EXB 172

SPOTLIGHT
Schöneberg turf wars
Schöneberg 30 is notorious for being a high crime
area, a heißes Pflaster, literally: hot pavement, as Berliners
would call it. First it was the dealers. Today it’s
sprawling prostitution – two local rappers and other
concerned Ausländer are fighting the pimps. By Robert
Rigney, photos by Anastasia Chistyakova
20-year-old rapper Nasip
Yazıcıoğlu is fighting for
his Kiez – Schöneberg 30
“This all has to go. The whores, the pimps. It’s getting too much. They
are even standing in front of my door fighting over turf.” The person
complaining is not some old Spießer, but 20-year-old Schöneberg rapper
Nasip Yazıcıoğlu, referring to the un-gentrified intersection of Potsdamer
Straße and Kurfürstenstraße, a few hundred metres north of Gallery Row. The
son of Turkish immigrants grew up here, in the infamous Pallas building on
the corner of Pallasstraße and Potsdamer Straße. With 514 apartments and
home to 1500 individuals from 25 nations,
for decades the place was known as an urban
disaster. Most of the residents were on the
dole. Drug dealers plied their trade in dark
corridors which dripped water from exposed
pipes. There were junkies, and sometimes
at night you could hear gunshots. Dead
babies were found in dumpsters. Graffiti was
everywhere. When Yazıcıoğlu thinks of his
childhood, he recalls finding needles everywhere
in the playground and how traumatising
it was when junkies across the corridor
from where he lived with his mother doused
their apartment with petrol and set fire to
it. If anyone knows the dark, ghetto side of
the area between Kleistpark and Kurfürstenstraße,
Yorkstraße and Pallas, it’s this
“The police are all
over us foreigners.
But the whores and
everything, no one
has anything against
that. We’ve tried
everything...”
born-Schöneberger, with his wispy beard and dark piercing eyes. When he is
not rapping and hanging out in the hood, he is working as a security guard at
Mediamarkt in Tempelhof.
Times have changed: the Bezirksamt has stepped in, and Pallas is now
Sozialpalast. There are waiting lists instead of vacancies. No more graffiti and
leaky pipes. No more junkies and drug dealers. The crime has moved further
north, as have Yazıcıoğlu and his mother, who are now living on Kurfürsten-
JUNE 2018
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