Red heart balloons seemed the favoured accessory of the 20,000 plus demonstrators who flocked to Leipzig on Saturday to protest Germany’s response to the coronavirus pandemic.
Media headlines following the event focused on violence that sparked at the margins of the protest—in large part stirred up by young hooligans there to cause trouble—but that wasn’t why most people had come. My friend, who traveled five hours by bus from southern Germany, came because under Bavaria’s strict lockdown last spring she had spent six weeks totally alone and it nearly drove her to suicide.
“They do not talk about the side effects of these lockdowns,” she said. “There is no national discussion about that.”
She was also concerned about the elderly left to die alone in nursing homes, and about children forced to wear masks in school. Many other protesters shared these concerns, touting carboard signs declaring versions of “Children need to breathe”. Theories have swirled among the anti-corona crowd that face masks were to blame for the sudden deaths of at least two children this September. However, in one case this was untrue and in the other the cause of death remains unclear.
Middle-aged women stood munching on carrot sticks packed in Ziplocks, and parents brought their children along. A man sang a song over the loud speaker which probably should have been confined to his shower: “When the masks fall, it’s a new age,” he crooned, implying a double entendre with the masks of politicians and the mainstream media which everyone I talked to believed were in cahoots. Not all were content to stop at singing. The German journalists union DJU reported that at least 38 journalists were either restricted from doing their work or physically attacked during the protests, mostly by anti-corona protesters but also by some counter-demonstrators and police (in the case of restricting access).
Two women in their 50s or 60s asked if I supported Trump or Biden in the U.S. election and were dismayed at my answer.
“Many here want Trump to come and liberate Germany,” my friend told me after. “Trump or Putin.”
Later, when the sun had set, thousands walked through the twisting streets of the inner city holding candles and chanting “Frieden, Freiheit, keine Diktator” – Peace, Freedom, no Dictator. No one said the message had to be consistent.
The main protest was organized by a group known as Querdenken – lateral thinkers – or thinking outside the box. The group’s main Telegram channel has over 68,800 subscribers. This is not the first major demonstration against corona restrictions in Germany, nor will it be the last. In between major events like this one, smaller protests seem to pop up on weekends like groundhogs in spring. In October, Germany’s federal health authority – the Robert Koch Institute – was pelted with bottles and Molotov Cocktails, although the perpetrators have not been found nor their precise affiliations determined.
The Leipzig protest was intended to harken to the “Peaceful Revolution” of 1989 when a weekly prayer meeting ballooned into massive candlelit marches in the autumn of 1989 calling for the fall of the GDR and reunification of Germany.
Some of the more radical 2020 protesters wanted a similar downfall of Germany’s current government. Others just wanted what they considered to be more democratic decision making.
As I rode the train out of Leipzig that evening, a man told me through his cloth mask that he was concerned about the apparent lack of clarity among scientists and the way in which political decisions had been made.
“We only hear Dr. Drosten,” he said, referring to Germany’s most prominent virologist who has been quoted by the print media four times more than any other expert in the country. “What about others who think differently?”
An engineer with Germany’s national train company, the 40-something-year-old man agreed corona was an urgent problem.
“Of course I think corona is real, everyone in that demonstration will say that. But the response is too extreme.”
Several smaller protests were held in cobbled church squares on the margins of the main event. On one stage, the MC waved a rainbow flag under the banner “Parents stand up”. Nearby a small group clustered around a man decrying the apparent infiltration of Islam into German politics. “No one is allowed to criticize Islam or they will be arrested,” he shouted into the microphone, as police stood by to protect him and the crowd from possible threats.
Indeed, resistance towards the government’s corona response has built its ranks from a broad mishmash of ideologies. Support for the QAnon conspiracy has rocketed upwards in Germany propelled by corona skepticism, some protesters wave German nationalist symbols and hail from extreme right factions, but there are also barefoot hippies playing ukulele and a spattering of rainbow flags, Gandhi quotes and people who want greater consideration of alternate views. Experts on extremism have worried that the community created through corona resistance could lure even the more reasonable of these disparate groups into radical rightwing ideologies.
At the edges of the protest, police had cordoned off counter-protesters with a wall of vans and chains of policemen and women. Enemies, protected from one another. Groups of men dressed in black wandered about, somehow slipping through the police-protected battle lines. Most were young, very young. I asked a small group why that had come.
“To beat up some Nazis,” one, who could not have been more than 20, shouted over his shoulder to me as the group scuttled away.
Later, fire crackers were thrown into a crowd on a small side street and a bunch of the black-clad men – Antifa apparently – ran past, away from the little mess they’d caused. A mother who had brazenly brought along two young children and a puppy, tried to move them out of the way as her daughter burst into tears, her red heart balloon bobbing along overhead.
It’s unclear how much of the light violence the occurred later in the night was attributable to the corona demonstrators themselves or to these gangs and other far-left counter-protesters – it appears a significant portion was the latter.
The Police have come under harsh criticism for not enforcing social distancing and mask wearing. After calling an end to the main demonstration in Augustusplatz around 3:30 pm due to the failure of protesters to observe these rules, the Police still allowed demonstrators to complete their candlelit walk through the city, and videos circulating online show chains of people dancing and singing without masks.
But, there was also no significant violence or injury, which seems quite an accomplishment given the pressure cooker of a situation generated by mutually-hating groups protesting side-by-side. As to accusations the Police allowed a super-spreader event to go on unbridled, Leipzig Police chief Torsten Schultze responded in a video: “You do not fight a pandemic through police force, but only with the common sense of the people.”
tararachael 