At the beginning of June 2015, the meeting of the G7 heads of state was to take place in the former Wehrmacht recreation home at Schloss Elmau under the patronage of the federal government. A good opportunity to protest for the broad spectrum of anti-capitalist motivated opponents of the summit. But the police had been prepared for this for a long time and so they welded all manhole covers in the wide area around the targeted protest location. When the time had come and the planned demonstrations against the G7 summit were pending, the Chancellor was heard in the news ticker on June 5th at 9:34 am with the words: “Angela Merkel sees peaceful demonstrations against the G7 summit in Bavaria Enrichment of democracy. ”This can be interpreted as a tolerant gesture directed at the subaltern by those who, through constitutional status, determine the guidelines of politics in this country. In the efforts of the level directly on site, at the spaciously cordoned off Elmau Castle, the situation was, however, more complex from the point of view of the police. And so they initially forbade a demonstration within “hearing and sight” of the G7 summit. But then a decision by the administrative court in Munich allowed a demonstration of exactly 50 people on site. However, this decision was linked to the condition that the demonstrators should allow themselves to be driven to the demonstration site in police vehicles. Such a loss of autonomy was rightly viewed as degrading by the summit opponents and was outraged. And so there was no enrichment of the summit meeting through a protest demonstration directly controlled by the police and almost certainly steered into peaceful channels. Poor Germany!
Now a large-format, voluminous, partly four-colored volume published by Martin Langebach enriches Protest in the history of the Federal Republic the publication table of this country. It depicts 90 protest events from the past and present of the two German states between 1949 and 2020. A large number of authors repeatedly create impressive miniatures here. Till Kössler integrates the crackdown on the protests against the militarization of the FRG on May 11, 1952, during which Philipp Müller was shot by the police, in the subsequent political marginalization of the KPD in the FRG. In his contribution, Simon Goeke acknowledges the wildcat strike and the occupation at the Ford works in Cologne in the late summer of 1973 by Turks and West German left-wing radicals as a “decisive focal point in West German migration history”.
Ismail Yozgat’s screams
Evidently here too: political protests of various origins always found completely different conditions for action and resonance spaces in the integration and optimization society of the Federal Republic of Germany than in the control and disciplinary society of the GDR. And yet there were also significant protest events in the GDR, as the protest against the expatriation of the protest singer Wolfgang Biermann depicted in the volume by Robert Grünbaum shows.
In addition, the volume devotes so-called short biographies to 15 activists from various political groups. The selection includes sympathetic pacifists, socialists, opponents of nuclear power, protest singers and anti-racism activists. The short biography of the Nazi networker Christian Worch, who has been active since the late 1970s, is also included. Also noteworthy: protagonists of the West German fundamental opposition, such as Fritz Teufel or Dieter Kunzelmann, whose services as protagonists of Commune I essentially consisted in bringing the students onto the streets for demonstrations in the second half of the 1960s, including the 68s Having put revolt on the agenda of the political affairs of the republic is not considered worthy of a short biography.
How is the inclusion of Nazi protests in the band to be interpreted? The volume was designed and financed by the Federal Agency for Civic Education, a subordinate authority within the portfolio of the Federal Ministry of the Interior. In the introduction, the editor thanks Hanne Wurzel, who is head of the extremism department there, for “the fundamental openness to be able to deal with protest in all its facets”. In this respect, the selection of protest events concerned in this volume can be viewed as an extension of the extremism doctrine in a softer version – which, as is well known, has been celebrated by the interior ministries in the publication of the annual reports on the protection of the constitution for decades. With this book, you can leaf through a teleological narrative of the Federal Republic, which to this day seems to succeed in productively integrating right and left protests into a success story. However, such access also has its price. It consists in elucidating the concrete content of the respective protests with explicit reference to some catch-all formulas from research on the “new social movements” such as “participation”, “civic engagement” or “fundamental social change” .
Even so, the opposition of the left-wing pacifist against nuclear armament in the book can be peacefully placed alongside the National Socialist’s public appeal for murder – both in their own way, somehow protest, perhaps also fundamental social change, and that also in Germany. The fact is, however, that certain political protests are not about how the hard-working researchers on the new social movements never tire of emphasizing, of bringing about a constant optimization of the constitutional architecture or of civil society in the FRG. Sometimes the protest is simply about the unfiltered expression of indignation and anger in the perspective of a completely different life. And sometimes it’s even a matter of life and death. One only hears the screams of Ismail Yozgat and Semiya Şimşek at the rally in Kassel in May 2006, which were directed against the continuing series of murders of Turks, which the police had not cautiously suppressed for years. This is exactly what you can read in the book in Ayse Güleç’s contribution. The Kassel manifestation of 4,000 migrants had remained completely unnoticed by both the political class and civil society until the NSU’s self-exposure in November 2011.
Protest Germany 1949-2020 Martin Langebach Federal Agency for Civic Education (Ed.) 2021, 468 pp., 7 €
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