Bekennerschreiben, SEK, and "Climate Extremism": The State Finds Its Newest Enemy Category

Over the past week, German authorities scrambled from one substation to the next: Turnow-Preilack in Brandenburg, Bergheim and Dormagen in North Rhine-Westphalia, Weisweiler near Aachen, and then a wave of confirmed explosive devices — twelve, then twenty-one — found along power lines in the Oberlausitz region of Saxony. A 48-year-old man from Gevelsberg is now being hunted after sending Bekennerschreiben (letters claiming responsibility) that cite "the fight against fossil fuels" as motive. Federal Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt (CSU) wasted no time giving the episode a name: "Klimaextremismus." His NRW counterpart Herbert Reul stood beside him talking about the ventilator on the intensive-care ward and the traffic light at the crossing, folding a lone act of sabotage into a story about protecting ordinary people from a new domestic enemy.

Whatever the individual actually did — the letters' authorship isn't even confirmed as matching the perpetrator yet, and police were careful to say a foreign-state actor hasn't been ruled out either — the political payload is already delivered. A single Bekennerschreiben citing fossil-fuel politics becomes the occasion to reach for more drone-defense capacity for corporations, more staff, more technical powers for the security services, and a fresh entry in the ministry's mental catalogue of extremisms that all conveniently point away from the state's own violence. Notice what's absent from the press conference: any accounting of who actually attacks infrastructure, homes, and bodies in Germany with the most regularity and the least consequence. It isn't people who write letters about Braunkohle.

This isn't happening in a vacuum. The same week, in Dresden, the Antifa-Ost trial ground into its third year — a case built partly on the testimony of a state-cultivated Kronzeuge, a man who describes his own role in a 2019 attack while sitting under armed protection from the same security apparatus that recruited him. A separate witness, Jannis R., refused to testify and was hauled into Beugehaft — coercive detention that can run six months — on the spot, handcuffed in the courtroom, for the crime of not helping the Bundesanwaltschaft build its case further. Compare the machinery: years of pre-trial witness-protection budget and courtroom security to imprison people for assaulting neo-Nazis, versus a single Gevelsberg letter-writer instantly promoted to a national threat category with cabinet ministers standing behind a podium within days.

The label matters because labels are how the state allocates resources and rewrites what counts as an emergency. "Klimaextremismus" doesn't describe a coherent movement or an ideology with a program — it describes whatever the Innenministerium needs it to describe in a given news cycle, the same elastic function "Linksextremismus" performs in Dresden. Both let the state avoid answering for the actual attacks on the actual public: the AfD's now-open embrace of ethnic-cleansing rhetoric that Chancellor Merz himself named a few days ago, the deportation regime that keeps expanding, the substations that get sabotaged in the name of stopping a warming planet that Germany's own coal blocks are still cooking. A downed power line for a night is real and dangerous and wrong — nobody on the left should pretend otherwise, least of all with an ICU ventilator on the line. But calling it "extremism" and reaching immediately for drone budgets and expanded police powers is a political choice, not a neutral description, and it's the same choice made every time a state needs an enemy sized correctly for the next line item in its budget.

The honest response isn't to defend sabotage tactics we don't control or endorse. It's to notice, plainly, that the vocabulary of extremism is being built out in real time to justify surveillance infrastructure that will outlast this particular manhunt — and that the same government finding new extremisms to fund police against is the one whose own AfD-adjacent deportation machinery a sitting chancellor just compared to ethnic cleansing. Watch where the powers land once the manhunt ends. They rarely go back in the box.

Sources

Tagesschau: Sabotage an Umspannwerken — Dobrindt spricht von "Klimaextremismus" (04.09.2026)
Tagesschau: Sabotage-Serie in Sachsen — 21 Sprengvorrichtungen (07.09.2026)
MDR: "Kronzeuge" sagt im Antifa-Ost-Prozess aus
taz: Antifa-Prozess in Dresden — Festnahme im Gerichtssaal