Woodstock at the Chancellery

The larger the demonstrations, the more conservative the government: Malte Lehming says the organizers of Germany’s “Occupy” movement have reason to be more than satisfied with Saturday’s demonstration. Still, the North German Pony Market in Hunteberg drew almost as many people.

The numbers are still in flux but a generous estimate of participation at Saturday’s “Occupy Action” movement shows 10,000 in Berlin, 8,000 in Frankfurt, 1,500 in Cologne, 1,000 in Munich and 5,000 in Hamburg — so the German branch of America’s capitalist-critical, anti-bank “Occupy Wall Street” movement got off to an impressive start. Nonetheless, the North German Pony Market drew nearly as many people a week previously. The “Occupy” activists were accordingly embraced by the politicians, with representatives of every party expressing understanding for their concerns.

“By the time we got to Woodstock, we were half a million strong,” Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young sang. “And we got to get ourselves back to the garden.” But numbers don’t always translate directly to power. Sometimes, they even result in the opposite. Berliners demonstrated against the Shah of Iran’s visit in 1967 (Benno Ohnesorg*). One year later the Shah was gone, only to be replaced by the Ayatollah Khomeini, whose fundamentalist government proved to be even worse than the Shah’s. The American anti-Vietnam War movement rose between 1965 and 1968, culminating in the election of a new president, Richard Nixon, who expanded the war into Laos and Cambodia and sought victory via saturation bombing.

Then Woodstock happened in the summer of 1969, and the following October 250,000 people protested the war by marching in Washington. One year later, four protesting students at Kent State University were killed by Ohio National Guard troops (Neil Young: “Ohio”). Then Nixon was re-elected two years later by a large majority. His opponent, George McGovern, had sided completely with the anti-war protesters under popular pressure, and the Republicans had little trouble in casting him as a crazed radical.

That pattern was repeated in 2004. On the day of the presidential election, the Iraq war had been going on for 18 months. No weapons of mass destruction had been found, the peace movement had mobilized millions around the world, Newsweek magazine had revealed the tricks Vice President Dick Cheney had employed to justify sending American troops into combat against Saddam Hussein and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz admitted that his government had invoked the specter of weapons of mass destruction for purely “bureaucratic reasons.” Despite all this, George W. Bush was re-elected by a wide margin, with a popular vote lead over John Kerry of some 3.5 million. More Americans had voted for George W. Bush than for any other president in U.S. history.

The bigger the demonstrations, the more conservative the government. This concept is familiar to Germans as well. The biggest peace demonstration in Germany up until last Saturday took place on Oct. 10, 1981, in Bonn against NATO plans to upgrade its weaponry. That led to Chancellor Helmut Schmidt’s resignation and the beginning of conservative Helmut Kohl’s 16-year administration.

Seen in that light, the organizers of the German “Occupy” demonstration have every reason to be satisfied. It was enough for the headlines, but more might have been counterproductive.

*Translator’s Note: Benno Ohnesorg took part in the protest and was shot to death by Berlin police.