by Marc Herbst
Leipzig, 2026 -- The front of the complex is on a main street. The two street-level storefronts are a vegan restaurant and a book bindery, and in the first courtyard is a print shop. They print a monthly flyer announcing events at the long-running punk club in the courtyard. This popular club doesn’t have a website or a presence on social media. Person-to-person, practice-based relationships maintain the communal luxury that this place expresses.
In Leipzig today, you can get vegan food options just about anywhere. Asian fusion restaurants with abundant vegan options have mostly replaced heavy Saxon fare as the regional food. But not so long ago, when vegan food was hard to come by, that restaurant and its cooks were real innovators. They came from the punk community. And until Covid the restaurant always had one menu item, priced cheap for the vegan punks. Now you can get vegan doner, vegan pizza, and all kinds of vegan meat in the supermarket cooler.
Above the two storefronts below are the complex’s largest residential buildings. This complex was initially an electronics factory, although you’d think it had been a printshop because of the old presses lying around. Just to the right of the restaurant an ornate clunky metal gate is almost always open. Through the gate a tall tunnel leads through the front building into that first back courtyard. Passers-by always stop to look at the street art glued onto the walls. On one side you can get a month’s worth of event posters.
Take it With You
Beside an ancient printing machine is a bunch of shelves for neighbors to leave or pick up shirts, pots, bike parts, drums, chairs -- whatever has been left. Here there is a tradition of leaving items in boxes with the tag “zum mitnehmen” – “to take with you”. I think this arrangement came before the more organized and centralized but DIY second-hand depots around Leipzig. But the best of this second-hand stuff is not left here. Many people bring their old stuff into the second courtyard and its free shop.
Zxrx, the concert venue that gives the whole complex its name, is attached to the free shop. The venue is two floors: it shares the basement and ground floor with the free shop and the DIY bike repair shop. Upstairs is a band practice space and a place for travelling bands to stay overnight.
Deployed around the building are a metal workshop, wood workshop, two garden spaces and several other storage sheds that some of the older male punks hanging outside use for ad hoc bike repair and small chores.
The free shop has a website and uses some social media. The concert venue does not. Zxrx has been hosting concerts since the end of the DDR. (It was occupied in late 1990.)
You Had to Be There
Publicity is entirely analog, comes out each month, and features original art. The printshop runs off a folded A3 flyer listing the concerts and the bands playing at Zxrx. There’s always a short text description -- sometimes poetic, sometimes like a little review, sometimes scientific in its music-nerdiness.
The flyer also informs about hours at the free shop and bike repair space, as well as the times for the weekly KüFa’s, or “Küche fur Alle” (Kitchen for All). It lists the other KüFa’s around Leipzig town, cooking at community spaces managed by the city’s vibrant punk and queer scenes. Gigs and events at other spaces throughout the city are also listed. Many of the punk and post-punk clubs are in this neighborhood of Connewitz; many green, left, queer and internationalist spaces are located in other neighborhoods. That said, we mustn’t forget that the first queer punk parties and ladyfests took place at Zxrx.
The flyer advertises spaces outside of the city, in the surrounding former east German state of Saxony, and in Thuringia and Sachsen Anhalt. The club tries to support other punk projects in whatever ways they can. While Connewitz, and Leipzig in general, has a radical left reputation, Saxony and the wider former East is the home to some of the nastiest far right groups in Germany today. Here punk is synonymous with DIY leftist cultural organizing rather than a specific kind of music style.
Connewitz District is Hardcore
Connewitz earned its reputation as a militant leftist center as East Germany collapsed in the transition to a united Germany. The East German government had made efforts to clear the neighborhood just before the wall fell, and a few squatters had already moved in.
[Editor’s Aside: See the OccuProp blog on the “Tutenhaus”, a Berlin squat movement that took place during this same moment of “die Wende” -- "Germany in Autumn #3: The ‘Trout Farm’ and the Free Party Scene in the ‘90s" (2022).]
During the transitional period, the alternative scene in the neighborhood blossomed besides a general period of police violence, right wing threats and euphoric lawlessness. From the punk social centers and on the streets in this period known as the “baseball bat years,” the squatting scene ran Nazis out of town as individuals in the city’s left-friendly government helped normalize the squats and cultural centers. This place was a beneficiary of the anti-fascist successes of the era.
