by J. Smith
71. Viehmann (1997), 6.
72. Fritz Teufel, “Indianer weinen nicht—sie kämpfen,” late May 1979. This text will be published along with other documents from the 2JM in a forthcoming documentary history to be copublished by Kersplebedeb and PM Press.
3
The Antinuclear Movement: Old Meets New
IF THE ONWARD MARCH OF generations affects all human endeavor, this is particularly true of the left, to such an extent that it often seems to keep time by the changing of the generational guard, and even remembering the lessons of just a few years past can be a challenge to what frequently appear as movements driven forth by youth itself.
As the guerilla languished, just a little farther afield history’s march was welcoming a new generation into the fray. Merging and clashing with veterans of the APO in a variety of struggles, the most important of these in the latter half of the 1970s was certainly the direct-action movement against nuclear power.
AGAINST THE ATOMIC STATE!
The FRG’s three main political parties had all held pro-nuclear positions since the 1950s. Indeed, at first, even social critics wondered if cheap nuclear power might provide a science fiction fix for the evils of industrial capitalism, as when Ernst Bloch waxed eloquent about the atom’s potential to “make flushing meadows from wasteland, flowering spring from ice, in the blue atmosphere of peace.”1
Of course, outside of the left, the new and mysterious high-tech energy source held a different appeal. For the first generation after Hitler, nuclear energy gave hope that technical prowess might replace military might as the measure of the nation’s strength. As one journalist from the liberal newspaper Die Zeit explained:
There was no way to express German national feeling after the war. This would have been interpreted as a Nazi attitude. West Germans instead constructed their new national identity around economic growth and power. Nothing better symbolized this than the nuclear industry.2
This vision of nuclear power as a symbol of pride, vital to the national interest, was bolstered by the first oil shock in 1973. That year, the price of oil quadrupled as a result of an OPEC decision to limit production following the Yom Kippur War; this came shortly after the collapse of the Bretton Woods monetary system in 1971. The world economy was sent into a deep recession, the post-World War II boom drawing to a final close.
Spiegel sums up the imperialists’ evaluation of the oil crisis: “Oil Sheikhs Against Europe.”
As the price of oil continued to spiral upwards (by the end of the decade it would be fourteen times what it had been in 1973), the West German ruling class saw both danger and opportunity. On the one hand, petroleum imports at the time accounted for almost 60 percent of the country’s primary energy consumption, and so the skyrocketing prices had the potential to strangle the economy.3 On the other, the oil crisis created an opening for the FRG to use atomic energy to gain leverage in the world market.
At the time, the country was ruled by a “Social-Liberal” coalition made up of the SPD and the much smaller Free Democratic Party (FDP), and the government’s economic strategy was for the FRG to position itself as a producer of capital-intensive, high-value exports, with the state mediating between employers and the working class to ensure social peace. This “Model Germany,” a term coined by SPD Chancellor Schmidt during his 1976 election campaign, involved phasing out labor-intensive industries that produced inexpensive products and making substantial state investments in the research, development, and infrastructure upon which the high-tech sector would depend. Nuclear power was key to this strategy, and by the middle of the decade that sector alone was receiving one-third of all federal R&D moneys, with the FRG becoming second only to the United States in international sales of light-water reactors and fuel cycle equipment.4 Meanwhile, at home, Schmidt’s 1974 Energy Program called for ten years of rapid growth in the domestic nuclear sector, with plans for more than forty new high-capacity plants supplying energy to several giant projected industrial corridors to be built in traditionally agricultural areas.5
The anticommunist bulwark was becoming the atomic state, based on a kind of nuclear imperialism and supported by all political parties, the trade unions, and big business. The word “technocracy” is an apt description; as sociologist Christian Joppke has noted, “In response to energy crisis and economic recession, the neocorporatist elites moved closer. Not dialogue, but the repression of dissent prevailed.”6 Faced with this ruling-class unity and a fourth estate which studiously ignored the risks associated with the new technology, most people initially favored building more nuclear plants, one poll in 1975 finding only 16 percent opposed.7
Echoing the experience of the 1960s Grand Coalition and APO, this “unity of all democrats” made for a cocky and belligerent ruling class, while also giving its detractors a strikingly clear view of the system they were up against. Consequently, it provided an easy route to radicalization.
