Demonstrations in Munich: Against the war, but not together

The artist Günter Wangerin has built a soldier out of wood. He has marched mechanically on Königsplatz, on a stage that shows large pictures of Berlin in 1945, Auschwitz and Belgrade in 1999. These are the results, that is his message, when soldiers start marching. A picture of Poland in 1939 can also be seen, as a reminder of the attack by Nazi Germany on the neighboring country. September 1 is from Trade Unions marked as a day against the war. At the same time, 85 years after the German invasion, called “A lateral thinker“ the traditional union day to gather on Marienplatz.

Another artist, Walter Kuhn, presented the organizers on Königsplatz with large poppies from his installation “Never again”; It was intended to remember the victims of all wars. Now there are some flowers in the lawn and they are just begging to be picked. So on this hot Sunday afternoon they will be improvised parasols at the Verdi union gathering. “Fascism and war again” is the demand, a few hundred people came to the Glyptothek. Many participants belong to leftist and leftist organizations and institutions, other trade unions and the peace movement. The proportion of elderly people is very high.

You will hear a speech by Konstantin Wecker. The Munich singer-songwriter is strongly defending himself against the Bavarian law which is intended to make it easier for the Bundeswehr to cooperate with state schools and universities. Wecker calls for civil disobedience to bring universities and other educational institutions back to a purely civil path. Wecker will not hear the praise; his speech comes from the tape.

Horst Schmitthenner is the keynote speaker at Anti-War Day. He used to sit on Verdi’s federal board and is introduced as “a child of war, he knows what he’s talking about”. He was born in July 1941, shortly after the German invasion of the Soviet Union. Schmitthenner criticizes German arms and arms exports. He wants the military to be stopped and the money earmarked for the military to be used to reduce the social divide in Germany. “Above all, it is the division of society into rich and poor, top and bottom, that accounts for the electoral success of the AfD, that is social security for the -all”.

One would expect a similar slogan on Marienplatz. Here too, Picasso’s dove of peace in many variations. And surely some people are worried about the same thing as those gathered at Königsplatz: peace.

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But the posters that welcome them take on a different tone. “Get rid of the total idiots in government,” he says in capital letters, for example. Several posters and flags show the colors of Russia. parties will be as the day before at the meeting of citizens of the Reich — destroyed as the root of all evil. Not all of them, of course: the lateral thinking party “Basic” is very well represented. AfD poster “Peace!” maintained. Several flags of the German-Russian Druzhba Campaign, co-founded by Today’s AfD Member of the Bundestag Rainer Rothfuß from Lindaublowing right in front of the stage.

Reich citizens who had demonstrated against the Federal Republic and for the Empire the day before are mixed with the friends of peace. A T-shirt of the right-wing extremist “Identitarians” is on a package and, according to the information portal “Endstation Rechts”, he was formerly an activist of the Munich Pegida.

The event should last a long time. Shortly after 6pm the Dresden actor Uwe Steimle appeared, who has been traveling between positions right and left for years. At the same time the first election results from the country of Steimle were published. Steimle explained that the CDU could have been the strongest party in Saxony according to initial forecasts as a “supervised vote”. He spoke of a collapsing system and made an indirect comparison between the CDU and the former SED.

Before that, according to the police, 3,500 participants marched through the old town and the Gärtnerplatzviertel to the sound of drums.

On the Querdenker stage at the start of the event, journalist Ulrike Guérot blamed the West for the war in Ukraine not ending – the governments “and the stock market and the media behind them”. A real “war euphoria” had been created, he said who was a professor at the University of Bonn. Putin’s Russia hardly appears in her speech – at least not as an aggressor. Russia was “systematically poorly written” and “Putin’s out-hand” was not taken. When Guérot says: “The question is no longer who started the war in Ukraine, but who will end it,” there was great joy on Marienplatz. On September 1, the anniversary of the German invasion of Poland.