The stubbornly beautiful continuation of the paper flyer reflects the affect of a scene that has had the luxury of time to stew in its own juices. An hour away from cheap 1990’s Berlin, Leipzig didn’t face any real gentrification until after 2010; then the de-population that had hit the city after the de-industrialization of reunification finally reversed. So the scene developed through more than 20 years of low and no rent, through Riotgrrrl and the alter-globalization movement that had scene members traveling through Prague, Genoa, and just traveling as people do. Partying, doing anti-fascist organizing, neighbors met and built resource centers like this one. There is an annual summer festival where friends of the venue come from throughout Europe to party and rekindle social bonds, listen to music, enjoy joke bands, drink, whatever.
The Anti-Deutsch
In dialog with these movements, tensions stemming from the fallout of German reunification came to shape a uniquely German left political tendency; the anti-Deutsch movement. Now far less popular than it used to be, the Connewitz neighborhood is known in the city for being the anti-Deutsch neighborhood. To glimpse at how this odd radically “pro-Israel” leftist faction movement could have emerged, you have to at least appreciate how the community actively fought the far right before the far right also started to visibly parade with Israeli flags. I have little interest in discussing them further in an article about left cultural centers -- except to say that though Zxrx is not an anti-Deutsch space, it expands upon an anti-Deutsch critique about German nationhood to a wider appreciation of the problems inherent to nations and borders. There is a “no flag” policy in the club. [ENDNOTE]
(If you want to learn more about the anti-Deutsch movement, I would suggest listening to this excellent and critical podcast by Emily Dische-Becker “on how Germany became attached to a wildly narcissistic anti-antisemitism and Israeli proxy nationalism that have made it one of the most anti-Palestinian governments on earth.”)
The monthly flyer is passed hand-to-hand by people living in the neighborhood who at least know each other by sight if not by name. While controversies surface online, this is a place far away from the slow and steady personal relations of a venue that does not concern itself with a digital platform. Controversies appearing there about differently held ideologies may only be resporough slow, locally distributed paper flyers. This is an interesting conundrum.
Remarkably, Leipzig has several spaces of left culture. Subcultures map onto neighborhoods that developed during the periods of revitalization. Connewitz embodies the post-DDR alter-globalization era of liberated tech, anarchism and Riotgrrrl. The West of the city through the early 2000s has large city-run sites with a decidedly left-green appeal to meet that generation of newcomers’ cultural and political bent. It served as a city-sponsored model for post-socialist cultural stabilization.
Decadal Changes
The city’s university had begun attracting students, many of them left-leaning. In this moment, the government rushed to facilitate alternative housing models rather than face years of squatter resistance. The East of the city has been the last to develop after the end of the Cold War. When it did, its abandoned housing stock became home to large external migrant communities, and it has some of the most sizable housing projects. Its left face is younger -- very queer friendly, and its politics are the most international, reflecting the overall diversity of the neighborhood.
Still, community spaces there appear to be the most precarious, reflecting the capitalization of real estate and the general rightward trend of state politics. The South has the bulk of the independent and established institutions with real resources – property, experienced staff, solid community support, years of meaningful memories and appreciation. This is because they were established when real estate was not an investment, and the city was emptying.
Zxrx is one image of what community luxury could be. Because real estate is now a thing, there is a real possibility that the younger queer and green left cultures will not be able to establish and hold onto resources in what have become their neighborhoods.
Zxrx and its free shop project is one effort to overcome this style and generational separation. While I associate the green West of Leipzig with electronic and rave, the East with hip hop, and the South with punk and post-punk, the venue plays all kinds of music. But as a good organizer knows, passive participation like attending a concert does not build real community. What does is working together on projects over time.
Why Buy?
I don’t know when Free Shops proliferated here. I can’t help but think of the Digger’s Free Store whenever the name comes up, or Claes Oldenberg’s Store -- both anti-authoritarian responses to consumer society. There are at least three free shops in town. And after working in Zxrx’s “Kijuwe” free shop for several weeks, it feels weird to think about buying clothes ever again. There is just so much of it, floating around for free.
The Kijuwe takes up about three rooms of space, and it’s packed to the gills with donated clothes as well as books, table settings, pots and pans, and weird stuff. The city’s DIY scene has created a list-serve for free items, and sometimes members of the Kijuwe will ping somebody who wants to get rid of 25 old computer monitors, or a bag of hand-knit socks from an over-motivated knitter. Those special items might sit behind the counter, on offer to someone in need. Or to someone who asks, or to volunteers, or friends of friends. Kijuwe organizes with local refugee centers to make large donations of seasonal clothes.
