Page One

In a small corner of West Berkeley, next to a noisy set of train tracks and behind a copper-colored gate, lies one of the most remarkable sites in the East Bay: a twisting, colorful community garden, overflowing with flowers, artwork and purpose. 

At the center of the Peralta Community Garden is one of the city’s most remarkable people, Karl Linn — an 80-year-old psychologist and landscape architect who fled Nazi Germany as a child and has spent a lifetime building gardens that pull people together. 

“All I’m doing to contribute to the growth of community among people has to do with my experiences with racism,” said Linn, who was the only Jewish child in the small farming community of Dessow. “I still hear Hitler’s shrill voice talking about how to get rid of the Jews. I still hear the Nazis’ goose-steps on the cobblestones.” 

Linn and the Peralta Community Garden are at the center of a new documentary by local filmmaker Rick Bacigalupi that will premiere Thursday at 7:30 p.m. The 76-minute screening, at the Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian-Universalists, 1924 Cedar St., is free and open to the public. 

The film, “A Lot in Common,” begins in 1997, when the garden was just an overgrown patch of dirt owned by BART. The documentary builds slowly, tracing a core group of community activists who survive city politics, a brouhaha over a bunny rabbit and a friend’s battle with cancer to build the garden. 

The film includes interviews with PBS reporter Ray Suarez, author Jane Jacobs and British scholar David Crouch to lend context to the story. But it is the neighbors — a retiree and his grandson, a psychic and her rabbit, and Linn himself — who are the stars. 

Bacigalupi said it was Linn’s move from refugee to dedicated community organizer that drew him to the story. 

“I think it’s really interesting what people do with hate,” the filmmaker said. “He turned it around into a lifetime of love.” 

Linn, a stocky, bright-eyed man with a thick German accent, grew up on a fruit tree farm in northern Germany where he developed a strong connection to the animals and trees on the family land. 

“Seeing 2,000 fruit trees blossom was so exhilarating,” he said. “So nature was always a place of peace, of healing, of inspiration.” 

Linn’s world changed in 1933 when the Nazis took power and the children in his two-room schoolhouse turned on him. 

“My fellow students started to experience me not as a friend, but as the only target they could find to practice anti-Semitism,” he said, recalling an unsuccessful attempt to force him into singing a hateful, anti-Jewish song.  

After a pair of Nazi soldiers threatened his father, the family sold their farm and fled to Palestine, settling in an area that would later become part of Israel. Linn, who now hosts Jewish-Arab dialogue sessions in Peralta Community Garden, said he is still torn about his family’s move to Palestine, where he took up residence next to a Palestinian graveyard. 

“I realize that Jews had no place to escape because of the Holocaust,” he said. “But, at the same time, displacing others to save your life is very burdensome.” 

As a young man, determined to understand how Nazism could flourish, Linn left Palestine to train as a psychologist in Switzerland before emigrating to the United States.  

After a brief stint as a therapist, Linn turned to landscape architecture, convinced that nature and labor could heal the human spirit. As a professor at the University of Pennsylvania in the late 1950s, Linn began taking his students to inner-city neighborhoods where they worked with residents to build common areas and a sense of community. 

On the streets of North Philadelphia, Linn struck up a lifelong friendship with Carl Anthony, a black community organizer. 

Anthony, now a program officer for the Ford Foundation in Washington D.C., said he remembers being awed by Linn. 

“I was impressed with how he was able to combine social justice issues with urban planning,” Anthony said. 

Anthony was particularly enthralled with Linn’s notion of “urban barn-raising.” The concept, still central to Linn’s thinking, builds on the Mennonite tradition of coming together as a community to construct a barn — or, in the urban setting, a community garden or common space — that bonds the community. 

“The experience of inter-dependence is a very important experience for all of us,” said Linn. “It helps with [feelings of] isolation.” 

For two decades, Linn used urban barn-raising as an organizing principle, creating nonprofit organizations around the country — in New York City, Chicago, Louisville, Ky., and Syracuse, N.Y. — that focused on the communal construction of common spaces. 

In 1987, Linn moved to the Bay Area. Within six years, Berkeley had named a small garden after him — just across the street from a plot of land, owned by BART, that Linn and a group of neighbors would change into the Peralta Community Garden. 

Today the garden includes a mix of ambitious art projects, Tibetan peace flags, an eco-friendly tool shed and periodic community gatherings. 

Linn’s persistence helped raise the government and foundation money that funded the park and the neighborhood volunteerism that built it. But some who worked with Linn kid him, good-naturedly, for going a bit overboard. 

“He’s a good person, he’s good hearted,” said Kay Wade, one of the neighbors, in the film. “But he’s a control freak.” 

Bacigalupi said there was some tension early in the filmmaking process, when Linn sought to exert control over the documentary and to mute criticism of the garden and his leadership. 

But in the end, the filmmaker said, “Karl had a tremendous generosity of spirit. He was open to constructive criticism and showing more than just the community garden line. 

“Karl is truly an amazing person,” Bacigalupi continued. “His commitment and drive and just his sheer stamina is unbelievable. It’s very easy to forget that he is 80 years old.”