The red envelope is stuck between two books, Wolfgang Dominik pulls it off his shelf. In it flutters the certificate of honor for his 25-year membership in the SPD. Oskar Lafontaine signed the document as “party chairman”, and Franz Müntefering as district chairman. That was 1995. A long time ago. Four years later, Dominik left the party. “Because of the NATO attack on Yugoslavia,” he says. In 1999 the red-green federal government sent German soldiers to Kosovo without a mandate from the UN, ten days later the Easter March in Bochum was directed against it. “I was booed when they heard that I was in the SPD,” says Dominik today. At the final rally in the old Langendreer train station, the city’s cultural center, there were also socis on the podium. The 77-year-old tells how he got up in the middle of his seat and held up a self-made sign in the air: “Today I am leaving the SPD!” There was a lot of applause.
20 years later Dominik is fighting again against the plan of a red-green government – the one in Bochum. Here in the Laer district, just 300 meters as the crow flies from his apartment, a NATO site could be built. “I don’t want a war in my front yard!” Bursts out Wolfgang Dominik.
In mid-September there was an article in the WAZ the city’s plans to locate the “NATO Communications and Information Agency” (NCIA) in Bochum were made public. She is responsible for cyber security at the military alliance. Many believe the author of the WAZ-Text had an informant at the city’s economic development agency, which is driving the project with Lord Mayor Thomas Eiskirch (SPD). Since the article, the mayor has weighed down all inquiries by pointing out that Bochum is not a “priority location for settlement”. His coalition partner is more euphoric: The leader of the Greens in the city council, 29-year-old Sebastian Pewny, raves about the “green commitment” to NATO and that his party is “fundamentally” in favor of the establishment of the NCIA.
At the top of the enemy list
It has not yet decided whether to move to Germany at all: its headquarters are in Brussels. And even if they did, the Federal Ministry of Defense would probably prefer other cities as the headquarters of the agency. In addition to Bonn, Darmstadt is on the shortlist. But why did almost 200 participants come to the rally against a “cyber war headquarters in Bochum” on November 5th?
Two “location advantages” make the city particularly attractive for the NCIA: The Horst Görtz Institute, which was founded 20 years ago at the local Ruhr University, brings together a great deal of expert knowledge in the field of IT security. And then there is G Data, one of the largest German manufacturers of cyber security software, also based in Bochum. It is quite possible that the NCIA will ultimately be drawn to this high-tech metropolis.
Wolfgang Dominik leaves his study, which is crammed with peace literature. There is also a book by Udo Ulfkotte on the shelf, uff, but only one passage interested him: that journalists are active “across the board” in transatlantic societies. No wonder if German media “glorify wars”?
He goes over to his living room and tells about a letter he has written to the editor WAZ published. In it, he described the settlement of the NATO agency as an “application” by the city to “slide to the top of the list of priorities of the enemy”. If the NCIA came here, even “the destruction of Laer” is conceivable. Please what? Dominik is serious. In military conflicts, the opponent’s high-tech infrastructure is always destroyed first. “That’s what NATO did during the Yugoslav war.” And high-tech, that would be right around the corner, namely on the former Opel site, where Bochum’s economic development agency would like to ship NCIA.
It is there that Horst Hohmeier, 72, enters the parking lot on Alte Wittener Straße. In the past, all of this was used by Opel, but today it is empty and you can only hear the traffic rushing along the autobahn. A faded graffito is emblazoned on the fallen soundproof wall: “Choose Love”, including a dozen national flags from the Middle East. Hohmeier smokes a cigarette, in the evening he takes over the shift in a nearby pub, the words come slowly out of his mouth. As a council member of the Left, he has been fighting since the publication of the WAZ-Article against the settlement of the NCIA.
Until 2017 he even sat on the board of the business development agency. And the only “comrade” of his who is still sitting there today was sick on the very day the body was talking about NATO’s plans. But it shouldn’t have “pierced” anything on him anyway, he says and then has to laugh a little himself. The Left Party has just made a request to the city: How could it be that they want to market this property to the NCIA when, according to the development plan, a “renaturation” of the area is planned? The city has not yet responded.
No matter who you meet here, the tough opponents of the “NATO location Bochum” are always the old, mostly over 70, like Hohmeier and Dominik. Is peace politics not for “Millennials” and “Generation Z”? Have they all swallowed the “end of story” pill and can no longer imagine it crashing? According to a study by the Global Public Policy Institute, 18 to 29-year-olds in Germany are more likely than older people to speak out in favor of a policy that “takes on more responsibility” in terms of foreign policy. Almost 60 percent of this cohort are in favor of Germany participating “more than before” in solving international conflicts. The authors of the study therefore come to the conclusion that the “consensus of restraint” is crumbling among younger people.
Wolfgang Dominik says that peace is “a tradition of the 68s”. Then he explains why that could be. As a child he sat in front of his grandmother’s radio, “another popular receiver”, and heard reports about “the last battle of Dien Bien Phu”. This is the Vietnamese city in which the Viet Minh independence movement won the decisive victory over the French colonialists in 1954.
Rockets are magnets
“I grew up with the Vietnam War,” he says, “I’ve seen children on fire running away from American napalm bombs.” He walks over to his desk, which has a picture on it that was in the previous newspaper Friday appeared. It shows a US soldier who has grabbed a dead baby by the leg and is carrying it across a field. “As we know today, they were all lumped together,” says Dominik. The Americans would have called that “body count”. Then there is another photo, on which you can see himself sitting next to the bedside of a Vietnamese boy with severe skin burns. He came to Germany in 1969 with the rescue ship “Helgoland”, then it went on to Bochum and directly to the “Bergmannsheil” hospital. Dominik, who was part of a student support group for Vietnam, came to visit him there.
The way he talks about this boy really lets you feel what a different meaning war and violence have for his generation than for those born later in this country. Today the foreign policy situation is “as hot as it was during the Cuban Missile Crisis,” says Wolfgang Dominik. After all, with the exception of Ukraine, NATO has taken “all of Eastern Europe” under the nail.
Suddenly he jumps up from his chair. Only 15 minutes until the meeting of the Bochum “Peace Plenum” begins. The group organized that rally against the NCIA in early November. Short journey, then into the “House of Encounters”. There are nine mostly gray-haired men and women sitting at a long table, with Doppelkopf being played next door. Two younger people also take part in the plenary. One of them types the protocol into his laptop. The other listens to the old people talking about “state trojans” and the dangers of “cyber war”. One of the seniors says: “If I were born as an alien, I would think: NATO has to disarm!”
They do not accept that the NCIA would also bring 2,000 IT jobs to Bochum. “They don’t go to the unemployed Opel employees,” says Dominik, “the buddies have absolutely nothing to do with them.” It is more important that the region becomes a target as a result: “If I were Russia, I would also throw a bomb on Bochum! “Says a man who can barely move his neck. “Rockets are magnets,” adds another with long hair and a tousled beard.
Another group of NATO opponents meets in the evening – and they are younger, between 20 and 40, for example. Eight of them sit in the Café Neuland downtown, a pub – all of them wear gray suits and red ties. It is the regulars’ table of the satire formation Die PARTTEI, which meets every two weeks.
They’ve been talking about this NCIA thing a lot here lately, sure, they’re also against the town’s settlement plans. “I’m more of the Warsaw Pact type,” says someone and laughs. But the Bochumers had already “flattened” Nokia, and a few years later Opel: “NATO should come here.”
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