Regime Change, But Make It a Board Meeting: Wedding Prepares to Purge Its VHS-Era Elders

A depressing little headline floated over from the United States this week: in Virginia, some university board members were reportedly asked to resign as the new governor, Abigail Spanberger, takes power.

In other words: a fresh administration looked at a group of extremely confident grown-ups in charge of an important institution and said, gently and politely, “Get out.”

Wedding read this and immediately thought: Finally—an exportable American tradition that doesn’t involve brunch lines.

Governance in the Age of “Please Leave Your Lanyard at the Door”

If Virginia can treat a university board like a half-empty jar of pickles—twist, pop, discard the crusty bits—then Berlin can do the same, only with worse lighting and a stronger belief that process is the product.

Within hours, a local "Community Oversight Council" (which is four people from a WhatsApp group and one person who just likes chairs) announced a pilot program for Wedding:

• Spätis will begin rotating their “Elder Council” (the guys who’ve been holding court by the fridge since the Euro was a rumor).
• Any café advisory board member who says “third wave” out loud must step down and do three months of unpaid dishwashing for the community.
• Döner shop customer feedback panels will be reconstituted without “founding members,” i.e., anyone who still says “I knew this street before it had vibes.”

A Turkish baker on Müllerstraße told us he supports the idea “as long as the new people don’t start a committee about sesame equity,” before returning to the only governance system he trusts: heat, timing, and unforgiving gravity.

The Spanberger Effect: Power Transfer as Performance Art

The governor’s move—asking board members to resign—landed in Wedding like a piece of conceptual art you’re obligated to understand because a curator with oat-milk breath said so.

It’s basically Marina Abramović, but instead of silence and eye contact, it’s a polite email that reads: Thank you for your service; please stop serving.

Berlin, naturally, is adapting this into a more local, more humiliating form:

1. The “soft coup”: someone slides a resignation letter under your door like a menu. You’re expected to sign it and pretend you had the idea.
2. The “public resignation”: you stand outside Leopoldplatz and explain your departure into a dead microphone, like you’re auditioning for a role in a grim reboot of The West Wing.
3. The “silent demotion”: your job title stays the same, but all your decisions are routed through a 24-year-old intern who studied “Systems Change” and has never successfully changed a lightbulb.

It sounds absurd, but that’s politics now: Debord’s spectacle with slightly more paperwork and less shame.

Universities, Neighborhoods, and Other Institutions That Swear They’re Not a Cult

What Virginia exposed—accidentally, like a drunk person stepping on a stage light—is that boards are often where ambition goes to get comfy. And when a new governor arrives, the first act isn’t policy.

It’s furniture rearrangement.

In Wedding, we don’t have a governor with formal power over universities, but we do have something stronger: people with opinions and time. And right now, the neighborhood’s semi-official bodies are reacting like Kafka characters who finally found the emergency exit—only to discover it opens into another corridor.

A self-appointed “Education Futures Committee” met this week in a back room that smelled like disinfectant and broken dreams. Their agenda was described as “a deep dive into accountability.” Observers reported stiff resistance from a retired academic who insisted the committee itself should resign first “on principle,” which is Berlin for “I refuse to lose, even abstractly.”

Meanwhile, the local art school promised to “decolonize governance” by replacing its board with rotating citizens selected by lottery—an idea that sounded noble until someone pointed out it’s also the plot of The Hunger Games, just with grant applications.

Who Gets Asked to Resign in Wedding? Everyone, Eventually.

Virginia’s board drama is about control: who appoints whom, who gets to shape an institution, who gets removed when the vibes shift. In Wedding, control is more intimate—like trying to penetrate a locked bike room with a key that technically exists.

The people most at risk in the coming purge:

• The “community elder” who thinks every new resident is an invading army.
• The “new resident” who thinks every old resident is a museum exhibit.
• The guy who moderates the building group chat like he’s Foucault with a Ring camera.
• Anyone who begins a sentence with “As a board member…” in a neighborhood where half the boards are literal planks holding up collapsing shelves.

The only true winners will be the consultants—because Berlin, like America, has decided the best way to solve power struggles is to hire someone to facilitate them for €140 an hour, which is, frankly, hard to swallow.

Closing Statement From Your Tired Correspondent

Virginia is swapping out board members. Wedding is watching and thinking: What if power could change hands without a five-year emotional trial?

Don’t get excited. This is still Berlin. The resignations will be symbolic, the committees will metastasize, and the old guard will simply reappear under a new title, like a sequel nobody asked for.

But for one brief moment, thanks to an American governor and a university board, Wedding remembered an impossible dream: that authority can be asked to leave—and might actually pick up its coat.