By Carla-Isabella Dunger
Once a year, Hamburg’s streets turn into a massive, politically charged rave. Trucks stacked with sound systems roll through the city with thousands of people dancing with them. Banners carry demands aimed at city leaders. The person who organises all this with the necessary authorities is Axelander Strauss.
Strauss is an activist who is watched by authorities, so he does not give clear photos of his face to the press, and this is not his real name; he has a day job outside of this work.
Strauss co-founded Reclaim Hamburg, the alliance behind the annual Großdemo, now better known as DEMORAVE. This year, it takes place on August 29th under the motto “alles Gute kommt von unten” (“everything good comes from below”).
I meet Axelander a few weeks before the big event. Halfway through our conversation, his phone rings. He looks at the screen and laughs: “Ah, it’s one of the cops!” he says. “This one is very dedicated. He calls me every single day.”
How did DEMORAVE begin?
Before DEMORAVE, there was DANS, a techno and art collective. “It started after Corona,” Strauss says. “We were just a few friends who wanted to have a good party once you could meet in bigger groups again. We thought about how there are no cool open-airs happening now, so let’s throw one ourselves.”
The circle of friends grew into a collective of about forty people. They organised summer open-airs before moving into clubs in winter, eventually running a monthly party at the Gängeviertel, a cluster of old houses in the city centre that artists occupied in 2009 to save from demolition; it’s now one of Hamburg’s last self-organised cultural spaces.
The parties quickly ran into legal resistance. Axelander Strauss tells me that spontaneous open-airs are structurally almost impossible to organise in the city.
He doesn’t need to explain why: I know the answer from my own work in Hamburg nightlife. There are barely any legal spaces where spontaneous open-airs can happen, and there’s little interest from the city in making them possible, especially when they also involve political demonstrations. So if people organise them anyway, they’re often shut down quickly by the authorities.
At the same time, the city’s permanent cultural venues keep disappearing. The controversial reconstruction of the Sternbrücke, a famous bridge in Hamburg, has forced iconic venues located beneath and around it, like Fundbureau, Waagenbau, and Astra Stube, to relocate or close.
“When we noticed that certain structures in the city just weren’t working, that we couldn’t do our work, our passion, throwing open-airs, because there was always something blocking the way, we thought: Do we leave things like this, or do we do something about it?”
“Then I had a ridiculous idea: let’s do a demo-rave and take what we wanted to do anyway into the streets. From there, it became something activist and political pretty fast.”
Do you believe all nightlife is political?
Yes, he does.
“An open-air is already political in itself, if you’re breaking the frame, doing something outside of registered events, something not strictly legal. Doing it for the culture.”
House and techno, he says, came out of marginalised communities and the spaces where this music grew in have never stopped being political spaces.
“Club culture is traditionally very political. These places came into being because marginalised people had to band together.”
“Especially coming out of the fascist history, if we’re talking about Germany, activists have always used club spaces to organise,” he says. “You might not see this so much from outside, but a club is, in the end, always a social centre.”
Hamburg is rapidly losing these spaces. This is why the mission, now, is much bigger than the freedom to hold open-airs.
“When we talk about non-commercial open-air events, what we’re addressing at the core is displacement. When we talk about displacement, we’re talking about people who have power and people who don’t, people who are marginalised. To say that some people need legal permission to gather in public creates a class distinction between those the state allows to gather and those the state forbids. This is why we are there for everyone who’s oppressed, and we want to be in solidarity with them, even when that oppression doesn’t seem directly related to club culture.”
How has your work evolved since the beginning?
The first one happened in the summer of 2023 with the goal of winning the freedom to have non-commercial, spontaneous open-air parties in the city.
“The first time, we were so careful. We’d all been to demos but never organised one ourselves,” Strauss says. “There were maybe 150 people. The second time, we did it with seven collectives and seven trucks, and suddenly it was over a thousand people. That was really a jump.”
Today, the alliance counts around 45 collectives. This happened because Axelander Strauss worked to develop a network that shares equipment, experience, and legal know-how across groups. When urgent political events happen, the network can mobilise “within hours.”
“When something happens, like Alice Weidel suddenly showing up at the town hall, we can organise a reaction demo,” he says. This is in reference to the far-right AfD leader’s visit to Hamburg’s Rathaus in January 2025, which drew mass protest.
“We sound the alarm in the group, then register the demo with authorities. It all moves super fast.”
He feels now this work is just as much about sharing information and inspiring other collectives as it is about organising events.
“In the best case scenario, we connect people. We tell them: if you’ve never done this, here’s a list of resources, you can manage it with this list. And here are the political groups that need help.”
