Gorleben Trek 1979

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The Gorleben Trek 1979 was a demonstration against the use of nuclear energy , which was directed in particular against planned nuclear power plants near Gorleben in the Lüchow-Dannenberg district . The trek began on March 25, 1979 in Wendland and ended as a final rally on March 31, 1979 in Hanover with around 100,000 participants. This was the largest demonstration in Lower Saxony to date and the largest anti-nuclear demonstration that had taken place in Germany until then. The high number of participants was also based on the then current accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in the USA.

occasion

The protest action of the Gorleben Trek was directed against the plans of the Lower Saxony state government to set up a reprocessing plant and a nuclear waste storage facility in the sparsely populated Wendland . The motto of the trek was in allusion to the then Prime Minister Ernst Albrecht ( CDU ) "Albrecht we are coming!".

procedure

On March 25, 1979 the trek started in Gedelitz . When he arrived at a rally in Lüchow, he formed a five-kilometer convoy with around 350 tractors and around 100 cars and cyclists. The date was chosen in order to get attention for the protest on arrival for the one-week “Gorleben Hearing ” in Hanover. On March 28, 1979, there was a partial meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant near Harrisburg . This event mobilized numerous people to join the trek. On March 31, 1979, the trek, which had grown to over 500 tractors and thousands of pedestrians, arrived in Hanover. At the Klagesmarkt in the city ​​center , opponents of nuclear power carried out the largest anti-nuclear demonstration in Germany to date. According to the organizers, around 100,000 people took part, the police put the number at around 50,000. One of the participants in the trek was Rebecca Harms ( Greens ) who later became MEP . Heinrich Pothmer , a relative of the Bundestag member Brigitte Pothmer ( Greens ), gave a speech in which he directly asked the Prime Minister to cancel the plans in Wendland. During the trek and at the final rally, the weather was rainy, which did not prevent the participants from demonstrating.

The boulder from the Wendland, erected as a memorial on the Weissekreuzplatz in Hanover

On the Weißekreuzplatz in Hanover, the demonstrators erected a boulder that weighed around 500 kg and weighed around 500 kg as a memorial opposite the pavilion cultural center . It was stolen in June 1981 by a community of citizens' initiatives for energy security and nuclear technology and replaced a month later by the rural emergency community with a stone weighing about 3 tons from Wendland. The stone is also known as the Gorlebenstein .

Effects

A few weeks after the trek, the Lower Saxony Prime Minister announced that the reprocessing plant in Wendland was politically unenforceable. The organizers of the trek saw this turn as a success of their protests.

In its Brokdorf decision , the Federal Constitutional Court named the Gorleben trek as a positive example of the peaceful implementation of a large-scale demonstration, which authorities should use as a guide in the run-up to other large-scale demonstrations.

The form of action was imitated 30 years later when another trek from Wendland to Berlin with a final rally was organized on September 5, 2009. This event was directed against the announcement by the CDU in the election campaign for the 2009 Bundestag elections that it would extend the running times for German nuclear power plants.

reception

On the 40th anniversary of the Gorleben Trek in 2019, the Historical Museum Hannover organized an exhibition in cooperation with the Institute for Didactics of Democracy , students of the History Department of the University of Hannover and the Gorleben Archive from Lüchow. It contained contemporary photos, documents, eyewitness accounts and memorabilia about the events and their effects.

See also

literature

  • Detlef Schmiechen-Ackermann , Christian Hellwig, Wienke Stegmann, Karolin Quambusch, Jenny Hagemann (eds.): The Gorleben Trek 1979. Anti-nuclear protest as a social movement and a democratic learning process. (Schriften zur Didaktik der Demokratie, Vol. 5; also: Publications of the Historical Commission for Lower Saxony and Bremen, Vol. 309) Wallstein, Göttingen 2020, ISBN 978-3-8353-3793-0 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Gisela Jaschik: March 1979: Gorleben trek to Hanover. In: North German History. ndr.de, accessed on March 22, 2011 (video).
  2. ↑ Dirk Averesch: "Berlin, we are coming!" The anti-nuclear trek rolls for election. n-tv Nachrichtenfernsehen GmbH, August 29, 2009, accessed on March 22, 2011 .
  3. ^ X-thousand times across , Hamburg regional group: ANTI-ATOM-TRECK - demo in Berlin September 5 , 2009 ( memento of March 7, 2009 in the Internet Archive ), accessed on March 22, 2011
  4. ↑ The trek began in the rain in Elbe-Jeetzel-Zeitung on March 26, 1979
  5. ↑ 50,000 to 100,000 nuclear energy generators in Hanover. Police pay tribute to the demonstrators in the Elbe-Jeetzel-Zeitung of April 2, 1979
  6. ↑ Angelika Blank: 30 years ago: the legendary tractor trek to Hanover. In: wendland-net.de. Gerhard Ziegler Internet @ gentur, March 31, 2009, archived from the original on November 2, 2012 ; Retrieved March 22, 2011 .
  7. ↑ Gorleben foundling removed in Elbe-Jeetzel-Zeitung of June 6, 1981
  8. ↑ Young farmers brought a new stumbling block in the Elbe-Jeetzel-Zeitung of July 15, 1981
  9. ↑ Jutta Oerding: Sign for a boulder , Hannoversche Allgemeine , January 15, 2010
  10. ^ The special train to Berlin in: The daily newspaper of August 31, 2009
  11. ↑ Agnes Bührig: Exhibition on 40 years of the Gorleben trek at ndr.de from March 26, 2019
  12. ↑ Tractor to Hanover at hannover.de from March 25, 2019