Gen Z

Between Climate Crisis and Coronavirus Pandemic

Klaus Hurrelmann, Erik Albrecht

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000395785
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Behavioural Management

Gen Z is a vital, thought-provoking portrait of an astonishing generation. Drawing on first-hand interviews and empirical evidence, it offers insight into the boom in political activism amongst those born post-2000, exploring its roots and wide implications for the future of our society.

As environmental disaster threatens the fundamental existence and livelihoods of Generation Z, this book considers how the fact that they have taken up the fight is likely to be one of the best things that could have happened to them. Focusing on the school climate change strikes and Greta Thunberg as initiator and icon of the Fridays for Future movement, it reveals the evolving world of Gen Z at school, at work, at home and online. It documents the development of their politicisation, the challenges they and their activism face in light of the global pandemic and considers how the experience of those on the margins can differ from their peers.

Gen Z is a compelling study of how fighting the climate crisis is only the beginning for these young people. It offers insight for all those interested in the study of adolescence and emerging adulthood, as well as teachers, youth workers, civil society activists, policymakers, politicians and parents who want to understand young people's aspirations for the future.

Chapter 1

The climate crisis is just the beginning

Who are the young protesters and what do they want?

Fridays for Future

“No life on Saturn,” reads the poster Camilla holds up in dreary downtown Dortmund. Underneath: “Save the Earth now.” The 20-something activist stands in front of a franchise of the popular electronics store bearing the same name on the city’s main drag. About two dozen climate activists have donned makeshift costumes for the demonstration: A little glitter on their faces and gold foil from a cut-up thermal blanket on their heads has to suffice to identify them as aliens from another planet. While Dortmund grew rich on coal mining and the steel industry, the deindustrialisation of the second half of the last century has been deeply painful for many here.

While Camilla keeps vigil in front of the Saturn store, the rest of the group goes shopping. The store’s one-man security team can do little to stop the rush of young people coming through the doors. With languid, space-like movements they slowly glide up the escalator to the upper floors and are soon dancing through the narrow aisles between coffee machines and hi-fi systems, calling on buyers and employees alike to go on climate strike. In the end, their call to action is displayed on computer screens throughout the store. In the drugstore next door, Camilla’s fellow activists are ordered from the premises.

Since the summer of 2018, students across the world have demonstrated on nearly every Friday for the climate during the school year. In Germany, the first group met in Bad Segeberg, a small town in northern Germany, to engage in “political truancy”: Instead of going to school, they went to the town hall to demonstrate with handmade posters and banners. A week later, about 300 students gathered in front of the Bundestag (the parliament building) in Germany’s capital Berlin. “They all came without knowing what it would lead to,” recalls Luisa Neubauer, one of the initiators, who was to become one of the most prominent faces of the protest in the following months. “Either success or just a wasted hour and trouble from parents and teachers.”¹

By 2019, the movement was spreading nationwide. Local groups quickly formed, often organised from within existing student councils at secondary schools. At the end of January 2019, 5,000 students gathered in Berlin for the Friday demonstrations and formed the movement Fridays for Future Germany (FFFD). On 1 March 2019, Greta Thunberg took part in a German demonstration for the first time – in Hamburg.

Today, FFFD is one of Germany’s largest social movements, with about 600 local groups. Fridays for Future (FFF) has gained a foothold in almost every European country and has spread to other continents. By spring 2019, the movement had brought more than 1.6 million people onto the streets worldwide, and by autumn of that year, the number had almost doubled. Greta Thunberg, the icon of the movement, spoke in front of the EU Parliament, the World Economic Forum and the United Nations. No youth movement has ever received so much global attention.²

At the climate conference in Madrid in December 2019, FFF was present at every meeting venue. Young people arrived from every continent and loudly demonstrated – “What do we want? Climate justice!” – for speedy international agreements to stem the tide of this crisis. Once again, Greta Thunberg by her presence alone made it impossible for the delegates representing the 197 treaty countries to ignore the movement and its arguments.

In Germany, initial amazement about the new youth movement was quickly followed by a public debate on the question of “Don’t they have to be at school?” The students, however, deliberately chose their form of protest; they are convinced that the government needed a wake-up call to finally take action on climate issues. It is, after all, their entire future that is at stake.

