With its large windows, exposed brick walls and long wooden tables, Berlin’s Cafe Hoven is a welcoming place with a familiar aesthetic.
In the last 18 months, though, the queer cafe-bar has been attacked, staff threatened, fire extinguishers sprayed in the door, homophobic insults smeared on the windows and Nazi slogans sprayed on the walls.
“People should be safe here,” said owner Danjel Zarte. “So it’s a huge psychological burden that I have to worry that something will happen to someone.”
Between Hoven and two other queer bars he owns, Zarte has filed 45 police complaints in the last 18 months, all linked to homophobic violence. After 15 years in Berlin, viewing his adoptive home a gay-friendly refuge, he senses something dramatic is happening.
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Official statistics agree with him, suggesting a quadrupling in the last decade of violence based on sexual orientation/ identity/ diversity.
Across Berlin, attacks on queer people and property are now a daily occurrence, says Berlin’s Maneo project against homophobic violence. It logs two to three cases daily, but estimates that 80 per cent of victims never come forward.
Some see the shift as part of rising social anxiety, part of a pushback against all minorities – Jews, Muslims, foreign nationals – that is reflected in the rise of the far right Alternative for Germany (AfD).
One of its leaders, Alice Weidel, lives with a woman, yet party politicians regularly frame non-heterosexual people as perverts, paedophiles and a danger to children.
Some see Germany’s ruling Christian Democratic Union (CDU), just three points ahead of the AfD in polls, engaging in dog whistle politics at the expense of LGBT campaigners.
CDU Bundestag president Julia Klöckner ended the practice of flying the rainbow flag during Pride season over the Reichstag federal parliament building.
“The black-red-gold flag already flying over our parliament can’t be beaten,” said Ms Klöckner. “It stands for freedom and individuality, including sexual identity.”
Citing the neutrality obligation of the state, Klöckner has banned parliamentary staffers from marching in Berlin’s pride parade on Saturday.
CDU chancellor Friedrich Merz backed her flag decision, arguing “the Bundestag is not a circle tent”.
His federal government’s own queer commissioner Sophie Koch, from the centre-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), hit back, saying: “If the rainbow flag is the flag of a circus, then what are queer people?”
Organisers of Saturday’s CSD parade hope the shocks over the flag and rising violence can repoliticise a queer community more used to tolerance and progress.
“For the first time since the second World War we are not fighting for new rights but to preserve the ones we have,” said Thomas Hoffmann, a board member of Berlin’s pride parade.
Berlin’s problems pale next to an alarming spike in violence towards regional LGBTQI+ organisations, people and parades. Last year the Amadeu Antonio Foundation – which engages against far right extremism, racism and anti-Semitism – logged 55 separate attacks on pride parades around Germany.
As the tensions build from without, fault lines are growing, too, within the community. The decision of some LGBTQI+ groups to join forces with Gaza solidarity groups has others uncomfortable with what they see as damaging links to more extreme Palestinian groups and people.
Another crack opened up when Kevin Kühnert, a former SPD politician, spoke of his experience of “aggressive homophobia” in his Berlin neighbourhood, which he saw as driven by strict conservative role models and religious fundamentalism.
“In my experience, it is from men I would perceive as Muslim that you are more likely to get a homophobic remark than would otherwise be the case,” he told Der Spiegel.
While the majority of the local Muslim population were not homophobic, he added, “those who are restrict my freedom and have no right to that – and I will not be silent about this for tactical reasons".
The blowback was immediate from Alfonso Pantisano, SPD queer liaison officer for Berlin’s city-state government. He urged a differentiated view of homophobia as a broad phenomenon with many perpetrator groups from far right extremists to religious fundamentalists.
“I simply don’t understand why we always pick out Muslims as a singular phenomenon,” he said.
That in turn has prompted critical pushback from Maneo and others on the front lines of the rise in homophobic hate crime. For them, the readiness to identify perpetrator groups is key to effective prevention programmes.
“We have to call things out as they are and, in Berlin, we have a problem on this front,” said Bastian Finke, head of the Maneo anti-violence group. “But if this is not taken seriously then we cannot have a [positive] effect.”
