Germany

The Basque centre in Berlin was not founded by a colony of emigrants looking for a place to meet. It was born of the memory of the bombing of Gernika, whose name it bears, and it was the first in Germany to be recognised by the Basque Government.

In 1997, on the sixtieth anniversary of the bombing, Constanze Lindemann organised a symposium in Berlin on that attack. According to two of its members, speaking in 2016, survivors of the bombing were invited to the symposium, and a letter was obtained from the German president asking for forgiveness.⁶ For the association itself, that symposium was the decisive step towards creating the Basque centre: with the support of Wolfgang Wippermann, Fritz Teppich, Helios Mendiburu, who was its first president, and Hans-Joachim Wilke, the Gernika Deutsch-Baskischer Kulturverein, the Gernika German-Basque Cultural Association, was born.⁴

The date of its founding changes depending on who tells it. The association places it in April 1998; the report of the Directorate for Relations with Basque Communities gives it as founded in 1998, and euskalkultura.eus in 1997, the year of the symposium.⁴²³ Its aims are to remember the bombing, to foster friendship between Basques and Germans and to spread Basque language, culture and history in the German capital.³⁴

On 9 December 2009 the Governing Council officially recognised it as a Basque centre, the first in Germany. Five others were recognised the same day, among them the first in Japan, in Tokyo.⁵ In 2014 Eusko Ikaskuntza gave it the ENE award, which honours work for the Basque language outside Euskal Herria, for its innovative and creative contribution.³

The centre has no premises of its own: it meets in rented rooms and holds its activities all over the city.⁴ It gives Basque classes and organises a Basque film festival, concerts, meetings with writers, the Korrika and acts of historical memory.³⁴ One of those acts recalls that the lehendakari (president of the Basque Government) José Antonio Aguirre was hiding in Berlin in 1941, under a false identity, while he waited for a Swedish transit passport. Two members of the centre put it this way in 2016: their contribution to the debate on refugees was to show that the Basques had also been in exile and that the lehendakari himself had hidden there.⁶