Civil Disobedience and the German Courts

The Pershing Missile Protests in Comparative Perspective

Peter E. Quint

• Publisher: Routledge-Cavendish
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134107414
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Law Theory & Practice
• Index: Law

In the 1980s the West German Peace Movement -- fearing that the stationing of NATO nuclear missiles in Germany threatened an imminent nuclear war in Europe -- engaged in massive protests, including sustained civil disobedience in the form of sit-down demonstrations.

Civil Disobedience and the German Courts traces the historical and philosophical background of this movement and follows a group of demonstrators through their trials in the German criminal courts up to the German Constitutional Court -- in which their fate was determined in two important constitutional cases. In this context, the volume also analyzes the German Constitutional Court, as a crucial institution of government, in comparative perspective.

The book is the first full-length English language treatment of these events andconstitutional decisions, and it also places the decisions at an important turning-point in German constitutional history.

Chapter 1
The anti-missile demonstrations

The protests and their context

In a particular patch of land in Mutlangen, a small town near Stuttgart Germany, a casual visitor would find little out of the ordinary now. On an autumn evening not too long ago, a lone power shovel stood in the fields and two large bunkers, covered over with earth and grass, lay empty or had been converted to serve modest ends. One of the bunkers, for example, provided shelter for a flock of sheep and acted as a storage bin for bales of straw. On that cool autumn evening, the purple outline of the “Swabian Alb”—the high Swabian plateau—was visible against the sky.

It was a peaceful moment, and for a visitor it was difficult to imagine that, just a few years earlier, this quiet field contained the main repository of deadly Pershing II nuclear missiles in Germany and that, as a result, it was the scene of almost continuous protests by members of the German peace movement. In most cases, these demonstrations at Mutlangen were limited to a handful of protestors—normally less than a hundred participants at a time, engaging in a quiet form of civil disobedience. But, on occasion, crowds of demonstrators swelled to several thousands, blocking truck and tank traffic traveling up the main road to the Pershing missile base.

Little evidence of this tumultuous history remained in those tranquil fields by the end of the 1990s. Yet considerable commotion of a different sort was evident upon a return visit shortly thereafter; builders were constructing large suburban houses and quaint winding roads on a large tract of adjacent field—the historic Mutlangen Meadow (Mutlanger Heide)—and this development threatened to expand into the territory of the former missile base itself. Perhaps the people of Mutlangen were happy enough to erase some last traces of their town’s conspicuous role in the history of the Cold War.

Not too many miles away—on the high Swabian plateau itself—the village of Großengstingen (Big Engstingen) lies amid an idyllic setting of forests and fields. (The even tinier village of Kleinengstingen—Little Engstingen—nestles on a slope nearby.) On the hillside above Großengstingen, a narrow road leads through pine forests into a deserted complex of concrete buildings. On a spring day in 2000, a visitor to this quiet spot could hear little more than the call of birds; massive white clouds drifted across a pale blue sky.

The deserted complex was an odd sight with its watch-towers looming over two empty bunkers—once repositories of Lance short-range nuclear missiles, but now (it is said) the home of nocturnal bats. The traces of previous military habitation were few: a large blue board with hooks for perhaps 40 keys—carefully labeled, but now completely empty—lay abandoned on the ground. On a metal shelf, an American soldier had used a felt-tipped pen to write an obscene note to the Soviet troops who he thought might be coming one day. At the inner gate of the base, someone had erected a large hand-painted sign that proclaimed: “Memorial Site: Battlefield of the Cold War, 1945-1991.”

The outer gate of the complex, at the foot of the hill at Großengstingen, was also the scene of dramatic sit-down demonstrations, leading to hundreds of arrests. The demonstrations at Großengstingen were in general earlier than those in Mutlangen. Indeed, these protests were among the first sit-down demonstrations in Germany against NATO nuclear missiles.

