BERLIN, Warschauer Straße. December 13, 2022: morning

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“Are you Damien Vogel?” the tallest of the two burly policemen asks in a booming voice. He glares down at Damien with surly eyes through the open doorway. The question seems rhetorical because the moment the policeman speaks, both cops barge inside, knocking Damien aside, before he has a chance to answer.

“What do you want?” he demands as they stomp inside his studio apartment like two rhinos. Neither responds. Why is his heart pounding? Both cops are large men with crew cuts and stubby facial hair. They’re dressed in black uniforms with “Polizei” branded on their backs and pistols strapped to their hips. The tallest one, easily seven feet tall—Damien himself is well over six feet tall—has tiny features embedded in a massive round face. Full mouth, pert nose and close-set eyes lose themselves in a rosy but cruel face. The other cop has a longer roughly chiselled face with hawkish eyes, slender roman nose and stern thin-lipped mouth. Both are burly behemoths and built like sumo wrestlers.

They don’t seem interested in interacting with him or questioning him; instead, they move about the place, critical eyes assessing. Despite their desultory treatment of his things, it is obvious to him that they are looking for specific things. The tall one leans over Damien’s coffee table and carelessly goes through his pile of newspapers and magazines. Several issues of taz, the latest issue of Der Spiegel and Die Zeit lie on the table. He picks up Damien’s copy of right-wing newspaper Bild and raises his brows with an oily smirk at the long-faced cop. Both snigger. After the cop flips through each magazine or paper, he tosses them recklessly on the floor. 

“What are you doing?” Damien demands. “You can’t do this.”

The tall cop ignores Damien and continues rifling through his papers. The long-faced cop answers, “Yes, we can. By order of the public prosecutor Cyrill Klement in the prosecutor’s office in Neuruppin: you’re under suspicion of disrupting public order and forming a criminal organization.”

He is obviously referring to the climate activist group Damien joined a few months ago: Letzte Generation. His last stunt of civil disobedience with them gained a lot of attention: gluing himself to the pavement of a busy street. When they scraped his bleeding hand off the pavement, Damien thought he was going to jail like his compatriots did in Bavaria. But all he got was a stiff reprimand by the officer on duty once he’d surrendered his name and official ID.

“That’s ridiculous,” Damien says, trailing after the cops who enter his bedroom. “I know my rights. Even disruptive forms of protest are protected by the fundamental right to freedom of assembly.”

Both cops smirk and continue their search with renewed vigor. Damien feels his heart race with fear as the tall cop fingers the papers on his oak desk. The policeman picks up a loose scrap of paper with Damien’s handwritten notes and reads aloud in a baritone voice: At the surface tension of history’s flow, where the delicate balance of the forces of stability and instability lie, life blossoms. The disorderly behavior of simple systems acts as a creative process, generating complexity. Beneath the turbulent waves of disorder lies a destiny worth mastering. He snorts and says sarcastically, “What is this? A novel about the revolution, perhaps?”

Close, thinks Damien. They are notes for a book he’s begun, a scientific treatise on the role of creative destruction in evolution. Revolution would metaphorically figure into that process.

The cop sneers and crumples the paper in his huge fist. Then, using his sausage finger and thumb, he flicks it across the room. The ball of paper sails in a wide arc, past Damien’s head, and bounces on the floor like a piece of trash. “There’s your revolution.” He grins then snorts out a churlish laugh.

Damien flinches at a crash behind him and spins around to see that the long-faced cop has purposefully knocked down from his high dresser the metre-high potted Christmas tree he’d just bought. The clay pot lies smashed with spilled dirt on the floor. The long-faced cop grins at him like a wolverine then rifles through Damien’s wardrobe, carelessly dropping clothes onto the floor after frisking each. Damien’s entire body begins to tremble uncontrollably. He remembers hiding two data drives filled with precious notes in his dresser drawer.

He thinks of the sit-in days of Heinrich Böll, Günter Grass, Walter Jens, Helmut Gollwitzer and Otto Schily. Back in the 1980s, they protested nuclear rearmament with no repercussions. That was fifty years ago; things have changed in Germany since then. Like the reunification and the violent protests against immigration. The open racism and anti-Semitism. The rise in neo-fascist protests. The backlash against human rights and increase in police brutality. Last month, Bavarian police—using the Police Powers Act—put twelve Letzte Generation climate activists in jail for gluing themselves to the Stachus and obstructing traffic for an hour. Under Bavarian law, preventive detention doesn’t require concrete suspicion of a crime or a court order for the first thirty days; anyone can be detained in jail without recourse.

Liebender Gott, we’re heading for a police state in Germany.

Things are changing everywhere. In Australia, just eleven days ago, new draconian anti-protest laws put climate activist Deanna Coco in jail for fifteen months with no bail for briefly blocking traffic to protest her government’s failure to act on climate change. All over the world, governments are suppressing opposition to their pro-business agenda in favour of the corporate elite with laws that protect fossil fuel super-profiteers. Unfortunately, police violence has become part of it.

