On October 2, the BMW Center for German and European Studies invited two leading activists behind youth climate protests in Germany to Georgetown for a film screening and impactful discussion surrounding the history and future of activism in Germany. CGES Director Abe Newman facilitated the conversation between students and the activists Helena Marschall and Luisa Neubauer.
The event began with a film screening of “Another World is Possible”, directed by Marschall, a 22-year old climate activist and one of the key organizers behind Germany’s largest climate protests in recent years. The film explored the broader climate movement, what it means to be an activist, and Marschall’s experiences and roles within the movement.
Following the model of the Fridays for Future movement, Marschall’s climate strikes have become “some of the biggest demonstrations since the fall of the Berlin Wall.”
Marschall emphasized the significance of protest as a force for inspiring change and how the trends have proved that it actually makes a difference. She talked about the danger of “tipping points” in the climate system, but how we can also reach a “tipping point” in the social system where at a certain point “when you’ve marched enough times and been there enough times that suddenly a lot more will become possible than before.”
This is why a big piece of their work, Marschall describes, is organization. Once you have a lot of people who believe in the cause, the emphasis becomes mobilization and actually getting people on the streets fighting for change.
Another agenda item for the movement is maintaining pressure on the government to not only follow through on their word, but to actually set more ambitious goals. Youth court cases, such as Neubauer v. Germany, have set a precedent that young people have a fundamental right to a clean future which must then be translated into progressive climate laws and policy.
At the end of the film, Marschall urged that “the current crisis will not be ended because world leaders decide to end it. The climate crisis will be ended by us fighting as hard as we can, by us fighting for our lives, everywhere all the time, and taking to the streets.”
She reminded the audience about the narrow window of opportunity left to take action and closed with one final question: “what are you going to do in that window of time?”
After the film screening, Abe Newman guided the attendees and speakers through a Q & A discussion. Students asked questions about how the movement deals with issues including outside pressure, political division, and radical activism.
Luisa Neubauer, one of the climate justice movement’s most prominent representatives, discussed the importance of carefully structured organization building and education in order to not repeat the mistakes of movements in the past and to “facilitate the translation from despair to action.”
She explains that part of the success of the movement is due to its ability to strike a “balance between fighting and dancing.”
On the question of political division and the framing of radical climate activism, Neubauer emphasizes how some climate questions–like renewable energy–can become uniting issues across voters and generations rather than a source of division.
But at the end of the day, the movement must be careful when choosing its fights. It won’t be possible to get 100% of people on board, but it’s “the activist’s job to find the right language to communicate ideas to the public” and be honest about what strategies do and do not work.
At the end of the discussion, it was clear that Marschall and Neubauer gave the audience hope that another world is truly possible.
