The Rote Flora is a former theatre in the Sternschanze district of Hamburg, Germany. It has been squatted since November 1989 as a self-managed social centre. The collective said in 2001 "We are the 'UFO in the neighbourhood.' The black hole in public space. The City won't get rid of us because we are a part of what life is." History of the building The Flora theatre was constructed on Schulterblatt in 1835. It was used for concerts, operettas, revues, and boxing matches. It became a variety theatre until it shut down after World War II. It was used as a cinema and then became a bargain store called 1000 Töpfe. In the late 1980s, local people were alarmed by the plans of Friedrich Kurz to gentrify the theatre by making it a venue for performances of The Phantom of the Opera, fearing it would attract tourists and change the area; they proposed to turn it into a community centre instead. The alternative plans were ignored by the city and the rear of the building was demolished in April 1988. Sabotage attacks began on the construction site and bowing to the local pressure, the community was given a temporary lease to use the building. When the lease expired on 1 November 1989, the occupiers stayed and the building was squatted. It was a week before the fall of the Berlin Wall and the new inhabitants said it was a "free space for realizing an autonomous life." It has remained squatted ever since. Social centre At the beginning the occupiers were very much focused on local struggles and as time went by, the Rote Flora has developed into a self-managed social centre connected to left-wing, anarchist activism, with links to similar projects in Amsterdam, Berlin and Copenhagen. The building provides a music venue, an infoshop, a social movement archive, a bar, a cafe, rehearsal rooms and a bicycle repair workshop. The Government of Hamburg offered to give the project a contract in the early 1990s but the offer was refused. Later, it decided to sell the building to a developer called Klausmartin Kretschmer for 370,000 DM, with the proviso that it would remain a social centre. When a well-known neo-Nazi was given a social housing apartment in a block behind the project in the 1990s, Rote Flora organised demonstrations against his tenancy. The collective said in 2001 "We are the 'UFO