"What Gives Them The Right?" Potsdam Protestors say NO to G8

At first, it seems like no one’s gonna show. At 3:30, only a few lonesome protestors are scattered across the grassy field in front of Potsdam’s Hauptbahnhof (main train station). Gregor – a young anarchist whose self-assured calm belies his 18 years – plops down on an elevated mound of earth and plants a small flag into the dirt. Further afield, a trio of uncharacteristically quiet teenage girls crouches on a log. The otherwise gentle afternoon is somewhat scruffied up by a boisterous group of older punks sitting around chatting and smoking, but to anyone who has spent more than five minutes in Berlin or its environs, this, too, is part and parcel of the everyday landscape. The only real indication that anything is out of the ordinary on this (finally!) sunny Wednesday afternoon is the eerie row of police vans – parked bumper to bumper – that surround the field. Near them, green clusters of police men and women stand grimly by 50 to every one protestor sitting, smoking or chattering on the grass.

But then things begin to stir. The Anti-G8 Bündnis Potsdam (Anti-G8 Confederation of Potsdam) has organized a demonstration for 4:00 o’clock—“against G8, war, exploitation and capitalism,” according to the website.  At 3:50, the flow of traffic through the Hauptbahnhof doors increases. The volume of black tapered jeans, silver-spiked belts and colorful mohawks increases ten-fold. Police start frisking arrivées (only those pierced enough to look the part of nefarious troublemaker, of course). What ten minutes earlier was an unimpressive (unpolitical?) gathering of malcontents is now suddenly a diverse and sizeable assembly of protestors. Thirty-year-old punks stand alongside 14-year-old anarchists, who stand alongside dreadlocked hippies, who stand alongside old school Communists, who stand alongside well-groomed medical students.

It’s time for a march.  

The pretext is this: the foreign ministers of the G8 states are meeting in Potsdam today (30 May) to discuss, according to the German foreign ministry website, Kosovo, the Middle East and Pakistan, amongst other things. The protestors I meet, though, have little to say about political problems in the former Yugoslavia. They are here to protest the general, not the specific. Dreadlocked, mohawked or — less frequently — perfectly coiffed, they are here to say: we don’t like the world you’ve made and we don’t like the way you run it.     

“Sure, people tell us, ‘There is no point,’” admits 17-year-old Julia, a Potsdam native. “But doing this is better than doing nothing. Anything is better than nothing.” She seems to voice a general sentiment. None of the protestors I meet entertain any illusions about the effect their march will have on the G8 foreign ministers; but all believe in the possibility of change and the importance of speaking up. “Even if I could talk to the foreign ministers, they wouldn’t listen to me,” explains Gregor. “They don’t want to understand me. But still, it’s important that they see that not everyone agrees with them. I want to show them that I think differently.”   

Thinking differently is something that unites the surprisingly diverse group of marchers. Gregor walks while waving the flag of the FAU (Freie Arbeiterinnen- und Arbeiter-Union, or Free Workers’ Union), an anarcho-syndicalist labor union that constitutes the German branch of the International Workers Association (IWA). Detlef, a 65-year-old Berliner, hands out flyers for RSB (Revolutionär Sozialistische Bund, or Revolutionary Socialist League), a small, Trotskyite group that forms part of the Fourth International. Three older men carrying DKP (Deutsche Kommunistische Partei, or German Communist Party) flags follow closely behind. And spread out amongst them, many – like Julia and her friends – march under no flag, for no party. Perhaps a question of Gregor’s best captures their collective feeling towards the foreign ministers: “What gives them the right to impose their morals on us?”

But though there is great hope, there is not great energy. Perhaps it’s being saved for Rostock and Heiligendamm? Some catchy tunes and a few short and intermittent speeches blast through various speakers, to be sure. But the latter are fairly similar in character and fairly unsurprising, even if well-delivered. Whether or not they are well-received is hard to determine; no loud shouts or whistles punctuate the air, no explosions of clapping. This is a relatively subdued protest.

Which isn’t to say unimpassioned. The people with whom I speak are all of the convicted, not the “it seems pretty cool to demonstrate” variety of protestor whose aggressiveness and vandalism often compromise any intended socio-political message (think, for example, of the drunken late-night crowd at Boxhagener Platz in Berlin on 1 May). Even if what they have to say is often vague (e.g. we don’t like the way the world looks), the Potsdam protestors are damned serious and refreshingly uncynical. “As youth, we are in a position to do something,” insists Julia. “We are the future of this country and we don’t want a future we don’t like.” Her fellow youth seem to agree: the majority of protestors look like they are under the age of 18 (I saw multiple sets of braced teeth). Perhaps more surprising is the degree of optimism expressed by the older protestors: “I want another world,” says Detlef in a tone of voice indicating he thinks he can get it. “We don’t need this one.”

But while the over-60s and under-20s are holding it down big-time for the anti-G8 today, there is one age group conspicuously absent: the 25-45-year-olds. Are they all happy with the current world order? According to Julia, “They have lived their lives the way the system wanted them too. And because of that, they’ve lost the part of themselves that would want to fight today.” Or, another protestor pipes up, “they are all at work.” Exactly.

Despite the absence of a fairly important age bracket, the march seems to fulfill the expectations of those who come. “I’m glad we can do something here, at a local level,” reports Gregor. “The anti-G8 protest should be decentralized. I can start discussions with people here — convince people — more easily than in Heiligendamm because I know where these people are coming from.” Herbert, a long-time member of the DKP, is happy to see so many young people on the streets – potential recipients of the Marxist schooling he hopes to disseminate. And Julia and her friends have, against the advice of their elders, successfully expressed the fact that they don’t accept the status quo.

Which, after all, is the whole point. “They try to dictate their economy and way of life to the world,” says Gregor of the G8 members. But, contends Herbert, “These states don’t have a mandate from the world.” Sure, the Potsdam protestors have some specific complaints and questions for the G8 foreign ministers (take Julia, for example, who asks: “If governments don’t do anything about global warming because they are afraid of damaging their economies, will there even be any economies left to protect?”). But for the most part, the message these demonstrators want to send is that the G8 way isn’t the only way, that there are alternative worldviews and multiple "right" answers. Like Herbert, they are asking: “Why isn’t everyone allowed to live according to his conscience?” Both old and young alike expect an answer…eventually. For them, the permanence of the presence is just an illusion, and to all the skeptics, cynics and apathetes who may wonder, stare or snicker, they pose the questions that Detlef poses: “Why do you say that we can’t do anything? How do you live without hope?”