Paul's Church Movement
The St. Paul's Church Movement was an extra-parliamentary movement that emerged as part of the so-called Without Me Movement, which in the 1950s expressed itself critically on integration into the West and spoke out against the rearmament of the Federal Republic of Germany .
At the end of January 1955, around a thousand representatives of the SPD with Chairman Erich Ollenhauer , the DGB and the all-German People's Party led by Gustav Heinemann gathered in the Paulskirche in Frankfurt , which was symbolic of the revolution of 1848/1849 . There were also representatives of politically oriented Protestant Christians and intellectuals. The speakers included Alfred Weber , Helmut Gollwitzer , Gustav Heinemann and Erich Ollenhauer.
Against the background of the Paris Treaties, they concluded an alliance against remilitarization in the Federal Republic. In a “ German Manifesto ” of January 29, 1955, the movement denounced the integration of the two German states into opposing alliance systems and called for resistance to rearmament and for negotiations to begin on German reunification.
At the regional level there were a series of actions by March 1955 with the participation of hundreds of thousands of people. In the form of rallies or silent marches, protests were made against the formation of armed forces in the Federal Republic of Germany and the GDR . However, the response was significantly less than in previous campaigns against Adenauer's military policy .
However , the movement was no more able to stop the accession to NATO decided by the majority in the Bundestag , nor could it bring about a change in Germany's policy. For the SPD, participation in the subsequent state elections hardly increased. In the longer term, however, it benefited from the growing trust of intellectuals and political minorities in the SPD. Not least as a result of the Paulskirchen movement, the GVP members Gustav Heinemann, Johannes Rau and Erhard Eppler joined the SPD.
literature
- Detlef Lehnert: Social democracy between protest movement and ruling party 1848–1983 (= Edition Suhrkamp 1248 = NF Bd. 248 New historical library ). Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1983, ISBN 3-518-11248-1 , pp. 182f.