Social Democratic Chancellor Helmut Schmidt (above), whose “Model Germany” relied upon the labor aristocracy remaining closely tied to the corporate and state elites.
Over the course of the decade, a series of campaigns against various nuclear facilities would become linked in a mass movement. Ironically, although reinforced by the successors to the APO New Left, notably the antiauthoritarian Spontis and the Marxist-Leninist party-oriented K-Groups, this movement actually originated in various Citizens Initiatives, groups initially set up by the SPD to seduce new members.8 As the radical left was drawn in, the movement’s political content became a point of contention, with the question of “violence” serving as the symbolic dividing line between those who viewed the state as something to reform and others who recognized it as an opponent to fight against.
The way this broke down varied from one place to another; for instance, in Hamburg the Kommunistische Bund found itself well-placed to lead the local campaign, while in Bremen and Göttingen the dominant K-Group (the Kommunistische Bund Westdeutschland) was in decline, and so a younger generation, more sympathetic to the Spontis, took the lead.9 Coming together in a series of confrontations with the state, the antinuclear campaigns would serve as a laboratory for these groups to put their very different ideas into practice, exchanging insights and comparing results. More importantly still, their strengths and weaknesses would be made plain to see for all the new people being drawn to the struggle. It was, in the best sense of the term, a living movement.
The first major mobilization occurred in 1975 against the proposed construction of a nuclear power plant at Wyhl in the conservative Land of Baden-Württemberg, where the FRG borders on both France and Switzerland. Led by local farmers and professionals, and fueled by regionalist sentiments, the opposition was dismissed as irrelevant by the Land’s CDU government and the nuclear utility, which ominously warned that, “Even if the risks of nuclear power were bigger than they actually are, we would have to accept them in the interest of freedom and democracy.” Or as Land president Hans Filbinger put it, without Wyhl, “the lights go out in 1980,”10 any opposition to the plant obviously being “teleguided by Communists or Maoists.”11
Despite the fearmongering, protesters carried out an audacious—though strictly nonviolent—action against the planned plant. In the frozen month of February, hundreds of local residents occupied the construction site and refused to move. They remained for two days before police turned on them with water cannons. Although driven away, they returned the next week, joined now by tens of thousands of people who had come from throughout the FRG, as well as from France and Switzerland. This time they built barricades.12
Dutch social scientist Ruud Koopmans has argued that “novelty gives protesters a strategic advantage—authorities are unprepared for new strategies, political actors, and themes,”13 and this was certainly borne out at Wyhl, the first site occupation of its kind in Europe. As the world’s attention turned to this tiny German town, so did that of the urban radical left.14 The nonviolent occupation became a miniature villag
e, preventing construction work and creating a political nightmare for the government. After ten months, the state blinked, declaring a “temporary” halt to construction, which would in fact never be resumed.
Wyhl was a successful first round, but the struggle against nuclear energy was just beginning. One year later, the ante was upped at Brokdorf in Schleswig-Holstein, the intended site of a nuclear power plant slated to produce 1,300 megawatts—as much power as the total energy consumption of the entire Land.15 As protesters assembled for what was billed as a nonviolent occupation in the spirit of Wyhl, they found that the building site had already been occupied—by a battalion of police. As one student from Göttingen University remembers:
For the first time, we were visually confronted with the atomic state: huge police levies, barbed wire fences, dogs, a construction site turned into a fortress. That was new for us. Before that, we had not been directly confronted with the state. The student movement and the wildcat strikes of the late 1960s had occurred before our time.16
The RAF had similarly energized a section of post-APO youth, but only a small one. One needed to be predisposed to the prisoners’ struggle, and preferably live in a big city with a supporters’ scene, in order to “get it.” Nuclear power, with its potential for widespread calamity, energized far greater numbers, and yet its opponents sparked a familiar dynamic, with repression exposing the system’s violent core, drawing new people and forces into what was initially a more limited conflict.
