Shall We Stay or Shall We Go?

I. Born somewhere else

Let me start with a reminder, not a confession – everybody knows it anyway. I’m not from here. I speak German, I’m integrated up to my ears, and some people already call me a proper Berliner. But I can’t vote in this city. No citizenship – because to get one, you have to live without welfare support, and I still need it. So the city that lives from our work doesn’t let us choose who cuts its budget. And most people who make this city interesting aren’t from here either.

I was born in Leningrad in 1985 – a city that changed its name before I learned to spell it properly. Vladimir Nabokov was born there too – on the 22nd of April, same as me. Then in 1922 he ended up in Berlin, like thousands of Russians running from a regime that had no place for them, and he stayed fifteen years. I live here since December 2017. Almost nine years. So I’m catching up, I guess.

The last song I wrote in Russia was called “I’m A Mushroom”. The one before that was “Mother Russia” – an anti-Putin anthem, written by a queer artist in Petersburg. You can draw your own conclusions.

Berlin has done this for a hundred years. It catches the people who don’t fit anywhere else.

In 1919 Magnus Hirschfeld opened his Institut für Sexualwissenschaft here – the first institute of its kind in the world. Same year, Anders als die Andern premiered in a Berlin cinema, probably the first feature film ever made about a gay man. Hirschfeld played himself in it. During the Weimar years nearly 200 queer bars and clubs came and went, and in the most famous one, the Eldorado, the whole room sang the Lila Lied: wir sind nun einmal anders als die Anderen. We are just different from the others.

Then 1933 happened. On the 6th of May Nazi students looted Hirschfeld’s library, and four days later they burned it on Opernplatz, together with a bust of the man himself. Hirschfeld died in exile in France. Kurt Weill – a Jewish boy from Dessau who gave Berlin The Threepenny Opera – fled to Paris, then New York, and never came back. Berlin’s misfits became somebody else’s genius. Every time.

And still the city grows them back. Like weeds. Like mushrooms (I told you).

In 1971 Rosa von Praunheim showed his furious film “It Is Not the Homosexual Who Is Perverse, But the Society in Which He Lives” at the Berlinale and accidentally started the gay liberation movement in West Germany. In East Berlin, the first and only GDR film about a gay man, Coming Out, premiered on the 9th of November 1989. Nobody noticed. Because, well – the Wall fell that same night. A men-only fetish party called Snax grew into Ostgut and then into Berghain, the most famous club on the planet. Queer culture didn’t decorate Berlin – it built half of it.

Why does this matter so much for people like me? Because for many of us there is no “back home”. In 2023 Russia declared the “international LGBT movement” extremist. Where I come from, you cannot be queer on stage, and soon you cannot be queer anywhere at all. So when somebody says – oh, artists will just move somewhere cheaper and safer – I want to ask: move WHERE, darling? Nabokov could still run from Berlin to America in 1940. Today the US is sliding into its own fascism. The map of safe places is getting smaller.

This city let me be two things at once. Queer and loud. That’s rarer than you think.

So yes. This is my story too.

II. Small money

Nobody gets rich here. Let’s get that out of the way.

But look closer at one night. In September 2024 I played Kantine am Berghain – first full-band show after eight years. July Space made the posters. LoboLoto, Nansea, Sicut Dico and Anti Shanti performed with us. We sold every ticket ourselves and paid rent to Berghain. Yes – the most famous club on the planet got our money, not the other way round. Every euro from that night passed through ten hands before it left the neighbourhood.

Now multiply this by every basement, every bar with a tiny stage, every collective throwing a party in a borrowed room. Every week. For thirty years.

That’s the Berlin economy nobody puts on a postcard.

We pay each other. I book a friend for a DJ set, she buys a ticket for my show, a third friend shoots the video for both of us, and somebody from Kyiv runs our socials for a fair price. When Patreon stopped making sense for me, I built my own platform – Mycelium – with tiers starting at €2.99. Small? Very. My single “Child Song” in 2021 was paid fully by those small people with their small money. THAT is how it works.

There’s a reason I named my label after a fungus, by the way. Mycelium is invisible. It runs under the whole forest, moves food from tree to tree, and nobody thanks it. Then you cut it (figuratively speaking) – and the forest starts dying, and everybody is very surprised.

Here are some numbers for the people who only believe numbers. In 2026 the Clubcommission surveyed Berlin’s clubs and collectives: 45% of them earn less than €100,000 a year. That’s what “small” looks like. And yet the cultural and creative industries in this city produce €12-15 billion in gross value added every year – more than traditional industry. Small adds up, as it always did.

