Ukraine war divides Germany's Easter peace demonstrations

The images from the huge rally that gathered in solidarity with Ukraine in central Berlin on February 27, 2022 were impressive. The police estimated that more than 100,000 people attended the demo, while organizers said it was closer to half a million. 

But the longer the war in Ukraine has gone on, the more public opinion in Germany has grown divided over the form and purpose of the protests against the war. In many quarters, solidarity with Ukraine has given way to fear that the war could spread, an attitude that has drawn condemnation from many.

Symptomatic of this are the reactions to a series of open letters in which prominent people from culture, science and religious groups called for a stop to arms deliveries and the start of peace negotiations with Russia (though Russia has shown little inclination to engage in such talks). Most recently, a new "call for peace" was released this week by Peter Brandt, historian and son of former Chancellor Willy Brandt and signed by several prominent trade unionists and Social Democrats, including the party's former leader Norbert-Walter Borjans.

'Conscienceless militarism or naive pacifism'

Bishop Friedrich Kramer, peace commissioner for the Protestant Church organization in Germany (EKD), became the subject of fierce criticism in the media after he spoke out against sending arms to Ukraine, warning that a military build-up could lead to nuclear war.

Among those outraged was the prominent publicist and blogger Sascha Lobo, who accused Kramer in the news magazine Der Spiegel of being "unmoved" by human suffering. "May he never find himself in a situation where the complacent inaction of others could be his death sentence," Lobo wrote in the Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper.

Without mentioning the hostilities directed against him personally, the bishop addressed the broader consequences of the furore before the synod of his church in Magdeburg in November 2022. He said it was particularly alarming "when, for example, those who think differently are accused of conscienceless militarism or naive pacifism in a deliberately false oversimplification."

Speaking to DW, Kramer said he valued the "polyphony" of the Protestant church, where different viewpoints are taken seriously. "There is always something of merit in every position," Kramer said, adding that a person's perspective on the question of arms exports depends very much on their own lives and circumstances.

The bishop said he hoped that politicians would "put diplomacy first." The central task, he said, was to achieve a ceasefire and then to see how to find a way out of the highly-charged situation without resorting to military force. That would be complex and difficult, he conceded, but he added, "that we will be more imaginative than simply continuing to use weapons to fuel a war that will cost thousands, hundreds of thousands, of lives."

Kramer will not take part in the peace movement's upcoming Easter marches due to other commitments, yet the 58-year-old would be in good company, if only for reasons of age: The traditional rallies against war and militarization, which happen every Easter in Germany, are increasingly attended only by people of his generation or older. 

Study on the Easter marches of 2022

This could also be seen in the Easter marches in 2022, which took place just a few weeks after Russia's invasion began. Larissa Meier of the Institute for Interdisciplinary Research on Conflict and Violence at Bielefeld University, co-authored a study on the marches, which found that the peace movement had been unable to mobilize virtually any support among young people.

"A very large proportion of the people who took part had already been active in the peace movement for a very long time," Meier told DW.

The fact that very few young people join the traditional peace movement is, the researchers believe, mainly because the movement's rhetoric is strongly influenced by the discourse of the 1980s, when hundreds of thousands of people in West Germany demonstrated against NATO and nuclear arms.

But that rhetoric does little to address people's current fears, said Meier, recounting an experience she had during a discussion about Easter marches at her university: "One of my students said, very aptly, that it all sounds incredibly dusty." Yet she believes that young people in general have become more interested in global security and the issue of peace.

Rallies in over 100 cities

There are no official figures on the overall scale of last year's Easter marches, which were organized by disparate groups in more than 100 cities. According to the police, however, the number of participants rarely reached four figures in any one gathering. Around 2,500 people took to the streets in Frankfurt am Main, 1,700 in Hamburg and 1,300 in Berlin.

The fact that despite the Ukraine war, the Easter marches were hardly any better attended in 2022 than in previous years is down to number of factors, Meier says. Judging by surveys on the issue of exporting arms to Ukraine, there was certainly more potential to mobilize support, but this support came from "diverse actors," including members of the peace movement, but also right-wing populist groups.

As an example, Meier points to the "Manifesto for Peace" initiated by prominent leftist politician Sahra Wagenknecht and leading feminist Alice Schwarzer. Their online petition, launched in early 2023, was signed, among thousands of other people, by Tino Chrupalla, leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), a party that is being monitored by the Office for the Protection of the German Constitution (BfV) for suspected right-wing extremism.

At the same time, there were demonstrations in solidarity with Ukraine on the anniversary of the start of the war, for which the Green Party, among others, had mobilized support. "We now have different actors who do not mobilize together, but who act in parallel or partly against each other," Meier says, adding that there was also a clear "tendency toward polarization."

Protest against NATO's nuclear armament

Kristian Golla of the Peace Cooperation Network in Bonn also remembers taking to the streets in the 1980s to protest against NATO. "Then you were always called stupid," he told DW.

After a year of war in Ukraine, he is pleading for a more robust public discourse and has many questions: "Do the weapons really help? Are there just too few weapons or could it be that that approach is wrong and we need more diplomatic solutions now?"

The conscientious objector's answer is clear, as is his opinion on Wagenknecht and Schwarzer's "Manifesto for Peace." "I think it's good that they have popularized the idea of negotiating instead of shooting," Golla said. "So far, the traditional peace movement hasn't managed that."

Nevertheless, the veteran activist does consider it problematic that the peace movement has failed to distance itself from its far-right supporters. That's why he didn't sign Wagenknecht's petition, though he agrees with at least some of what it said. "That now all of a sudden the AfD is the peace party, that's really a topsy-turvy world," he said.

On the homepage of his network and in newspaper ads, Kristian Golla and his team are mobilizing people to take part in this year's Easter marches against the war and what he sees as a potential arms race.

There is also a plan to send Olaf Scholz an e-mail entitled "Mr. Chancellor, be proactive about negotiations!" Because, when it comes to the danger of escalation in Ukraine, Kolla says: "I'm really quite worried about where this is going."

This article was originally written in German.

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