If the state had supposed it could keep a lid on things with its police deployment at Brokdorf, it would soon learn otherwise. Within a month, a national march on the site had been organized, with the insistence on nonviolence dropped. Thirty thousand people streamed in from across the country and beyond, many prepared for action. As they approached police lines, some two thousand broke away, fighting their way through. They waded across the moat that had been dug, and, braving water cannons, attacked the wall surrounding the building site.17 The response came as police helicopters indiscriminately tear-gassed the retreating crowds, including the vast majority who had not joined in the attack.18 For the first time in West Germany’s history, units of the Federal Border Guard were deployed at a protest.19
Things continued to escalate. The next battle came in early 1977, in Grohnde, where another one of the Schmidt government’s new power plants was being built. As the movement magazine Autonomie20 reported, “A demonstration did not occur. Instead, the activists immediately attacked the fence with the necessary tools.” Joppke explains:
With “military precision” and “criminal energy,” and the help of blowpipes and electric chainsaws, the militant attackers struck a huge hole into a monstrous steel fence that had been considered indestructible. Eight hundred police officers and demonstrators were injured in this ferocious battle—the worst political violence ever registered in the FRG.21
Clearly, a section of the movement had transcended the normal bounds of democratic protest. As the movement radicalized it also made connections, growing beyond its single-issue origins. In the words of Jens Scheer, a physics professor from Bremen university, and member of the Maoist Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (KPD),
The escalation of violence originates not from us but from the state. Already the construction of nuclear plants is violence. Many citizens learn from Wyhl and Brokdorf that their real enemy is not a flawed energy policy or a dangerous technology but the state itself.22
Opposition to nuclear energy was radicalizing people by shining a light on the ugly face of repression in Model Germany. In the year after Grohnde, movement energies were spent supporting a number of arrested activists, eleven of whom would eventually be convicted of endangering national security. The state added insult to injury, taking legal action to force them to pay the costs for the police action (230,000 DM), while eighty people who testified on their behalf were brought up on charges of perjury.23
Grohnde, March 19, 1977.
All of this was largely ignored by the RAF and the 2JM—most of their members being either in prison, or focused on freeing the prisoners—but not by the RZ. Members of the Revolutionary Cells had participated in the action in Grohnde, and in Brokdorf before that. Impressed by what they had seen—and coinciding with their move away from the international terrain subsequent to the Entebbe disaster24—they decided the time might be right to add the guerilla to the mix. The RZ carried out two such actions in August ‘77, against the MAN corporation in Nuremberg and against both Klein and Schanzlin & Becker AG installations in Frankenthal—all three targets were involved in nuclear weapons production, and MAN had important contracts in South Africa.25
If Grohnde represented a high point for the antinuclear movement, the pendulum would soon swing the other way. Construction was nearly complete at Kalkar, a small town in North Rhine-Westphalia not far from Düsseldorf, by the time the movement’s next national mobilization occurred. Protesters were particularly incensed as the Kalkar power plant was to be a “fast breed” facility—one which produces more radioactive material than it consumes, with byproducts that can be used to make nuclear weapons. A demonstration was planned for September 24, 1977: smack dab in the middle of the German Autumn, just a few weeks after the RAF had abducted Hanns Martin Schleyer.