The use of school strikes as a targeted act of civil disobedience garnered overwhelming and unparalleled public attention for the demonstrations. Students copied Greta Thunberg’s idea after she began picketing in front of the Swedish parliament in Stockholm every Friday instead of going to school.

In Germany, school attendance is compulsory until the age of 16, and home-schooling is illegal except in extraordinary circumstances (as the coronavirus pandemic illustrated a year later). When young people fail to attend class, the school administration formally records the absence. This absence does not appear on their report card as long as they submit a written statement from their legal guardians, usually their parents. If there are repeated absences, however, and a student does not provide a note from their parents, the police are usually called in. Parents can receive a warning or a fine for their children’s unexcused absences.

In such a strictly regulated school system, school strikes involved numerous levels of authority: First, the parents, who had to write absence notes for their children, then the teachers, the school administration and the educational authorities. It also attracted the attention of the media, which granted extensive coverage to the strikes. “Skipping school” became a provocative means to an end and, soon enough, allowed the young activists to place their message at the centre of public debate, putting pressure on the government’s climate policy.

Germany’s energy policy has been up for vociferous debate since the West German anti-nuclear power movement entered the public consciousness in the 1970s. After the subsequent phase-out of nuclear energy, hopes were high that the country would use that momentum to become a global pioneer in the use of renewable energy sources – but these hopes were subsequently dashed.

In early 2019, FFF stepped into the gap between expectations and reality by loudly drawing attention to the government’s failures. In its struggle to stop climate change, FFF has joined forces with many other – often more radical – environmental movements to fight against specific issues like the continued mining of lignite coal in the Lausitz region or the construction of new motorways in Hesse. While the Green Party’s success in the 2019 European elections showed that it was possible to win elections based on climate and environmental policy, it was Fridays for Future that managed to place the climate crisis at the top of the political agenda. Suddenly, it became all too clear just how hollow, bland and insincere the policies of the two traditional mainstream parties – the reform-oriented Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the pair of conservative sister parties, Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and Christian Social Union (CSU) – were on the subject of the climate crisis.

Public attention was thus primed when, on 20 September 2019, FFF’s climate activists called for a worldwide day of action. In cities across Germany – and across the world – smaller and larger groups came together to protest against government inaction on climate change. In Berlin alone, over 100,000 people of all ages and walks of life marched from the Brandenburg Gate to Alexanderplatz, a huge public square about three kilometres away. FFF estimated that 1.4 million demonstrators participated nationwide.

As people gathered in front of the Brandenburg Gate for the largest climate demonstration Berlin had ever seen, the German government’s ‘climate cabinet’ was heading home for a change of clothes and a snack. Throughout the night, for almost 19 hours straight, they had struggled to negotiate a government package with measures to combat the climate crisis. In the end, the results were anything but the “great leap” that SPD Finance Minister Olaf Scholz had promised. Even business associations – alongside scientists, environmental associations and members of the opposition – criticised the measures as too feeble. Very few, even among the Fridays for Future activists, had expected the government to meet all of their demands, but the fact that the “climate package” would turn out to be such a small parcel was nonetheless a bitter pill for many.

Since then, it has seemed certain that Germany will not meet the climate targets set by the government for 2030. Nevertheless, since 20 September 2019, there is no longer a viable political path around the issue – which is considerably more than many previous movements have ever achieved. Indeed, a year later, in their attempt to forestall the impending collapse of the economy due to the coronavirus pandemic, the government adopted an economic stimulus package worth a staggering 130 billion euros that did not give in to efforts by lobbyists from the traditional industrial powerhouses to ignore environmental considerations in the face of economic necessity. On the contrary, in addition to a temporary reduction in the value added tax and a one-time bonus payment to parents of minors, programmes were introduced to encourage the improvement of public transport networks, the purchase of electric cars and the expansion of both the hydrogen economy and quantum technologies. The plan is for Germany to exit this crisis greener than it had entered it. Beyond that, another thing stands out: The young FFF activists have always called for quick, decisive action supported by scientific expertise, in contrast to politicians, who often argue that such action is simply too disruptive. In the wake of the pandemic, the government proved its own politicians wrong.

