Yan Morvan - Berlin

The partition of Germany following its defeat in the Second World War made the country the epicentre of East-West tensions against the background of the atomic threat. The Cold War saw its agents take the country as a playground and the states use its soil to deploy an arsenal sufficient to erase the earth from the solar system. It is 1981 and «America is back», Reagan has just been elected, the ultra-conservatives are in power after the rising fevers of the previous two decades. Moscow has just installed its ss20 missiles in East Germany and the USA is about to do the same with its Pershings, their range is 1800 km, Berlin is 1822 km from Moscow. The renewed tension is palpable. The anti-nuclear, anti-militarist and ecological move- ment has logically taken on prime importance in the social conflicts that are sweeping the country. Die Grünen appeared on the scene while the RAF imposed political violence as a dialectic. This strategy of conflictual rupture with the framework imposed by bourgeois democracy left little room for the extra-par- liamentary left. On 13 September, the arrival of General Haig of the US Army saw a crowd of 70,000 people in favour of disar- mament invade the streets of West Berlin. Although the Protestant youth organisations formed the bulk of the troops with those of the SPD, they considered the situation so serious that they agreed to form a common front with the K, the communist organisa- tions. «Their motives are not the same as ours, but that doesn’t matter, as long as we serve the same purpose,» says Pastor Albertz, former SPD mayor of West Berlin. To their left are the alternative activists structured around the environmental movement, which has been mobilising for years through its action committees on concrete grounds. Then came the squatters who occu- pied 20 buildings with an anarchist tendency. They rejected the two blocks and maintained links with the more radical elements.