Police surround a building in Kreuzberg where a group of asylum seekers are protesting against their treatment in Germany

Kreuzberg, the heart of countercultural Berlin, is no stranger to protests. But a tense standoff between police and protesters over the past six days has set a new standard.

Since last Wednesday, hundreds of police officers have been surrounding a former school building in which a group of mainly African asylum seekers are protesting against their treatment in Germany.

On Monday morning, around 20 officers lined up behind barricades on the junction of Ohlauer and Reichenberger Strasse, some of them deep in conversation with locals who wanted to get trolleys full of food and medicine through to the protesters.

The press are refused entry to the school building, allegedly because of a fire hazard.

While some local politicians are trying to negotiate an agreement that would allow the asylum seekers to permanently remain in the building while their cases are being processed, Germany's police union is advocating an evacuation of the building.

In a call from the roof of the building, a 32-year-old Sudanese refugee who would only give his name as Adam said: "The police try to give the impression that we are criminals and crazy people, but we only want to fight for our rights."

He denied rumours that the protesters were threatening to set fire to the building, but said that some of the approximately 50 protesters on the roof – who include refugees from Ghana, Nigeria and Syria as well as German activists – would rather risk their lives than leave the building.

"There are some people here who have been waiting in centres around Europe for years only to have their asylum request rejected. They stand to lose everything – they'd rather jump off the building than get caught."

While the Mediterranean sea off the Sicilian coast has borne witness to one human tragedy after another, the interior of Europe has largely been sheltered from the global refugee crisis triggered by conflicts in Eritrea, Libya, Somalia and Syria.

No other country in Europe received more asylum applications in 2013 than Germany, but while the country has shown more willingness to take on Syrian refugees than others, some researchers claim it fails to pull its weight in the processing of applications. According to Germany's Foundation for Science and Politics, the country has been letting in 2% fewer refugees than its economy and demographics would allow.

Unlike in other parts of Europe, refugees in Germany are often confined to camps and cannot move freely around the country, in effect leaving them in limbo while the government works through a backlog of cases.

In October 2012, 50 asylum seekers tried to bring the refugee crisis from the periphery to the heart of Europe, and organised a 500km protest march from Würzburg in Bavaria to Berlin. In the capital, some of them set up a tent camp on Kreuzberg's Oranienplatz, while others started squatting in the empty building of the Gerhart Hauptmann school on Ohlauer Strasse. The tent camp was cleared in April, but remaining protesters in the school are refusing to move – partly because they say the government has failed to stick to its promises.

"We were promised we would get a fair hearing," said Hakim Bello,a Nigerian refugee who was based at the school until last Wednesday's raid. "But four months later many of us are still waiting in a queue and are running out of hope." He said the demands of the protesters inside the school were consistent with those of the old protest on Oranienplatz: to close the camps, stop deportation and abolish the mandatory residence permits that inhibit their movement.

"Some people in Germany think we want to invade their country, but we only want an opportunity to contribute to society: to work and to pay our taxes," said Bello, a trained tailor.

Politicians in Berlin say the causes behind Europe's refugee crisis lie elsewhere, such as in the "Dublin" regulation blamed for creating buffer zones around the edges of the EU.

But Berenice Böhlo, an asylum lawyer who works with many of the protesters, said that there was plenty of room for governments to interpret the law in their own way. "There is nothing that would prevent Germany from not returning refugees to Italy, where many of them can't find work."