The sit-down blockades and the “double-track” decision

Protesting the Lance missiles—Großengstingen

The demonstrations against the Lance missiles at Großengstingen began with a small blockade in July 1981, in which 13 protestors chained themselves to the entrance of a nearby German army barracks.¹ Following this modest beginning, the protests in Großengstingen reached their high point in the summer of 1982 with a series of demonstrations that extended over an entire week and involved approximately 700 participants, who had come from several parts of Germany and abroad. Because accommodation was scarce in this somewhat remote rural area, organizers of the week-long protest established five “Tent Villages” in fields borrowed from local farmers, and they arranged with the fire departments from surrounding towns to keep the “villages” supplied with water.

The organization of the 1982 Tent Village protests involved considerable complexity.² The hundreds of demonstrators were organized on the basis of so-called “affinity groups” (Bezugsgruppen)—closely knit associations of up to 15 protestors, typically drawn together by friendship or common political views. Bearing fanciful—but pointed—names such as Termite, Nettle, and Grain of Sand,³ approximately 50 “affinity groups” formed the basic units of the 1982 Tent Village demonstrations.

Typically, the blockades of the Tent Village protestors followed rotations of six-hour shifts. During each six-hour period, three affinity groups sat before the gates of the Lance missile base—supported by back-up groups in case the police cleared the area by arresting demonstrators and carrying them away. The demonstrators were generally cleared twice a day—when provisions for the base, or soldiers relieving those on duty, were transported into the compound. All in all, at least 400 protestors were arrested during the week of the Tent Villages in the summer of 1982.⁴

In this protest, and in many later anti-missile protests, strict non-violence was an absolute requirement. Before the demonstrations began, the protestors participated in joint “trainings”—this supposed English plural was taken over directly into German—in the theory and practice of non-violence. Indeed, participation in a weekend training session was a requirement for participation in the Tent Village demonstrations.

In these and later “trainings,” the central purpose was to help protestors internalize the principles of non-violence, so that their resistance would remain passive even if they were confronted with the violent acts of others. In the trainings, for example, participants were sometimes divided into two groups for the purposes of playing the roles of protestors and “police officers.” They were then required to confront each other at close quarters in order to simulate and understand the tensions that each side might face in a real confrontation. In this way the organizers sought to ensure that this large demonstration of hundreds of protestors would remain non-violent even in the face of provocations.⁵

The “trainings” in non-violence, and the use of affinity groups, were influenced by similar preparations for American demonstrations against planned atomic power plants at Seabrook New Hampshire in 1979 and Diablo Canyon California in 1981.⁶ Of course, the practice of training participants in non-violence goes back to the American civil rights movement of the 1950s,⁷ and to the passive resistance organized by Mahatma Gandhi decades earlier; moreover, it is said that the idea of affinity groups originated in Republican military units in the Spanish Civil War.⁸ Yet the immediate inspiration for these methods of organization was the massive protests against nuclear power plants in the United States and Germany, and this is only one of the several ways in which the anti-missile protests were influenced by these slightly earlier environmental demonstrations.⁹

In the German protests the affinity groups played a particularly important role, and they made their decisions—for example, whether or not to take part in an illegal blockade—based on the principle of unanimity. The affinity groups were particularly crucial because they offered individual protestors an intimate and reliable refuge within a huge and otherwise anonymous demonstration—with its attendant anxiety in the face of possible injury or arrest. As the planning Handbook for the 1982 Tent Village protests put it:

[In the affinity groups] we can largely avoid the anonymity, insecurity and feelings of isolation [that are present], above all, in the case of [protests] with numerous participants. Here we can find a basis of trust, which would make it possible for individuals to express their anxieties and show their feelings.¹⁰

In the 1982 protest at Großengstingen, coordination among the affinity groups was maintained through a complex system of councils linking the five Tent Villages which—because of the difficulty of finding farmers willing to allow use of their land—were located as far as 10 miles from the missile site itself.

In the course of the Großengstingen protests, participants often tried to engage soldiers and bystanders in conversation about the goals of the blockade. Although military personnel on duty had strict orders not to fraternize with the protestors, off-duty soldiers in street clothes would occasionally appear at the blockade to discuss the issues. Furthermore, numerous “blockade tourists”—students, neighboring farmers, even a representative of the conservative political party, the CDU—came around for “pa...