That being said, the shockwave of infections shifted public attention from the climate crisis to health issues overnight, creating a very real danger that the pandemic would blow away the young environmental movement. Large street demonstrations, FFF’s most important trademark and organising strategy, were difficult or impossible to continue due to the lockdown and subsequent restrictions on the right of assembly. In addition, the provocative “school strike” completely lost its effect during the school closures, which lasted for weeks. Nevertheless, it has become clear that a politically active young generation has made an indelible mark on society, and many leading figures have pointed to the close connection between the climate crisis and the pandemic. The movement’s most prominent speaker in Germany, Luisa Neubauer, argued in an interview with National Public Radio in June 2020:

The nature of the coronavirus crisis is completely different from the climate crisis. The climate crisis comes at you with less heft, but it requires more incisive action. […] We can still learn a lot from the coronavirus crisis: We can take crises seriously. We can listen to science. We can come together internationally…we can make politics intergenerational.³

Throughout the pandemic, the movement has continued to emphasise the absolute priority of combating the climate crisis. In the meantime, it has been forced to get creative, by inventing new digital forms of protest and resuming small-scale rallies on Fridays in strict compliance with all social-distancing rules and hygiene regulations – and by expanding its field of action: It now openly supports other movements with different priorities. Following the murder of George Floyd by the police in Minneapolis (USA) at the end of May 2020, numerous FFF activists participated in the organisation of Black Lives Matter demonstrations. Their fight against climate change has transformed many in this generation into seasoned political actors – with the energy and stamina to stay the course.

Suddenly political?

When the bell rings in the late-nineteenth-century hallways of Sophie Scholl Secondary School in Berlin-Schöneberg, the doors to the classrooms fly open. The voices of more than a thousand students, from seventh to thirteenth grade, reverberate from the corridors’ vaulted ceilings, as the building’s staircases channel the masses to their next lesson. Everyday school life – on Fridays no less than on any other weekday.

Secondary schools such as Sophie School offer all three school leaving certifications – the basic qualification after nine, the intermediate qualification after ten, and the most advanced pre-university qualification (Abitur) after 12 or 13 years. Only some of the students attend the Fridays for Future protests in Berlin’s Invalidenpark on a regular basis. “I’d like to go more often,” says Adrian, an eight-grader. “But sometimes it doesn’t work out. Last time, we had a test in class.”

And yet environmentalism and climate change are ubiquitous in the hallways of the school. While the thick walls of the old building keep out the heat of a Central European summer with record temperatures, the Amazon is burning. Samira, a classmate of Adrian’s, is horrified by Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s attitude on the issue. “He just can’t understand what’s going on,” Adrian adds. “What is stupid is that he even refused to allow others to come in and help fight it.”

Since Fridays for Future took off, Adrian’s mother does not buy food in plastic packaging anymore; Adrian insists on it. But he also knows it is not enough. “That’s pretty much it,” he admits. “There’s not much you can do as an individual,” explains Adrian. “Politics has to change.” In so doing, he is echoing one of the basic demands made by those young people taking to the streets. They know that individual sacrifices will not save the planet, which is why they want to see more regulation of polluting industries from politicians and the state. Whether industry and transportation, consumption and agriculture, building refurbishment or air travel – the message is that climate policy must affect all areas of our lives if we want to stop the climate crisis or at a minimum mitigate its consequences.

Young people are becoming more political again. And while this is true for virtually all highly developed countries, the shift is particularly noticeable in Germany. Whereas at the turn of the millennium, only one in three young people stated that they were interested in politics, today that figure has increased to just under one in two. It is also striking that the percentage of those who are “very” interested is particularly high. The last time young people were more interested in politics than now was in 1991 – the era of German reunification, during which 57 percent of young people were interested in politics. And that is not all: Among the younger generation of 12 to 25-year-olds, politics has become cool again: 35 percent say that it is “in” to become actively involved.⁴

As much as young people’s political activism came as a surprise to the wider public, it has been quietly manifesting itself for some time. As early as 2007, studies among primary school children in Germany showed a high level of self-confidence and a great interest in actively shaping their everyday lives at home and at school. The worries and fears of the six to eleven-year-olds interviewed were also striking: Terrorism and war, increasing poverty, and, in particular, increasing environmental pollution.⁵

The yo...