The Clubcommission also asked people who moved here why they came. All of them named club culture as an important reason. So the tech bros with their startups, the tourists with their easyJet weekends, the investors buying our old squats – they came for the thing WE made. For free, mostly.

You’re welcome. (Irony or sarcasm? You decide…)

III. Shall we stay or shall we go?

So what does Berlin want from us now? Honest question.

Because the signals are, let’s say, mixed. In 2025 the Senate cut €130 million from the culture budget. For 2026/27 culture fell below 2% of the city’s budget for the first time in years – while the total budget GREW to €44 billion. Funding for art in public space was cut by 66%. Diversity programmes were simply deleted. Only 61% of clubs still break even. And on the 1st of November 2025 SchwuZ closed – Germany’s oldest queer club, open since 1977, the place that helped give this city its Pride parade. Almost fifty years, gone in one insolvency hearing.

In 2003 Klaus Wowereit told a business magazine (isn’t THAT ironic?) that Berlin was arm, aber sexy. Poor, but sexy. Nobody wrote that slogan for him – it just came out of his mouth, and the whole world repeated it. Twenty years later the Institut der deutschen Wirtschaft says the “poor” part isn’t true anymore. Berlin got richer.

Just not us.

Before I get angry, let me say this clearly. I’m grateful. Germany gave me asylum when I needed it, I made new wonderful friends here, and this city gave me a stage. Danke. I mean it.

But I’ve seen this film before. Petersburg was a city of artists and queers too. I watched the small bad signs pile up there – a new legislation, one closed venue, one cut budget, one “temporary” rule at a time – until one day there was no air left. I see some of the same signs here now. So if what comes next sounds angry, know that it comes from care. You don’t shout at a place you don’t love.

And it’s not only money. In September the AfD got 16.3% in Berlin. In the city of Hirschfeld. Nationally they came second in the 2025 federal election, with 20.8% – double their 2021 result. In my circles – queer, migrant, usually both at once – you can feel the panic. People checking passports, counting savings (if any at all), asking each other: if it gets worse, where do we go this time?

And here’s the part that makes me really angry. What happens to an artist in Germany when the gigs dry up and the grants are gone? Jobcenter. Since July 2026 the Bürgergeld is called Grundsicherungsgeld, and the new rules are very clear about what they want from you: take work that ends your need for help – in practice, a full-time job. If you’re self-employed, after one year they check whether “another activity” would be reasonable for you.

Translation: stop being an artist.

I don’t think anyone in Bundestag sat down and said – let’s kill the artists. But the logic of the system is anti-artistic by design. It sees my work as a problem to be fixed, not as work. A song that takes eight months? Not a job. A show that pays a few hundred euros and keeps four other people working that night? Not a job. Twenty-three years on stage (I count from 2003)? Hm. Not a job.

Meanwhile, Ireland. Since 2022 Ireland ran a pilot paying artists a basic income of €325 a week. People in the pilot spent more time making art, were less stressed about money and felt better mentally. Shocking, I know. Now Ireland made it permanent – 2,000 artists, three-year cycles. Their culture minister called it “the envy of the world”. Gosh, he’s right. I’m envious.

So here’s my proposal, dear future coalition (yes, you, still sounding each other out): a basic income for working artists in Berlin. Not charity or a grant you spend three weeks writing applications for and then wait half a year. (I know. I wrote around twenty of those for my new album. Nineteen rejection letters, one yes. I finished it anyway – thanks to crowdfunding and skipping meals. Romantic, right? No.) A safety net – a minimum income you can count on every month, so we can keep the mycelium alive while the city decides what it wants to be when it grows up.

The whole of Ireland put about €18 million into it for 2026 – for 2,000 artists across the country. Now compare that with what artists give back in just one city: Berlin’s cultural and creative industries alone produce €12 to 15 billion a year. Remember why the tourists come. Remember who built the clubs your city marketing loves to post about.

Shall we stay or shall we go?

I don’t have an answer yet. But I know what art did for me.

I came here with all I could carry, my past life packed into a few suitcases. And I’m not special – you see it in every tiny basement and on every dancefloor in this city. People come in broken and leave a little less broken. Even the researchers say it now: culture is good for your health (sounds like a topic for research, note it, scientists – oh wait, they did).

And healed people don’t just sit there. They work, they love, they pay rent, they start bands and collectives and labels, they buy tickets for each other’s shows. Healing is an economy too. Maybe the cheapest healthcare this city has.

Universe, help us all.

Be sound, be brave,
Gene Sophia xx
Berlin, 19th of October 2026

PS: if you’re a misfit who came here to finally breathe – stay loud. They need us more than they know.