“We’re taking this,” the tall cop says, seizing Damien’s laptop from his oak desk.

“You can’t! That’s mine!” Damien grabs for his laptop. “It has my master’s thesis in it and the research paper I’m—”

The tall cop strikes him hard on the face, hurling him backward. He falls painfully on his rump to the floor. His ears ring and he feels the stinging bite of the blow on his cheek. Fear roils in his gut and settles against his chest like a heavy iron fist.

“We’re confiscating it by order of the public prosecutor,” the tall cop booms. “Now, give us your phone.” He holds out his hand and impatiently flicks his thick sausage fingers at Damien. Close-set eyes burn into him with an insane fire. Trembling on the floor, Damien reaches into his pocket with a shaky hand and surrenders his phone. The cop snatches the phone from him and pockets it.

I’m not a fighter, Damien thinks, feeling the tendrils of powerlessness pull at his gut. He’s more of an intellectual with a philosopher’s build. Tall and lanky. Not a runner like his twin brother, Eric. He feels useless. How can he stop these two monsters who are stripping him of his scholarly existence? Eric would fight back.

Damien struggles to his feet and mutely watches the two policemen trash the rest of his apartment. They find and pocket his two flash drives hidden with his underwear. The drives have information on his scientific research. Damien sighs and sees his academic life flash before his eyes. Years of tireless research are about to walk out that door. He knows he’ll never see his computer and drives again. Or if he does, they’ll be erased or heavily tampered with.

But the cops aren’t done. The long-faced cop pulls a book from the bookshelf above his desk, obviously intending to confiscate. Damien recognizes Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. The book he’s carried with him everywhere he went since his mother gave it to him for his sixth birthday. The cop flips through the book, noting the copious portions Damien has highlighted. Then he opens to the front page and carelessly reads aloud the inscription in the open handwriting of Damien’s mother: Je klarer wir unsere Aufmerksamkeit auf die Wunder und Realitäten des Universums um uns herum richten können, desto weniger Geschmack werden wir an der Zerstörung haben. Liebe, Mutti.

“NO!” Damien wails. Forgetting his fear, he lunges for the book. “Please! You can’t take—”

A great maw slams into the side of his face from nowhere. He sees lights and teeters in a spiral like a felled tree then finds himself sprawled on the floor with his knees on fire. He must have briefly blacked out. Tears spill out of his eyes from the intense pain and he feels his breakfast clawing its way up and burning his throat in a hot wave of nausea. A sudden warmth between his legs alerts him that he’s wet his pants.

“And stay down,” the tall cop commands in a calm voice of quiet menace, standing over Damien like a vulture.

 The long-faced cop wags the book in front of him. “In a better world, this trash would be burned,” he snarls and tucks the book inside his satchel. He turns back to the desk and focuses on a poster pasted on the wall above the bookshelf. The poster lists the eight principles of deep ecology created by George Sessions and Arne Naess in 1984. Long face sneering in a mean smile, the cop reaches over the desk and with a sweeping flourish of violence rips the poster off the wall. It screams off the wall as he pulls it down and tears it to shreds. The pieces flutter to the floor like leaves in the dead of autumn.

Shivering uncontrollably on the floor, Damien finds himself focusing on the policeman’s hip where a 9mm Luger sits tucked in its holster. Damien can’t shake an awful feeling: that these two are more than just mean cops. What if they are also Reichsbürgerterrorists?

Experts have been warning for years of ultra-right-wing networks in German security agencies and the armed forces. Just days ago, authorities raided the right-wing terrorist network Reich Citizens’ Movement—Reichsbürgerbewegung—for conspiring to storm the Bundestag, attack the German power grid, and overthrow the German government. The raid confirmed ties to Germany’s military special forces unit, the Kommando Spezialkräfte. If elite soldiers of the KSK were identified as far-right Reichsbürgerterrorists, why not the local police force? Both are conservative and enforce a hierarchical order; “blind in its right-eye,” says Nathaniel Flakin of Red Flag. Authorities have already identified several Bavarian police officers as disciples of that movement and they found neo-Nazi and anti-Semitic ties to police departments in other parts of Germany. There is no doubt in Damien’s mind that the Berlin police harbour radical far-right types. Are two in his apartment this moment?

Damien begins to shake. The long-faced cop points to Damien’s wet crotch. “Wahrscheinlich hat er als kind ins Bett gemacht!” he chortles. They both laugh loudly.

The cops finally leave, slamming the door behind them. Damien hears their churlish laughter echo in the hallway as their heavy footsteps fade. He stays where they’ve left him in the silence, only hearing his beating heart. He can’t stop shaking. A long time passes before he gingerly gets back to his feet and glances down at his wet crotch. As he pulls out a Vita Cola from the kitchen fridge and gently rolls the cold wet bottle over his burning cheek and temple, he considers himself lucky today. If these cops are Reichsbürgerterrorists, he is lucky he can still stand.