The regional politician is responsible for public health in the eastern state of Saxony, and the shouting protesters on her doorstep were apparently furious about measures to tackle the coronavirus pandemic.

The protest last month, widely condemned by politicians and the public alike, was not a one-off. Every week tens of thousands of Germans take to the streets to demonstrate against restrictions and vaccination.

Turning to hatred
Many protests are peaceful, but others explode into violence and experts are increasingly worried by the aggressive language and threats aimed at politicians and public figures online.

Two security officers stood guard as I interviewed Petra Köpping about her experience.

“Of course it’s disappointing. You try to make policies that protect people in a pandemic and that turns into anger and hatred.”
Petra Köpping – Health minister, state of Saxony

Some of the hatred towards her, she says, is stirred up and exploited by the far right.

“We have to make a clear distinction between organizers who engage in right-wing extremist ideology and want to change society – they don’t care about vaccination policy – and the people who come along because they’re opposed to vaccination.”

People like Björn who I met at a recent demonstration in Berlin. He’d brought along his young son and, as he held his hand in the crowd, Björn explained he wasn’t vaccinated himself because he thought the jab had been developed too quickly.

“The discrepancy between what we know and what the media tell us makes me suspicious.”

COVID has divided Germany. The unvaccinated are banned from restaurants, non-essential shops, leisure and arts facilities. And politicians are considering compulsory vaccination.

Björn was among several thousand people who marched through the brightly lit streets of the capital.

At the same time, in towns and cities across Germany, around 70,000 people took part in small, simultaneous demonstrations, some of which ended in scuffles and arrests.

Crying ‘Freedom’
Many take place on Monday nights. By advertising them as Spaziergänge, or strolls, organizers not only seek to bypass COVID laws, which might prevent a mass gathering, but also to invoke nostalgically the symbolism of the Monday night strolls that were used by pro-democracy protesters opposed to the communist regime of the old East Germany.

The crowd in Berlin shouted Freiheit – freedom – as loudspeakers blasted out antivax songs, misinformation and conspiracy: “You’d be surprised by what our politicians and public broadcasters keep secret from you – and why!”

Some German politicians have acknowledged that they’ll never persuade many of these people of the benefits and safety of the vaccine, let alone convince otherwise those who don’t believe COVID exists.

But authorities are worried by the spread of conspiracy theories and the threat of radicalisation. The number of recorded politically motivated crimes rose to its highest level in a decade last year.

“The big shift we’ve seen during the pandemic is that the more inherently violent ideas of overthrowing democracy which we’ve seen from the beginning turn more into concrete ideas,” said Miro Dittrich, who researches right-wing extremism at the Centre for Monitoring, Analysis and Strategy.

He spends his days undercover online, monitoring networks like the messaging app Telegram.

“So it’s not just ‘we’ll do a big demonstration in Berlin’, it’s ‘what are the private addresses of these people who we think are responsible for this and we have to visit their homes’.”

He pointed to an example from Telegram: a picture of the German health minister with text suggesting people storm his flat and “inject him with his own stuff”.

While he believes it would be wrong to assume that all those who express such ideas online represent a physical danger, “we’ve seen its crucial for people who actually do offline violence to feel that they have a community that agrees with them”.

Most Germans dismiss the conspiracy theories and the protesters who are, after all, very much in the minority. But the voice of discontent is loud. It’s disruptive and it’s persistent.

Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-60059543

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Photo: Imanuel Marcus

Berlin, November 12th, 2020 (The Berlin Spectator) — In the Corona year 2020, the number of protests in Berlin did not decrease, in spite of it all. As a spokesman for the Berlin Police Department told The Berlin Spectator, as many as 5,010 rallies have taken place, as of yesterday. This year, Corona deniers and Nazis, but also the Black Lives Matter movement staged the biggest rallies. First, let’s rewind time by a hundred years.

In January, Britons demonstrated against Brexit. Photo: Imanuel Marcus

On January 13th, 1920, Germany’s most tragic and bloody protest ever took place. While the Weimar National Assembly was in session at the Reichstag, some 100,000 people demonstrated in front of the building. They were left-wingers who intended to show solidarity with workers who wanted more say in companies. Those who staged the protest opposed a new law that was being discussed in the parliament. The police shot at protesters. Dozens were killed in what is known as the Reichstag Bloodbath.

Berliners Against Rearmament

Another historic Berlin protest occurred over several days in late February and early March of 1942 in Nazi Germany. During the ‘Rosenstrasse Demonstration’, non-Jewish Germans, mostly women who were married to Jewish men, demanded their spouses’ release. Earlier, 2000 Jews who were part of what the Nazis called ‘mixed marriages’, had been arrested. With a lot of courage, the participants of the rally defied Adolf Hitler’s regime.

On May 11th, 1952, seven years after Nazi Germany’s unconditional surrender, Berliners took to the streets in order to protest against the Federal Republic’s rearmament. One participant was shot by the police. A year later, in June of 1953, the East German uprising against the communists in East Berlin was crushed by Soviet forces. Thirty-four protesters and several security officers were killed.

During the student revolution, on June 2nd, 1967, a rally against Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Persia, took place in West Berlin. A policeman shot the student Benno Ohnesorg. This deadly incident increased the tensions in West Germany’s cities.

Gulf Wars and Fukushima

On the other side of the Berlin Wall, one of the most important Berlin protests ever took place thirty-one years ago, almost to the day. On November 4th, 1989, half a million GDR citizens rallied against their country’s communist regime. Only five days later, the Wall fell.

Since then, Berliners have protested against hate, both Gulf Wars, and nuclear power. After the Japanese reactors in Fukushima blew following the tsunami, tens of thousands of Berliners were on the street, demanding the shutdown of all nuclear power plants in Germany. They will get what they wanted in 2022.

Berliners keep on staging protests today. Not all of them are big, but many are. The demonstrations the Berlin Police Department counts include those with one participant or tens of thousands of them. Individuals or organizations need to register their protests beforehand. In Corona times, the right to demonstrate was restricted in the spring of 2020 when the infection numbers skyrocketed.

Source: https://berlinspectator.com/2020/11/12/berlin-capital-of-protests-2/

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