A police investigator checks a burned-out car in Hamburg, one of six set ablaze on March 15
When Sven left his Berlin apartment one cold December morning to go to work, he got a nasty surprise: his gleaming white Audi was nowhere to be found. Sven, who declined to give his last name, looked up and down his leafy street in the trendy Prenzlauer Berg district, but it had vanished. Just then, a neighbor shouted from her balcony that she'd seen the car ablaze in the middle of the night. Burned beyond recognition, the car was removed by the fire brigade after neighbors alerted police.
Sven's Audi was the latest victim in a spate of car burnings in the German capital. Police have blamed the vandalism on far-left militants who are waging an increasingly violent campaign against the wealthy Germans they see as being the cause of the recent gentrification of Berlin. According to police, the number of cars set on fire in the city reached a record high of 270 in 2009. The Interior Ministry released figures last month showing that crimes committed by left-wing extremists jumped almost 40% last year — and violent offenses were up 53%. "These far-left militants are becoming more dangerous," says Rainer Wendt, head of Germany's police union. "They're terrorizing neighborhoods by burning cars or assaulting policemen."
Intelligence agencies estimate that there are some 6,300 extreme left-wing militants in the country who are bent on violence. Although they've been dubbed "far-left radicals" by police, experts say they have little in common with the leftist student protesters who agitated against the government in the 1960s, apart from their commitment to violence and their targets — symbols of capitalism. "Back in the late 1960s and early '70s, the protesters had a distinct left-wing ideology. The majority were Marxists who dreamed of revolution, and they wanted change," Christian Pfeiffer, the head of the Hanover-based Lower Saxony Institute of Criminology, tells TIME. Today's far-left radicals are a motley bunch of anarchists, antiglobalization activists, peace campaigners, antinuclear protesters and disillusioned youths who defy easy categorization. "They have no clear political aims, and they don't adhere to any particular left-wing ideology," says Pfeiffer. "They feel they haven't achieved their goals. They're very disappointed and angry, and they have nothing to lose."
Experts say the protesters see themselves as locked in a losing Manichaean struggle with authoritative symbols of the state, like police officers, as well as the rich, whose luxury BMW, Porsche and Audi cars represent a blatant affront to disillusioned Germans. Major German cities like Berlin and Hamburg, which have undergone rapid social and political transformations in the past two decades, are perfect breeding grounds for this type of dissent. "These protesters have zeroed in on gentrified neighborhoods in large cities" where there's a widening gap between the rich and poor, says Michael Kohlstruck, a political scientist at Berlin's Technical University.
Over the past few years, these groups have also become increasingly violent, venting their anger, for instance, at the 2007 G-8 summit in the German seaside resort of Heiligendamm and during the traditional workers' holiday of May Day. During last year's May Day demonstrations, scores of people chanting anticapitalist slogans threw bottles and stones at police and set cars and Dumpsters on fire in the capital. Nearly 50 police officers were injured in the chaos.
Police forces, already grappling with a recent spike in far-right neo-Nazi violence, are now struggling to cope with this growing wave of attacks from the left. Budget cuts aren't helping matters: Germany's 260,000-strong force is set to be reduced by 10,000 officers over the next five years. "We need more civilian officers patrolling the streets and tougher penalties for anyone who attacks a policeman," Wendt says. Until now, far-left attacks have generally been isolated incidents committed by anarchist groups lacking structure and organization. But officials fear this could change with time, and they'll be faced with more mayhem — and more burned cars — as coffee shops, boutique hotels and chic restaurants continue to pop up in Germany's newly hip capital.