Harry Stopes

The elections held in September 2021 for the Berlin Abgeordnetenhaus, the state parliament, were marred by administrative problems at nearly a tenth of polling stations. There were shortages of ballot papers, unusually long queues to vote and ballots delivered to the wrong locations. Some voters were turned away, or offered only ballot papers for the federal elections taking place the same day (in which Olaf Scholz was elected as chancellor). After a long investigation, the state constitutional court ruled last November that the state election would have to be repeated. The date was set for 12 February.

The arrests of the so-called ‘Reichsbürger’ plotters highlights the serious and longstanding problem of organised and committed far-right activists in the German police and security services. But the country has also been slow to acknowledge more mundane, everyday forms of police racism. It is still unclear why Dortmund police shot and killed Mouhamed D., a 16-year-old asylum seeker from Senegal who was experiencing a mental health crisis in August this year. Two officers were recently charged over the death of a mentally ill man in Mannheim in May.

A scare story in Bild about poor people overrunning exclusive holiday destinations such as the North Sea island of Sylt ended up being a self-fulfilling prophecy. The Hamburg punk band Trümmer Youth released ‘Chaostage auf Sylt’ (‘Down with the bourgeoisie/On Sylt now anarchy rules/Off to the chaos days on Sylt’).

On 24 April 1932 around three hundred ramblers, mostly from Manchester, took part in a mass trespass of private land at Kinder Scout in the Peak District, organised by the British Workers’ Sports Federation (a Communist Party affiliate). ‘Weekends are all that the majority of working lads and girls have to look forward to and live for,’ the Manchester secretary of the BWSF, Bernard Rothman, wrote in the Worker Sportsman a few weeks before. ‘In winter it is [football], but in summer we all go Open Air Mad.’

The plague first came to Marseille on a ship from Spain in 588, forty-seven years after the disease’s appearance in the Eastern Mediterranean marked the beginning of the first pandemic.