of European peoples went to pieces when, and because, it allowed its weakest member to be excluded and persecuted.” (Hannah Arendt, “We Refugees,” 1943)

In November 2023, we, students and teachers from the Alice Salomon Hochschule Berlin, with different past experiences of borders and limitations in our lives, crossed the border between France and Spain. Our walking route took us along a former smuggler’s path from the French border town of Banyuls-sur-Mer over the Pyrenees to the Spanish border town of Port Bou. In 1940, many people used this route to flee from the Nazi state: Jews, Communists, LGBTIQ people, Romani, deserters, and many others persecuted by the Nazi regime. Those who had managed to leave Germany in good time now had to flee again following the occupation of France. Not long before, in 1939, Spanish Republicans had used the same route in the other direction to enter France, fleeing General Franco’s army. Since 2009, this path, that previously bore the name of Lisa and Hans Fittko, who accompanied escaping refugees on this route, has been an official hiking route signed “Chemin Walter Benjamin” in French and “Ruta Walter Benjamin” on the Spanish side. As a Jew, Communist, and intellectual, the writer and philosopher Walter Benjamin, too, was persecuted by the National Socialists. Today, people fleeing war, exploitation, and a lack of prospects in various countries who end up on Europe’s outer borders use this same route in their attempts to reach central and northern Europe.

This border crossing is just one of three stops on our study trip (Marseille, Port Bou, Barcelona) as part of the four-semester project seminar “Current protest movements and their forms of media expression” in the Social Work bachelors course at the Alice-Salomon-Hochschule Berlin. The seminar deals with movements and forms of protest for a world without borders, against neocolonial exploitation, and for climate justice. The theme of our study trip was: Flight, segregation, and resistance. Current and historical stopping points for people in transit between Barcelona, Berlin, Marseille, and Port Bou.

Curated by Andrea Plöger (professor, ASH), Elène Misbach (research assistant, ASH), Eva Hertzsch & Adam Page (artists and research assistants, ASH, members of the station urbaner kulturen work group).

Part of the project seminar “Current protest movements and their forms of media expression: movements and forms of protest for a world without borders, against neocolonial exploitation, and for climate justice.”

The study trip was accompanied by Viviana Uriona (filmmaker and lecturer, College of the Marshall Islands, Majuro), Djif Djimeli (filmmaker and actor) and Aya Schamoni (photographer; lecturer, ASH).

The presentation and program of accompanying events are part of a cooperation between station urbaner kulturen/nGbK Hellersdorf and the pilot project Zwischenräume. Belebung von Campus und Stadtteil in the project Campus Transferale – Transfer_Hub at the Alice Salomon Hochschule Berlin.

Klassenzimmer der Zukunft and Place Internationale are projects of the AG station urbaner kulturen (Juan Camilo Alfonso, Jochen Becker, Eva Hertzsch, Margarete Kiss, Constanze Musterer, Adam Page, Ralf Wedekind)