Building an anti-fascist city

The sun sets on the now-empty cobblestone streets of Erfurt. Just hours earlier, roughly 17,000 activists from across Germany had converged on the eastern German city in one of the country’s largest antifascist mobilizations in decades (“Widersetzen,” literally “to resist”). They failed. Despite mass blockades, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) still held its party congress.

The critique is a familiar one: thousands descend on a city, disrupt business as usual for a day, then head home while the far right carries on. If the blockade failed, what was the point? For revolutionaries, the answer lies in a different question, however: Once the buses leave, what remains?

In Erfurt, quite a lot. Just months before the congress, the city had almost no organized antifascist activity. By the eve of the blockade, hundreds of local residents had passed through action trainings, more than 800 attended a citywide organizing assembly, and over 3,000 Erfurters joined the blockades. One resident remarked that it “felt like 1989 again.”

To understand how this transformation took place, I spoke with two organizers who relocated to Erfurt months before the congress. Their story is about how this city became the backbone of one of Germany’s largest acts of civil disobedience—and the kind of power that is built long before the blockades.

Aaron: Can you introduce yourselves? What kind of organizing were you involved in before Erfurt, and what led you to make the decision to move there?

Carlu: I’m organized in Marx21, a revolutionary socialist organization in Germany. I started organizing when I was 18 in the climate movement with Fridays for Future, then went into Wir fahren zusammen (“We ride together”—an alliance between climate activists and bus drivers), where I really started organizing and talking to people. In 2024 I switched to SGR (SGR, “Students Against the Far Right”) in Freiburg because of the resistance protests against the AfD party congresses.

I organized mobilizations from Freiburg for Essen, Riesa, and Gießen (the previous sites of AFD congresses). At some point I thought, I can do it another time, and maybe 100 or 200 more people will come from Freiburg—but it doesn’t make a huge difference if the city where the congress is taking place isn’t part of the protest.

So Charlie and I decided we had to move there. We had to organize the city itself. Looking back at Gießen (the previous direct action), there was no store open, nobody from the town was really involved. Twenty thousand people came from all over Germany, blocked the party congress for one day, then went back home. We thought we had to do it differently. To win local people over and organize them, we had to move there beforehand.

Charlie: I’m also organized in Marx21, a revolutionary socialist organization in Germany. I started organizing at 18 in the climate movement, first with Ende Gelände (Here and No Further), then End Fossil Occupy (both direct action climate justice groups), later the Kurdish movement, Wir fahren zusammen, and finally SGR around the first AfD party congress in Essen. Since then I’ve organized students at Freie Universität Berlin to travel to the AfD blockades.

After Gießen, a good friend who had gone earlier to organize came back totally frustrated. The local movement didn’t seem to want to blockade the AfD party congress, and he was basically alone. We realized we needed to change things. We had to go earlier and build a real structure that would last longer than a few days.

Aaron: What did you find when you arrived? What organizing already existed, what was the political atmosphere like, and where did you see opportunities or challenges?

Charlie: There was no real structure. There were youth organizations from the conservative CDU (RCDS), the center-left SPD (Jusos), and The Left (Linksjugend [‘solid]), but none of them were really active. There was also an open antifascist meeting once a month, but it didn’t really want to be part of Widersetzen.

There were a few people who had organized Widersetzen the last time, and coalitions like Zusammenstehen, Weltoffenes Thüringen, and Auf die Plätze—broad local alliances against the far right, but none of them were really mobilizing for July 4. When we arrived, maybe five or ten people were organizing.

We also met with a Left Party (Die Linke) politician who told us, “Erfurt is out-mobilized. There’s no chance.”

Carlu: I think they thought, “Okay, we’ll build a little infrastructure so people can come from all over Germany and make the protest happen.” But nobody really thought it was possible to organize people from Erfurt into the civil disobedience.

Aaron: Walk us through those first weeks. Where did you begin, and what were your priorities?

