Concert rally against conscription: "Fight for this Germany? No, thank you!"

Maybe punk isn't dead yet: a group of young people are squatting on the ground in front of the Brandenburg Gate, wearing leather robes with Antifa symbols, combing and spraying their colorful mohawks.

A few meters away, on the stage of the “Unforcible” rally against conscription, the rap group “Well-educated Asis” is heating up the pogo: “We've been hearing over and over again lately that we're scum, but when I hear who says that, then I'm happy to be scum!” shouts one of the musicians. General cheering. Again and again the crowd chants “Merz leck Eier!”

According to the organizers, up to 20,000 people came to the concert rally against conscription. It is difficult to say whether the information is realistic because of the long time span of the rally. The police spoke of only 3,000 participants on Saturday morning. There were probably a few thousand more: in the evening the 18th of March Square was packed, and the rally extended to the Street of the 17th of June. It's quite possible that this was the largest single protest against conscription to date.

The audience was diverse. Old leftists cavorted alongside queer young people, and the sea of ​​flags of socialist youth groups was also interrupted with anarcho symbolism. Even in the evening, the crowd of students and party-lovers never became apolitical: anti-fascist chants rang out between every concert and every speech, and the taz didn't speak to anyone who was only there for the top-class concerts, for example by KIZ.

The good tone of the protest included insults towards politicians who were pushing forward rearmament and calling for the reintroduction of compulsory military service. The satirist Martin Sonneborn set the tone early in the afternoon. Wearing a Bundeswehr jacket over the obligatory suit and with a Sternburg can of beer in his hand, he spoke of “Friedrich-Fotzenfritz-Merz” to enthusiastic cheers and joked: “Merz has a good time? He can also go to die on the Eastern Front.”

The background to this is the recurring arrests of school strike activists because of precisely these statements at strike rallies that the police classified as offensive, most recently in Berlin because of the term “son of a dog”.

When the Berlin school strike committee came onto the stage with a large banner “Generation Resistance instead of Drone Food,” that was exactly what was being discussed. “It may well be that the colleague over there in the Chancellery, the son of a bitch, can hear you!” shouts a speaker. No one was arrested on Friday.

But it wasn't just provocations. In terms of content, a speaker from the Verdi Youth, for example, criticized the massive austerity policy right at the beginning, which was “on a scale like Agenda 2010”. The Merz government is easing fixed-term contracts; no one his age believes in a secure pension anymore, says the young speaker. "And now we are supposed to meet our death in the trenches of the future? Not with us!" It is the task of the unions not to remain silent about rearmament in the fight against the cuts. To applause, he expressed his solidarity with the student protests in France, which became a recurring theme throughout the evening.

On the sidelines of the rally, a young person in a skirt and with an iron chain around his neck complains: “I come home every day after vocational school and just go to sleep so that I can somehow cope, and the next day everything starts all over again.” The training salary to become an educator is not enough either way. And anyway: “Germany exports weapons everywhere, Rheinmetall profits from the war.” If Germany were an “open society with a backbone”, without a shift to the right and social cuts, it might be something different. But fight for this Germany? "No thanks."

A young woman in a gothic look expressed a similar opinion a few meters away. "I grew up in youth welfare. I know how cuts affect people's real lives," she says. Especially for her younger siblings, she doesn't want war or for them to have to flee. "I want a safe country where social cohesion and my right to a future are respected, where climate protection counts. And it's not always just about me, me, me and money," she says.

As for the threat from Putin's Russia, few at the rally believed there was an actual threat of war. In speeches, Russia was named and criticized as an aggressor in Ukraine. But that does not justify the current “armament hysteria,” said a Greenpeace youth speaker. She presented a study according to which “NATO is already significantly superior to Russia militarily, even without the USA.” Europe is already defensible and conscription is “simply not necessary,” she continued. But because Merz wanted the “largest conventional army in Europe,” he accepted the devastating social cuts that led to the rise of the extreme right.

An Israeli conscientious objector warned of the long-term social consequences of militarization. “I come as a messenger from a militaristic country to tell you: This is an addiction,” he said in English to loud applause. “At some point everyone is so guilty that there is no going back, only forward.” Politicians would then “look for wars for the armies in which they have invested.” When he spoke of a genocide in Gaza, “Viva, viva Palestine” echoed across the square.

When the main act came onto the stage after more than five hours of rallying with KIZ, everything had already been said. The only thing left for musician Maxim to do was to warn ironically about the left-wing radicals who were supposed to be at the demo. “Just because the rich are preparing a war that is not in your interest, just because they want to force you to die and kill, that is no reason to become critical of this state,” he said.

The protests are set to continue on Saturday: The more traditionally oriented part of the peace movement is planning demonstrations in Stuttgart and others in Berlin from 1 p.m.