On Thursday morning, the Berlin police searched an apartment and a studio in the Prenzlauer Berg district that are said to belong to the environment of the “Center for Political Beauty” (ZPS), a collective for satirical political activism. A spokeswoman for the police confirmed to the SZ that between 7 a.m. and 9 a.m., investigators from the State Office of Criminal Investigation had seized electronic data carriers in the apartment and the studio.
The seizure serves to “preserve evidence on the suspicion of falsifying evidence-relevant data.” When asked whether this nebulous statement, which for its part sounded a bit like satire, was an investigation into ridiculing the AfD in the last federal election campaign, the spokeswoman said: “Here, too, you see me nodding.”
At the time, the ZPS had pretended to be distributing millions of party leaflets with an alleged “Flyerservice Hahn”, but in reality disposed of them. The AfD assessed this as “damage to democracy” and announced a complaint at the time. The ZPS activists, in turn, called the searches on Twitter a “black day for artistic freedom in Germany”. They promised “we will emphatically reject this attack on artistic freedom, together with you and civil society”, and immediately used the attention to recruit: On Twitter, the ZPS asked for accomplices who would “join us in the dock”.