“I never imagined something like this,” the man says. He’s come to a cafe at Kottbusser Tor in Berlin’s diverse Kreuzberg district to talk about left-wing militancy in Germany. In his mid-twenties, he’s wearing a baseball cap and a t-shirt bearing the logo of the Zapatistas, Mexico’s left-wing guerrilla movement. He gives no name, revealing only that he was involved in organizing the May 1 protest in Berlin and that he belongs to an anti-fascist group.

He begins to talk about Greece. The revolutionary resistance there seemed to have entered a promising phase, with unions and autonomists united on the streets. It was going so well, he says. And now this.

Violence, he says, must be used constructively and “responsibly,” not against people — especially now that things in Germany are also gaining momentum again. “There’s been a rise in the number of night-time actions,” he says, “and militancy on the street is increasing.”