“Electronic music collectives do one thing brilliantly: they provide great tech. Political groups usually have less to do with that. It’s a match made in heaven when we can connect them.”
This year, the network helped organise demos protesting for safe abortion, for trans rights, and against racism.
What does it take to make the DEMORAVE happen?
It takes all year, he says. Every winter, the alliance is rebuilt from scratch. There is a first, big meeting where new collectives learn what it means to take part in the event.
“They learn that it’s political, they learn what our mission is, and that it isn’t just a party on the street,” Axelander Strauss tells me.
Then it’s a year of meeting and planning sessions. “We check the big decisions back with the full alliance, so that we legitimise ourselves, and so the hierarchy doesn’t take over too much.”
Then there’s a lot of dealing with the authorities, the daily calls from cops, or “desk cops,” as Axelander Strauss calls them: the officers who process the paperwork, who are “differently wired from the cops carrying it out on the street.”
With a marching route that runs 6 kilometres through half of Hamburg, there are many permissions to get. “We talk through every single street,” he says.
“I keep checking back with Deutsche Bahn, with the city, with law enforcement, and so on, to make sure things will work.”
This year, the thing the DEMORAVE is primarily protesting is, interestingly, the very thing that stands in the way of it happening: the Sternbrücke construction site has narrowed the surrounding streets, so trucks can’t pass.
“So now we’re looking at alternative routes. How can we go around it and still stay inside the city centre?” The hope, Axelander Strauss says, is to end with all the trucks rolling into a park for the closing rally. “That would be so nice!”
Have these events led to real change?
“At the beginning, the city was annoyed that we wanted to do this at all, like we were rebuilding something like G-Move back in the day,” Axelander Strauss says, referring to Generation Move, the Loveparade-style procession that ran through Hamburg from 1995 to 2004. “I don’t think the city was into that vibe.”
Size changed things: press coverage, thousands of people converging on the street, and public pressure became things the city could no longer ignore.
“The bigger you get, the more interest the city has in you. Since last year, I’ve noticed the city actually pushing for us to keep it up. With time, I’ve noticed now they make suggestions about which streets we should take.”
At some point, he says, he has to remind them of something:
“Look, desk cop, you’re not talking to one person. You’re talking to 45 groups of 10 to 30 people. In theory, we could all go out separately. We all have the right of assembly. 45 demo-raves in one day. It’s a latent pressure we can apply. Be glad you can work with one entity, one person, me.”
The clearest proof of that power came when club Molotow got a termination notice, with a hotel developer lined up to take its place.
“The notice came over Christmas, and within five days, we pulled together what normally takes months,” he says. He organised the demo with Thore Debor of Clubkombinat. Thore Debor has been the Managing Director of Clubkombinat Hamburg e. V. since 2012; this is the official representative body and lobbying organisation for clubs in Hamburg (the same as Clubcommission Berlin).
“I’d talked to the folks from Molotow before that, and it was all pretty hopeless. They wanted to stay close to their current location on the Reeperbahn and were only being offered places really far away. After the demo, suddenly they had three new options and could choose. And what a luxury: all three options were right on the Reeperbahn. It was because of the demo.”
He feels certain that the thousands of people gathering, and the newspaper Tagesschau reporting on it, along with all the other media, led to the victory.
“It was a moment where I thought: okay, wow. This works.”
What does this year’s motto mean?
“It means to form alliances, get politically active, and stand up for your values,” Axelander Strauss says. The mission behind it is 2029, when Germany’s next federal election takes place.
“The AfD is organising well. They have real cadre schools where they train people on how to appear respectable while making inhumane statements. It’s really, really scary. We’ve all had history lessons. We know what happens when far-right groups gain power.”
“We don’t want to just sit back and trust the state to manage this,” Axelander Strauss says.
Until August 29th, the alliance is running weekly events introducing political groups to newcomers, a “kind of onboarding,” he says, and writing its knowledge down in how-to guides so that the infrastructure outlives the people who built it.
“If fascists can manage to stoke hatred and half-convert a nation, we can manage a huge event for love and hope, and times like these are when love and hope really matter.”
Follow Axelander Strauss and his ongoing work in nightlife and public activism on Instagram at @axelander.strauss.
Carla-Isabella Dunger is a writer at Hinterhaus, a subculture worker, and a music and culture journalist whose work centres on FLINTA* visibility within the scene. She is a co-founder of the FLINTA* Roundtable, organises events at Golden Pudel Club, and is also active as a DJ. Follow her at @_carluschka_.
Edits: Alexander Cheves @badalexcheves
Images: Mara Menzel @maramenzel with additional photos provided by Axelander Strauss
