A planned swimming session reserved for members of Berlin’s Black community has been cancelled after organisers said they could no longer guarantee the safety of participants amid threats and what they described as racist agitation.
The event, scheduled for the afternoon of August 14 at the temporary Volksbad swimming pool outside Berlin’s Volksbühne theatre, was organised in cooperation with Each One Teach One (EOTO), a publicly funded NGO that runs programmes for people of African origin from its base in the African Quarter of Wedding, northern Berlin.
EOTO and the Volksbühne said they could not guarantee the safe arrival and departure of registered participants or a relaxed afternoon at the pool.
The cancellation comes days after the event attracted national attention, the Volksbühne having originally advertised a six-hour slot from 12 noon to 6pm on August 14 as being exclusively open to Berlin’s Black communities.
The temporary pool, which opened on August 7 and is due to remain in place until early October, is normally free and open to the public. On some days, though, parts of its opening hours are reserved for particular organisations.
The 25m-long, 1.3m-deep pool stands on Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz in central Berlin and cost about €300,000, drawn from public funds, according to German media reports.
Slots have also been set aside for the street social work charity Gangway and for Flussbad Berlin, which campaigns against the blanket ban on swimming in the river Spree.
The planned EOTO session became the subject of criticism from conservative politicians and media outlets, with opponents arguing that excluding people on the basis of skin colour amounted to racial discrimination.
Alice Weidel, co-leader of the Alternative for Germany (AfD), described the arrangement as “apartheid”.
Aileen Weibeler, a Christian Democratic Union (CDU) district councillor in Pankow, northeast Berlin, posted a video on Instagram saying she could not use the pool because she was white and that the experience felt discriminatory.
Stefan Evers, Berlin’s finance and culture senator and the CDU lead candidate for the September 20 city election, told Bild he saw no merit in sorting people by skin colour.
Christoph Meyer, who heads the Free Democratic Party (FDP) list in the city, said a Volksbad that divided people by colour made a nonsense of its own name.
The Volksbühne has defended the concept as a measure intended to provide protected spaces for groups that experience discrimination.
Its artistic director, Matthias Lilienthal, previously said the theatre was seeking to follow Berlin’s State anti-discrimination law by providing groups affected by discrimination with spaces in which they could move freely without experiencing discrimination.
He told Tagesspiegel the format complied with the binding rules of that law and had been welcomed by the Berlin Senate’s anti-discrimination ombudsman office.
EOTO said it had received racist threatening emails, threats of violence and discriminatory comments on social media since the public debate over the event began.
The organisation said it could not rule out that the children and young people taking part would be exposed to further danger.
Likewise, the Volksbühne said the swimming session for Black children and young people had become the target of a nationwide wave of “right-wing and racist agitation”.
Following the criticism on the alleged racism, the description of the event was changed to identify the period as being reserved for EOTO, a registered organisation.
The Volksbühne has stood by its broader policy of offering special sessions to groups it considers structurally disadvantaged.
Lilienthal said the theatre would continue to offer such measures and maintain its cooperation with EOTO, while stressing that the protection of guests, partners and employees had to take priority. A replacement session is to be arranged at a later date.
The cancellation does not mean the temporary swimming pool itself has been permanently closed. The Volksbad had also been shut since August 11 because of technical problems with its showers, although the theatre planned to resume swimming on August 14.
The pool was not due to open during the six hours originally set aside for EOTO. A Volksbühne spokeswoman said on August 13 that it remained unclear whether public swimming from 6pm would go ahead as scheduled.
