An extract of an essay by writer and literary translator Lucy Jones written for the now-defunct Pigeonhole project…
Those same people who denounce the invasion of tourists that has taken over Prenzlauer Berg are generally incomers too, of course. The pecking order seen through the eyes of the native East German is as follows: the highest-ranking person is a bona fide East Berliner. He or she is allowed to complain about anyone and anything and blame everyone else for things not going right. For him, ‘tourist’ is a loose term of abuse for anyone who is not from East Berlin.
Then come people from former Eastern Bloc states who lived here when the Wall was still up. Next come people from West Germany who have lived here since the Nineties, preferably those who squatted in a building in the Bötzowviertel and turned it into a café where a cappuccino is still under two euros. Then come Turks, usually those who used to live in West Berlin’s Wedding, and who hopped over the border after the Wall fell.
Recently, I went into a mobile-phone repair shop to get a quote for my smashed iPhone display. The man, with an unmistakable Turkish accent, said it could be done for seventy-nine euros and would be ready in an hour. I was dismayed. ‘That much?’ I complained. ‘I thought it would be more like forty.’ He shook his head in disgust and said, ‘Dann gehen Sie doch zum Türke!’ – Then go to the Turk! Perhaps, after all, he was Kurdish.
Then come the Vietnamese, who were honorary socialists until ’89 and now run vegetable shops or restaurants (and until recently, a wave of bubble-tea cafés that were quickly closed again after it was discovered that the drinks’ main ingredient was sugar). Then come the Western Europeans that moved here around the turn of the millennium and who have sublet contracts and small suitcases: Italians, French, Spanish, English. Then come Americans, because America is still the capitalist enemy. And in final place are the Swabians.
Swabians are hated by just about anyone, even those who don’t know where Swabia is. ‘Swabian’ is almost interchangeable with ‘tourist’ as far as terms of abuse go. At least this is what the press would have us believe. But in this context, Swabia is in fact a mentality, not a geographical place: in Germany, Swabians have a reputation for being industrious and thrifty, for getting things done and investing wisely.
The gentrification process needed to be blamed on someone, and so the cool Berliners decided to pick on a group that would not be able to defend themselves: the Swabians who are neither poor nor sexy. It was an attack on a minority, as there is no actual evidence that there are more Swabians than, say, Rührpottler, Saxons or neighbouring Brandenburgers in Prenzlauer Berg.
An age-old animosity was stirred up mainly by remarks made in the press by the SPD politician and former Bundestag president Wolfgang Thierse, himself a long-time resident of Prenzlauer Berg: he accused the nest-thieving Swabians of organisierte Schwabenschaft (organised Swabianism), in which they had ousted the traditionally poor and working-class Berliners in Prenzlauer Berg…