Olof Palme Peace March

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From the CFK organized Thuringia demonstration of the Olof Palme Peace march on 19 September 1987 by the Buchenwald concentration camp after Kapellendorf

The Olof Palme Peace March was a three-country peace demonstration . The march consisted of several pilgrimage routes that led across the territory of the GDR from September 1 to 18 and 19, 1987 , and in which groups of the political opposition in the GDR could legally participate.

The march was named after the former Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme , who was murdered on February 28, 1986. In view of the arms race between East and West, Palme had spoken out in favor of a nuclear-weapon-free corridor in Central Europe .

prehistory

The peace march was initiated by the German Peace Society - United War Resisters in the Federal Republic , the Peace Council of the GDR and the Peace Committee of the ČSSR . In addition to state representatives of the peace movement, at the insistence of the West German co-initiators, the Federation of Evangelical Churches in the GDR was also allowed to take part in the peace march. The march was announced in New Germany in the spring of 1987 and coincided with Erich Honecker's visit to the Federal Republic of Germany from September 7th to 11th, 1987 .

procedure

The peace march started on September 1st at Olof-Palme-Platz in Stralsund and led via Burow , Potsdam , Wittenberg and Meißen to Dresden . At the same time, independent events took place at various locations, mostly organized by the Evangelical Church. On September 5th , around 1000 people took part in a demonstration in the Berlin district of Prenzlauer Berg , which led from the Zionskirche to the Gethsemanekirche .

The highlight was a suggestion of Action Reconciliation carried out several days of pilgrimage from the memorial Ravensbrück to Sachsenhausen Memorial . The route was reminiscent of the death march of concentration camp prisoners in 1945. The participants in the peace march were greeted by the mayor and pastor in the individual villages. After the peace prayer in the church, state and opposition participants planted the "peace tree" together. On the pilgrimage, banners with the symbol of the peace movement swords to plowshares and peace-political demands for a social peace service for conscientious objectors or the end of military indoctrination in kindergartens and schools, but also with domestic political slogans, for example against nuclear power plants or the demarcation policy of the GDR, were carried along.

On the last part of the journey on September 19, from the Buchenwald National Memorial and Memorial to the “Thomas Müntzer” Evangelical Community Center in Kapellendorf , around 500 participants, including the later Thuringian Prime Minister Christine Lieberknecht , took part. The pastors from the Herderkirche in Weimar and von Denstedt welcomed the peace pilgrims on their way, who carried banners and peace slogans on which there were domestic political demands, but above all the demand for a chemical and nuclear weapons-free corridor in Europe according to Palmes and Honecker's ideas. This march was organized by the state-affiliated Christian Peace Conference (CFK) Thuringia under the direction of the Protestant pastor and unofficial employee of the Ministry for State Security (MfS) Peter Franz .

Independent opposition groups from Jena, Weimar and Erfurt took part in the Weimar March with a large number of banners such as “For the demilitarization of school lessons”, “Yes - we need new wallpaper”, “Guitars instead of creaking”, “Glasnost”. Some participants left the officially prescribed route and walked across the market square past the Weimar town hall to meet the Weimar mayor, which did not succeed. The MfS recorded the entire march in Weimar in photo documentation for the purpose of evaluating and identifying the participants. A German delegation from Trier and journalists from West Germany, who were just in Weimar to sign a town twinning agreement, took no notice of the extraordinary event because the organizers had obviously succeeded in getting them off on an excursion at the crucial hours Keep out of town.

Political importance

After the peace march, many members of the opposition hoped that the SED would deal more liberally with demonstrators . Earlier demonstrations had always been ended violently, but the GDR rarely took action against the opposition during the peace march. However, the fears that Honecker's visit to Bonn in particular had led to the SED leadership allowing the demonstrators to go ahead were soon confirmed. About two months after the peace march, the Stasi raid in the Berlin environmental library made it clear that there was no question of a new freedom for the opposition in the GDR.

In his novel From the End of Punk in Helsinki, the Czech author Jaroslav Rudiš brings together the life of a punk girl from the ČSSR and the story of a few desperate punk fans from the GDR at a concert by the band Die Toten Hosen , which is part of the Olof Palm Tree Peace Festival took place in Pilsen on September 15, 1987 . Rudiš remembers “this whirring” that was heard in anticipation of the concert among the young people in half the Eastern Bloc, it was a historic moment, like the young people from the GDR, the ČSSR, Hungary, Poland and “a Bunch of punks from capitalist West Germany would have fought side by side against the authorities. "

literature

  • Thomas Klein : "Peace and Justice!" The politicization of the Independent Peace Movement in East Berlin during the 1980s. Cologne 2007.
  • Ehrhart Neubert : History of the opposition in the GDR 1949–1989. Bonn 2000.
  • Hans-Erich Schulz: It's better to move yourself. The Olof Palme Peace March. In: Sigrid Grabner, Hendrik Röder, Thomas Wernicke (eds.): Potsdam 1945–1989. Between adaptation and rebellion. Berlin 1999, pp. 101-103.
  • Axel Stefek: 1987. The Olof Palme Peace March in Weimar . In: Ders .: Weimar unadjusted. Resistant behavior 1950–1989. Weimar 2014, pp. 117–124.
  • Stefan Wolle : The perfect world of dictatorship. Everyday life and rule in the GDR 1971–1989. Berlin 1998.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Ehrhart Neubert: History of the opposition in the GDR 1949–1989. Bonn 2000, p. 690.
  2. ↑ Hans-Erich Schulz: It's better to move yourself. The Olof Palme Peace March. In: Sigrid Grabner, Hendrik Röder, Thomas Wernicke (eds.): Potsdam 1945–1989. Between adaptation and rebellion. Berlin 1999, pp. 101-103. Here: p. 103.
  3. ^ Ehrhart Neubert: History of the opposition in the GDR 1949–1989. Bonn 2000, p. 690.
  4. ↑ Olof-Palme-Friedensmarsch: September 1 to 18, 1987 by Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk on bstu.de , accessed on October 15, 2019
  5. ^ Ehrhart Neubert: History of the opposition in the GDR 1949–1989. Bonn 2000, p. 692.
  6. ^ Ehrhart Neubert: History of the opposition in the GDR 1949–1989. Bonn 2000, p. 691 f.
  7. ↑ Axel Stefek: 1987. The Olof Palme Peace March in Weimar . In: Ders .: Weimar unadjusted. Resistant behavior 1950–1989. Weimar 2014, pp. 117–124.
  8. ↑ Philipp Oehmke : Die Toten Hosen: In the beginning there was noise . Rowohlt, Frankfurt 2014, ISBN 978-3-498-07379-4 , 356 - 357