Though the Kijuwe has money from grants, its method is to stick with the volunteer ethic that supported the wider project’s development. That is, it values unpaid and volunteer hours, knowing that collective and free labor creates more solidarity and love between people. Its bonds are stronger. This, of course, from a generation of people and within a neighborhood that is more settled.
The Kijuwe aims to become a center for the commonwealth and skills of the city, generosity, inclusivity, handwork, time. It aims to become a kind of punk degrowth center. Plans are in the works to attach the outdoor refrigerator to the power supply to make a public refrigerator. The city already has a discounted “tafel” where, if you register,you can go and retrieve out-of-date food items. Some of it is great organic bread, cheese, milk. But there is also a network of DIY food sharing pick-up sites where dumpster divers re-distribute their bigger scores. The problem with this more DIY way of food-sharing is that perishables get damaged in the heat. The refrigerator project aims to address that, joining other public refrigerators that developed internationally through the Covid era.
Some Are Seeds
The Kijuwe has a neighborhood seed library. It is tended by an autonomous collective that occasionally meets to organize the library and host seed-sharing events. Seed libraries, for those who don’t know, allow gardeners to take seeds out in spring to plant for the growing season, harvest the produce, and then return new seeds from the years’ planting when ready. The library thus also promotes seed selection to produce more climate- appropriate plant varietals.
The place is pro-repair. It has a free bike-repair shop staffed by people who can help you repair your bike. It has a FLINTA-only repair day (FLINTA is a German acronym for women, lesbians, intersex, non-binary, trans and a-gender people), as well as a day for mixed populations. It also has a clothing repair station with sewing machines and a day when you can come in and mend whatever, also staffed with a knowledgeable volunteer.
Outside, they are installing a small garden and rainwater barrels. What can be grown in the garden that meets the interest of the yard’s frequent users and also pulls in occasional and interested gardeners, and food preservationists, people interested in both freezing, circulating, or fermenting foods.
The kitchen can be used when the free shop is cleared out for events -- a teen art show, a Ukrainian film screening night, an information night around German abortion laws, as a small community theatre space, a place where members of the anarchist women’s soccer team meet.
Who Will Help Out?
All these projects require staffing. The recognition that the Kijuwe could bring in new and diverse populations for something other than music only recently emerged. New procedures, new protocols, new relations, new responsibilities. New ways of connecting out and making and enriching solidarities. New things to do with long days of either nothing to do, or short late afternoons at the end of a tiring workday. There is an upcoming Kijuwe weekend festival with a hip-hop dance workshop, donation-based coffee bar run by an old punk, and various upcycling workshops.
There must be ways to overcome internal, often generational or situational left divisions, in a leftist city sitting within a far right state. The stable situation of the Kijuwe, initiated during an era when real estate was not a commodity, provides its contentious organizers a place to try and overcome tensions. As a social center that is used by a cross-section of society, the Kijuwe can be a resource for collective mediation. As a mirror of communal wealth, the luxury it affords can be of benefit to a wider community.
Afterword:
In light of the ongoing rise of the far right within the state of Saxony and neighboring regions, spaces like Zxrz can continue to expand beyond their punk origins in order to demonstrate ways that open, grassroots and self-organized infrastructure can work. This is based upon their efforts, but dependent upon wider political possibilities that normalize anti-racist and queer friendly sociality that supports us all through the common – also uncommon and extraordinary individual and collective – difficulties of life.
MARC HERBST is an interdisciplinarian, an artist, theorist and editor, whose current work focuses on the relationship between individual nighttime dreams, grassroots culture and fine art in the maw of climate and governmental collapse. His long-term interests circle around ecology and also the relationship between culture and social activity and qualitative political change. He is co-edits the Journal of Aesthetics & Protest
https://joaap.org/
https://marcherbst.wordpress.com/
[ENDNOTE] If you want to learn more about the anti-Deutsch movement, I would suggest listening to this podcast by Emily Dische-Becker “on how Germany became attached to a wildly narcissistic anti-antisemitism and Israeli proxy nationalism that have made it one of the most anti-Palestinian governments on earth.” https://thedigradio.com/podcast/the-german-question-w-emily-dische-becker/
