Raise strike funds for The Berliner's freelancers

We, the freelance contributors to The Berliner, need your support in our fight against our corporate owners’ decision to sell advertisements for Berlin’s edition of the Nova Festival Exhibition. Having fought with management over the last week to try to convince them to pull the advertisements, we are making our objections felt by withholding our work and striking November Issue #245.

We are more than a dozen contributors – culture editors, columnists, contributing writers and illustrators – responsible for all the regular sections, amounting to more than half of the content of Berlin’s only English-language culture and news magazine.

We have been concerned over the past few months about tightening restrictions on our ability to discuss Palestine at all in The Berliner, let alone include pro-Palestine speech. Management’s decision to accept these advertisements demonstrates a further retrenchment of anti-Palestinian sentiment in the ownership. We made several proposals, including offering to provide the money for the ads from our own paychecks, which were all rejected. The message was clear: our corporate ownership wishes to use the blurred line between advertising and editorial at the magazine to endorse the Nova Exhibition, which the Holocaust historian Ben Ratskoff has shown is in the business of instrumentalizing Holocaust memory to rally support for Israel’s destruction of Gaza, not only “justif[ying] a war of annihilation,” but doing so “in language [...] of official war propaganda.”

We are continuing to push for a resolution, but the decision to go on strike means that we have foregone our pay for the November issue. While this is an important sacrifice in order to make our voices heard, many of us rely on that income. No one deserves to face financial hardship for taking action with their coworkers. Your donations will help us win this fight.

Striking Berliner freelancers will be able to request funds, which will be distributed through a shared account. If we do not need all the funds raised, we will donate the extra money. This fundraiser and strike does not apply to the full-time editors who are part of the office staff.