Berlin ist RAW: Cassiopeia, RAW-Gelände and Berlin’s talent for selling its own soul

Does Berlin really want to become another Frankfurt?

The news around Cassiopeia and RAW-Gelände does not arrive as a shock. That may be the most depressing part. It lands with the familiar weight of another Berlin story in which culture is praised in speeches, photographed for tourism campaigns, used to sell the city’s mythology, and then asked to step aside once the numbers become interesting.

About Berlin’s RAW-Gelände: In June 2026 the owner of Berlin’s RAW-Gelände in Friedrichshain., Kurth-Gruppe, declared the RAW West planning process failed and issued eviction demands to several cultural operators. Cassiopeia was reportedly given two weeks to leave, with the venue warning that eviction by the end of June would mean immediate insolvency. Negotiations around the area had lasted more than ten years and that protesters were calling for “RAW für alle – Cassiopeia & Co. müssen bleiben.”

Another cultural space under pressure. Another developer. Another office project. Another fragment of Berlin forced to explain its worth in the language of rentable square metres.

According to the current mobilisation around RAW-Gelände, Cassiopeia has been confronted with a short time frame in relation to plans that could push the venue out of its long-standing location. Supporters have already reacted, including the protest around 19 June, drawing attention to the venue itself and to the fragile ecosystem around it. The practical details matter: ownership, contracts, planning law, safety requirements, investment, access, maintenance, the difficult reality of old industrial buildings. Any serious argument about a city has to admit that these questions exist.

Still, behind all those details sits a much colder question.

What exactly is Berlin trying to become?

If the answer is more offices, more hotels, more polished leisure districts, more investment façades and more interchangeable urban neatness, then Berlin should at least be honest about the price. It is losing far more than clubs. It is losing one of the reasons people crossed borders, took night trains, slept badly, stayed too long, fell in love unwisely, discovered music in concrete rooms, and believed, for a few hours at least, that a city could still contain some form of freedom.

Of course Berlin needs development. It needs housing, functioning infrastructure, safer public areas, maintained buildings, places to work and realistic answers to growth. RAW-Gelände is not a holy ruin floating outside money, ownership or planning conflicts. It is a complicated former industrial site shaped by temporary use, private interests, cultural improvisation, public expectation and years of negotiation. Pretending that nothing should ever change would be sentimental and useless.

But a city can change without erasing the very thing that made it matter.

It can build without flattening its own memory. It can repair without sterilising. It can create safer structures and better public access without treating clubs, ateliers, concert halls, flea markets and informal meeting points as decorative remains from a less profitable decade. The question is not whether Berlin should stay frozen in graffiti and nostalgia. The question is whether Berlin still understands that clubs, rehearsal rooms, small stages, courtyards and cheap, imperfect places are part of how a city actually lives.

RAW-Gelände is not just a plot of land near Warschauer Straße. It is one of the places where Berlin still behaves like Berlin: messy, improvised, loud, contradictory, commercially useful and still stubbornly resistant to polish. It holds clubs, concert halls, galleries, painted walls, beer gardens, rehearsal rooms, tired Sunday bodies, night people, artists, tourists, locals, skaters, punks, goths, techno kids, industrial heads, metalheads, bored teenagers, stray romantics and everyone else who arrives in Berlin looking for something less obedient than a shopping street.

And anyone who has actually walked through RAW knows that this is not an abstract idea. It is the crunch of gravel under your shoes, the smell of beer, dust, old paint and fried food, walls layered with posters, tags and stickers, a queue forming somewhere in the half-dark, bass bleeding from one building while another room throws out a different rhythm entirely. You do not enter RAW as you enter a branded leisure quarter. You drift into it. You get slightly lost. You hear the city before you understand where you are going.

This is why the “Berlin ist RAW” campaign hits harder than a slogan should. It could have been another clever line for posters and social media. Instead, it exposes the contradiction at the centre of the whole debate. RAW is not a subcultural logo Berlin can paste onto its self-image while cutting away the rooms, leases and communities behind it. The campaign points to what is actually there: dozens of projects across art, sport, youth work, club culture and social practice; a former industrial site where studios, circus training, skate halls, climbing walls, bars, clubs and workshops still rub against each other instead of being sorted into sterile categories.

Campaign reporting has put annual footfall at more than a million. Even if one treats that number carefully, the point remains obvious: this is not a niche. This is Berlin making rough, half-broken places useful, social, loud and alive again. So yes, Berlin ist RAW. But that sentence only stays true if RAW remains alive, difficult, mixed, loud and materially protected. Otherwise it becomes a neat phrase placed over something that has already been emptied out.

Cassiopeia, Astra Kulturhaus, Urban Spree and the surrounding spaces belong to the same nervous system. Remove one element and the damage will not stay politely contained. These places do not function like office units. They depend on proximity, movement, accidental noise leaking from one courtyard into another, the chance that you leave one room and follow bass, smoke, light, people, bad decisions and sudden beauty somewhere else. RAW’s value cannot be reduced to one stage, one bar, one club or one event. Its value lies in the fact that one courtyard can contain five different versions of the city at once.

That is exactly what property development so often fails to understand, or understands perfectly and destroys anyway.

Cities love selling their mythology after the people who created it have been removed. Berlin is particularly gifted at this. It markets rebellion, club culture, creative freedom and urban roughness while allowing the actual places that produced those things to be priced out, regulated into exhaustion or replaced by developments that look acceptable in aerial renderings and feel dead at street level.

