‘Görli is our garden’: Berliners fight to stop mayor locking their park at night

T he “hollow” in Görlitzer Park was heaving with revellers who had gathered in reaction to a court ruling against Berlin’s mayor who wanted to lock it up at night. “Görli is our garden,” said Monika, a retired psychiatric nurse who lives nearby and had joined the crowds on Monday night for a beer and a bop on the popular deep bowl-shaped meadow in the Kreuzberg district. “Görli is where we socialise and where my daughter grew up,” she said, using the affectionate nickname for the centrally located green space covering 14 hectares (35 acres). A decades-long on-off row about the park’s patrons and its role in Berlin’s daily life resurfaced earlier this year when the state government voted to seal it with a perimeter fence overnight in order to squeeze out the drug dealers and addicts who proliferate there. Judith, left, and Monika, who says Görlitzer Park is where she and her neighbours socialise. Photograph: Kate Connolly “We must, in the literal sense, take back control of Görlitzer Park,” the mayor, Kai Wegner, declared in 2023 after a “security summit”. After much deliberation, a metal fence with 16 gates, installed at a cost of about €2m (£1.7m), became operational on 1 March. After the ruling on Monday, the fence has stayed up but the gates have remained open 24/7. Few deny the problems attached to drug dealing – families report finding syringes and human faeces in playground sandpits and women say they have been abused. …