01/08/2026 10:57 - Internacionales
Published: Saturday, August 1, 2026. Source: The Guardian
The currents of history sometimes converge in a single point. In Berlin, one of the most intriguing places is a small traffic island in the Kreuzberg district, where a peculiar two-story wooden structure known as the Treehouse on the Wall stands. Today, a group of supporters fears that municipal authorities will demolish it for being a public safety risk, but they are fighting to turn it into a memorial honoring its creator, Turkish worker Osman Kalin.
In 1983, Osman Kalin, born in Anatolia in 1925 and arrived in West Germany in the late 1960s as labor, was looking for a small plot to plant onions, garlic, and cucumbers. In his own neighborhood, divided by the Berlin Wall, he found a triangle of no-man's land next to the concrete barrier and barbed wire. Although it was in West Berlin, by the logic of the Cold War, the land officially belonged to communist East Germany.
With great audacity, Kalin built a structure adjacent to the wall, patrolled by soldiers with shoot-to-kill orders. Eventually, against all odds, he obtained permission from East German authorities to stay, with the sole condition that whatever he built could not be taller than the wall. After reunification in 1990, Kalin faced eviction orders but found an unexpected ally in the neighboring St. Thomas Church, which provided 18th-century documents proving its ownership of the land.
Kalin was part of the first generation of so-called Gastarbeiter (guest workers), a problematic term that designated foreign workers who were only supposed to work in Germany for a short time. According to the portal DOMiD, West Germany began recruiting workers from Mediterranean countries in 1955, signing an agreement with Turkey in 1961. Under this program, about 14 million workers arrived in the country between 1955 and 1973, undergoing strict health checks.
Although the plan was temporary, many stayed. Today, nearly 3 million people of Turkish origin live in Germany, 200,000 of them in Berlin. After Kalin's death in 2018, his son Mehmet has maintained the property and his father's legacy.
Suat Özkan, secretary general of a Turkish community group, and district councilor Florian Schmidt are working together to obtain the necessary permits to guarantee the treehouse's permanence. For many, like historian Stefan Zeppenfeld, this building is one of the few tangible legacies showing the agency of Turkish workers as a real part of the urban landscape, a symbol of resistance, community spirit, and multiculturalism that lights up the heart of Berlin.
Alfredo S. Quiroga