The East Side Gallery area already shows the result of that logic. A place once charged with rupture, border, division, violence and euphoria now competes visually with arenas, malls, hotels, corporate naming rights and the strange smoothness of capital dressing itself up as public life. Around the former Mercedes-Benz Arena, now Uber Arena, Berlin has already shown us the model: history on one side, brand architecture on the other, and somewhere between them the uneasy feeling that the city’s past has been hired as a decorative consultant.

Do we really need RAW-Gelände to follow the same route?

Cities change. Berlin has always changed, often violently, sometimes brilliantly, often stupidly, occasionally beautifully. The problem begins when “change” becomes the polite word for cultural amputation. When every irregular space is treated as underused land. When every courtyard must become monetisable. When every trace of unpredictability becomes a planning problem. When the people who made a district desirable are slowly pushed out by the value they helped create.

Friedrichshain and Kreuzberg are not ordinary districts in Berlin’s self-image. They are part of the city’s grammar. Through them Berlin explains itself to the world as open, alternative, rebellious, queer, loud, migrant, punk, electronic, unfinished, nonconformist. Of course that image is partly mythology. Berlin has never been as free as people wanted it to be, and no scene is innocent. There is tourism, commodification, exploitation, drugs, noise, conflict, exhaustion, rising rents and plenty of romantic nonsense. Still, mythology matters when it remains attached to real rooms, real communities and real risk.

Take the rooms away, and all that remains is the branding: the same old Berlin rebellion, emptied out and sold back as atmosphere.

I do not live in Berlin, and I do not want to speak over the people who do. But I have travelled there for years, often staying in this part of the city, and RAW-Gelände has always been one of the reasons Berlin mattered to me. Not the postcard Berlin. Not Brandenburg Gate, Ku’damm or the monuments one is supposed to admire politely. Those places have their history, of course, but they are not why I return. I return because of Warschauer Straße, Friedrichshain, Kreuzberg, the clubs, the walls, the courtyards, the strange mixture of freedom and exhaustion, and the sense that the city still leaves a door open for people who do not fit neatly anywhere else.

This is why the RAW question reaches beyond nostalgia. It is not about worshipping dirt or pretending that every graffiti-covered wall carries sacred value. It is about understanding that urban culture needs friction. It needs affordable rooms, ugly corners, late hours, imperfect infrastructure and places where people can gather without immediately being turned into customers of a lifestyle concept.

A city made mostly of offices, hotels and polished residential investment may look calmer, cleaner, more adult. It may also feel strangely dead, as if someone solved the noise problem by removing the pulse.

Berlin should be careful. The world does not need Berlin to become Frankfurt with better nightlife branding. Frankfurt already exists and performs its function perfectly well. Berlin’s power came from elsewhere: a historically wounded openness, an ability to absorb outsiders, a talent for turning ruins into rooms, emptiness into sound, damage into culture. Its landmarks are Brandenburg Gate, Museum Island and Ku’damm, yes, but for many people they are also RAW, SO36, Köpi, Berghain, Urban Spree, Cassiopeia, Astra, vanished clubs, cleared squats, bars that survived too long, walls that still speak before someone paints them beige.

For many regular visitors, RAW-Gelände is one of the reasons to go to Berlin. Not as tourists ticking monuments from a list, but as people drawn to the city’s living nervous system. Warschauer Straße, with all its chaos and excess, still feels like an entrance into a Berlin that has not fully surrendered. You arrive there and the city does not behave politely. It sweats, shouts, flickers, stains your shoes, feeds you badly, gives you great nights, and sends you home with too little sleep and too many memories.

That atmosphere cannot be rebuilt once it is gone. Developers can commission murals. They can leave a brick wall standing. They can name a courtyard after culture. They can preserve a façade, install lighting, create a “creative hub”, add food trucks and invite a DJ for the opening weekend. What they cannot manufacture is the cultural legitimacy that grows slowly through risk, use, conflict, failure, noise and belonging.

The irony is obscene. Berlin’s club culture has been recognised as cultural heritage, while the material conditions that allow that culture to exist remain under constant threat. Heritage cannot live in press releases. It needs leases, rooms, soundproofing, political will, protection from speculative pressure and an understanding that cultural value is not always immediately profitable. If Berlin wants to boast about nightlife, alternative culture and creative energy, it cannot keep feeding the spaces that sustain them to the real-estate machine.

Cassiopeia is not the whole story. It is a warning clear enough to be impossible to ignore.

Once these places disappear, the loss will not be counted only in closed venues. It will be counted in fewer accidental meetings, fewer small promoters taking risks, fewer bands finding a stage, fewer young people discovering a scene, fewer travellers returning because the city made them feel strangely at home, fewer nights where music rearranged someone’s life for a few hours.

This is what gentrification often erases first: not buildings, but conditions. Conditions for experimentation. Conditions for disobedience. Conditions for people without money to participate in culture. Conditions for a city to remain porous.

Berlin has to decide whether it wants to protect those conditions, or keep trading them for developments that could stand almost anywhere.

That is the real danger: not new buildings, not change, not the end of some romantic fantasy of eternal ruins. The danger is a Berlin that becomes more efficient, more expensive, more managed, smoother by the year, and less able to produce the culture it still uses as its calling card.

If RAW-Gelände is reduced to another predictable office-and-leisure development, Berlin will lose more than a few venues. It will lose part of its argument for itself.

That would not be urban progress.

That would be the city cutting into its own heart, then wondering why the pulse feels weaker.

Karo Kratochwil