FOR years, German communist weekly Unsere Zeit (UZ) held a biennial festival of left politics, culture and music, the “Pressefest,” in Dortmund’s Revier Park.

It was a big event, attracting thousands every other summer. Debates took place in a relaxed atmosphere: there was even a swimming pool in which comrades could take a dip when they fancied a break.

But the last Dortmund Pressefest took place before Covid, and UZ and the German Communist Party (DKP) held last weekend’s event — dubbed the Peace Days rather than the Pressefest — like 2022’s, on a much smaller scale in Berlin. 

DKP leader Patrik Kobele blames an intensifying political crackdown on the left: Revier Park and parks of similar size no longer dare to host them.

[[{"fid":"68788","view_mode":"inlineleft","fields":{"format":"inlineleft","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"Patrik Kobele"},"type":"media","field_deltas":{"1":{"format":"inlineleft","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"Patrik Kobele"}},"link_text":null,"attributes":{"alt":"Patrik Kobele","height":"405","width":"654","class":"media-element file-inlineleft","data-delta":"1"}}]]“We request places of this size, and the answer is always ‘sorry, no’,” he tells the Morning Star. They tried four large parks in the Ruhr area. “They did want us because they need the money — they would get €31,000 (£26,000) — but the shareholder said no, none of the four parks will in future be allowed to host political organisations.”

In the end the Peace Days were held in the old offices of the paper Neues Deutschland and the square out front, but this meant a big reduction in scale, and even then organisers aren’t confident they’ll get in again. 

Negotiations over the venue, whose management is linked to the Die Linke party, included warnings against public expressions of solidarity with Palestine, though this didn’t deter the invitation of Palestinian speakers and the crowd from erupting in cries of “Free, free Palestine” when they were introduced on the Saturday evening.

Germany’s crackdown on Palestine solidarity has been among the most repressive worldwide. On August 5, a Berlin court convicted a young woman of “condoning a crime” for leading a chant of “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be Free.” 

Back in April, police cut electricity from a building hosting a conference on Palestine and burst in to disperse the several hundred attendees, on the grounds a speaker addressing it by video link had a previous record of glorifying Hamas. Germany blocked the rector of Glasgow University, Palestinian surgeon Dr Ghassan Abu-Sittah, from even entering the country to talk about his work in Gaza’s hospitals.

Germany’s communists are no strangers to repression — they fought through the courts, successfully, a bid to revoke their status as a political party in 2021 — but Kobele says the current climate is something new.

“This is not a normal development. Nobody would have thought, two years ago, you could be detained by the police for shouting ‘Free Palestine’.”

It’s part of a wider bid to paint the peace movement as illegitimate and hostile to German interests: “If you say we are for peace with Russia, they call you a Putin apologist. 

“What we are seeing is a reactionary, militarist rebuilding of the state. They need to strengthen instruments of repression because they know they are forcing people to pay for Berlin’s pro-war policy, and this could cause complications down the line.”

Germany is cutting spending on everything else, while massively increasing its military budget.

“And people are forced to pay for that in various ways. If you take a train, you will be late: there is a terrible situation on the railway because the infrastructure is damaged.

“We have crises in our hospitals and schools, because the infrastructure is damaged.” At the same time wages are held down, and high inflation — particularly for energy, the price of which has soared due to sanctions on the Russian gas that previously powered the German economy — continues.

The impact on German manufacturing has been severe. The economy has shrunk, and big German firms are offshoring plants to the United States, where energy is cheaper. Why does German business tolerate it?

“Well, as you say, they can move to the US and let the working class pay,” Kobele observes. A ruling class indifferent to wrecking domestic industry if bigger profits can be extracted abroad will be no novelty to British readers.

Germany’s capitalists are split — “the chemical industry has really big problems with the energy costs, there are certainly elements who are not content.” 

But Kobele points to the role of the state in Marxist understanding as a committee for the management of the ruling class’s interests, and says in Germany this is reflected in measures to shore up profits at the expense of the working class and state assistance for the worst-hit sectors, while Berlin emphasises that “the priority is to unite against Russia and China. Because if we [the US-led Western bloc] lose our hegemony as imperialists, it will be much worse.”

A major problem is that trade unions are more reluctant to challenge a Social Democrat-led administration than a Christian Democrat one, and many have been drawn into support for militarism. The biggest public service union Ver.di backed sending missiles to Ukraine at its last congress, while industrial union IG Metall joined the economic council of the Social Democrats (SPD) and a coalition of arms manufacturers in a statement backing arms spending.

But unions would surely fight the wider collapse of German manufacturing due to the war? “Yes, they do, but let me give you an example. 

“A member of our party works in a big company that makes printing machines, which is in crisis. He discussed the crisis with members of the office works council (German bodies in which staff representatives sit with management) and they suggested asking the directors if they would not do better to shift to weapons production.”

But is support for war popular? I note that in the three German states with looming elections, Thuringia, Saxony and Brandenburg, all government coalition parties look to be wiped out. The Christian Democrats, who also back war, are in the running but polls suggest they’ll need coalition partners. 

The only other two parties riding high in the polls are the far-right AfD, which other parties have always said they will not consider as a coalition partner, and Sahra Wagenknecht’s anti-war BSW, which split from Die Linke last year because of the latter’s refusal to back peace demonstrations. Both the AfD and BSW are opposed to support for Ukraine.

Further, Germany has recently sent out mixed signals on its own attitude, saying it will halt arms supplies, and issuing an arrest warrant for a Ukrainian suspected of involvement in the Nord Stream pipeline bombings.

Kobele says the pause on support for Ukraine is illusory, electoral manoeuvring by the coalition. He’s unsurprised Wagenknecht has taken credit for the decision — “that’s politics” — but says the DKP won’t be formally endorsing any other party in the coming elections. 

If the BSW sticks to its current line of refusing to support any administration that backs government plans to station intermediate-range US missiles in Germany, its advance could be the best realistic outcome, he concedes. The DKP will stand its own candidates in Brandenburg; it cannot back Die Linke, he argues, since it is so compromised by support for Nato’s wars, while the SPD is entirely pro-war and not an option.

As for the pipeline, “this new theory about the explosions [that a rogue crew of Ukrainians carried out the operation] is also for show. There would necessarily have had to be state actors to carry this out, not a little sailing boat with five or six people and 100 kilos of TNT.” 

Overall, Kobele is unconvinced that there are any serious moves against the pro-war consensus likely in the German parliament; nor does he think the US election will make much of a difference. “You can speculate that perhaps Donald Trump will be more aggressive towards China and less aggressive in Europe; that Kamala Harris will be more aggressive in Europe and less against China. But it’s speculation.”

It’s the peace movement that can change that, which is why the DKP prioritised the Peace Days theme for its summer event.

The next major mobilisation will be for October 3: German unification day and a public holiday, but one on which Germany’s socialists are planning a huge anti-war demonstration in Berlin. 

“There is currently no chance of an anti-war coalition from elections. We must build a stronger movement. So October 3 is a very, very important date.”