Despite the tense political situation, between thirty and fifty thousand people gathered for the march. The police had been given a green light to proceed as they saw fit, and as many as ten thousand manned checkpoints throughout the area, all motorists and travelers being searched, and hundreds of foreigners being turned back at the FRG’s borders. At one point, a police helicopter even forced a train to a halt and had its passengers disembark.26 Protesters were fingerprinted, photographed, and entered into the police computer files.27 The authorities would announce that thirty-three persons had been preemptively arrested and that thousands of masks, helmets, and protective shields, five hundred batons, forty-one walkie-talkie sets, as well as steel ball projectiles, catapults, steel rods, knives, and flare guns had been confiscated. Thus disarmed, the protesters were kept from the actual construction site by over a thousand police armed with submachine guns and protected by barbed wire, a moat, and a concrete wall.28
In the lead-up to Kalkar authorities had warned that the demonstration would likely turn violent, with the possibility of fatalities—not completely far-fetched as an antinuclear protester had been killed by police in France just a few months earlier. As it was, officials were left crowing about how they had managed to defang the protest before it could even begin, and the movement suffered a serious blow. In the words of one organizer,
At Kalkar, we ran into the machine guns of the state. The demonstration never occurred; it was already smashed in the forefield. The state used all means to demonstrate its power. We experienced a limit. It became clear we could no longer confront the state in this form. A long period of resignation set in.29
Here too, a movement had seemingly reached an impasse; but repression did not stop people—it polarized them. For some, the problem now became the “atomic mafia” and its “atomic state.” As one movement text would later explain,
The atomic State is not a temporary or reversible development. It is a symbiosis between the development of military strategy all over in Western countries which are increasingly going over to considering and treating their own populations as the enemy and the development of a destructive technology (atomic energy technology) that is to be put to use by the electricity concerns and the energy fetishes regardless of the consequences that could follow. Atomic technology has developed out of a social system which has often proven that it will even risk genocide for the sake of economic progress. Criticizing atomic energy thus becomes a basic criticism of the way of production in this society.30
It was a situation not without its possibilities.
THE ONGOING ADVENTURES OF THE POST-APO LEFT
The antinuclear movement brought together different political tendencies and generations and, as
we shall see, would eventually provide a launching pad for new cycles of struggle. For the first postwar generation, those who had come of age in the 1960s, it served as a way station, a place to remain active as one’s ideological reference points began to show their age. While the RAF had plunged the guerilla and its supporters into the most dramatic crisis with its actions in ‘77, the fact of the matter is that all tendencies of the post-APO left were approaching various crossroads in their respective paths.
The German Autumn would serve as a synecdoche for this broader crisis. For while it fell to the guerilla to solve the problems of its own unique circumstances, others pondered a much similar quandary: how to break through the obstacles that faced them? Not an easy task, given that these obstacles could often be traced back to the ideologies and class trajectories of the groups in question.
The self-styled “antiauthoritarians” who had emerged from the APO had been exemplified by the Spontis, with strongholds in Frankfurt and West Berlin. As this scene experimented with increasing levels of violence, it fractured, some sections adopting out-and-out pro-guerilla positions, while others retreated into the so-called “alternative movement,” which was pioneering what would later be termed, somewhat reductively, lifestylism. Dissatisfied with these choices, others continued to look elsewhere for new places and ways to introduce and advance their politics.
If any single event can be credited for the antiauthoritarians transcending their time of crisis, it would be the Tunix Conference, held in West Berlin on the last weekend of January 1978. A month earlier, a group of friends had issued a wistful call out for this gathering of the countercultural left:
We are fed up with this country! The winter is too sad, the spring too contaminated, and the summer too suffocating. The smell from the offices, the reactors, the factories, and the highways is unbearable. The muzzles no longer taste good and neither do the plastic-wrapped sausages. The beer is as flat as are bourgeois morals. We no longer want to do the same work and make the same faces day in and day out. We have been ordered around long enough. We have had our thoughts, our ideas, our apartments, and our IDs controlled. We have had our faces smashed in. From now on, we refuse to be arrested, insulted, and turned into robots. We are leaving for the beaches of Tunix!31