Carlu: The first thing we did was the organizing seminar at the end of March—a weekend training on how to build organizing committees, develop new leaders, and practice one-on-one organizing conversations. We managed to mobilize four or five people from Erfurt. There were about 80 people there from all over Germany, but only a handful from Erfurt. After the seminar, we thought we would go home and come back ten days later. Instead, we stayed. We had so many one-to-one meetings and group meetings to plan that we realized we couldn’t leave.

A few days later we mapped the entire university and the city—all the cafés, bars, restaurants, lecture halls, professors. We mapped everything we could. That was really the starting point.

The next step was an action week at the university. More than one hundred people from all over Germany came to help organize the campus.

Aaron: When did you realize the campaign was really taking off? What do you think made the difference?

Charlie: During the action week we spent three days talking to students across campus. For the first time, local students started thinking, “Oh my fucking God—we can actually win people. We can actually organize this campus.” By the end of the week, there was hardly anyone left who hadn’t heard about the SGR.

Eventually came our first public SGR meeting. We expected to get a room at the university, but the administration refused us any space. So we had two days to organize an open-air meeting with a stage, music, and speeches. More than 600 people came.

The most important thing was that the students organized almost all of it themselves. We helped with moderation and speeches, but every part of the meeting was organized by the students.

A week later we held the first public Widersetzen meeting in the city. We had spent days knocking on doors and talking to people, but we still weren’t sure anyone would come. Within minutes the room was full. More than 400 people showed up. That’s when we knew it was possible to organize the city, too.

Aaron: Once you knew it was possible to organize the city, how did you build the campaign from there?

Charlie: After the first Studis gegen Rechts and Widersetzen meetings, we split the campaign into two. At first we thought, “This is crazy.” We’d only just arrived in Erfurt, and now we were trying to run two campaigns instead of one.

One focused on the university, organizing students through their departments. The other focused on the city. We divided Erfurt into eight neighborhoods and had delegates responsible for each one. At every meeting, there were about 15 to 20 minutes of campaign-wide updates, then people split into neighborhood groups for about 45 minutes to organize locally. Over the months, people organized neighborhood festivals and built their own community groups.

That made a huge difference because it wasn’t always the same five people standing on a stage. As more people stepped into organizing roles, almost everyone knew someone helping lead the campaign—they were their neighbors.

Aaron: As July 4 approached, how did the campaign build toward the blockade?

Charlie: May was kind of a low phase. We spent those weeks trying out different ways of organizing the university and the city. The door-knocking campaign worked. The neighborhood organizing worked. The seminar outreach worked. We were constantly testing things, seeing what people responded to, and building on what worked.

Then came Science Against Fascism week. Students organized more than 70 seminars, going from class to class to persuade lecturers to turn their courses into part of a campus-wide week on fascism and anti-fascism. During the same week, we held the student assembly and, soon after, the city assembly. Those were our first real structure tests.

Then, in the last week before July 4, another hundred people came from across Germany to help organize. We talked to the whole city again. We talked to the whole university again. In the end there were around 3,000 people from Erfurt on the streets.

But actually, my favorite moment of the whole campaign wasn’t July 4. It was the night before.

We held the final action meeting in a church. People came in six different time slots of about 250 people each to get the information about where to meet the next morning. That was insane. It wasn’t just students anymore. It was the whole city coming to this church.

There was a real focus on the churches throughout the campaign. We held action trainings in churches, meetings in churches, and our plenaries in churches. It changed how people saw Widersetzen. Our strategy was “Erfurt lädt ein”—Erfurt invites you. It wasn’t radicals coming to Erfurt. It was Erfurt inviting people to come.

My parents never would have come to a Widersetzen protest before because they were scared. But they came now because they saw what was happening in Erfurt. It wasn’t just leftists running through the streets. The whole city was there—old people, young people, everyone.

Carlu: One especially memorable moment for me was at the final action meeting. We asked everyone if they were ready to stop the AfD party congress and the whole room stood up.

Really, throughout the campaign we didn’t just ask people what they thought about the AfD party congress. We asked, “What are you afraid of? What do you want to do against it?” Then we invited them to do something. No one had ever asked people in Erfurt that before.

Charlie: Another thing was that we always framed this vision. We told people that on the morning of July 4 they would look out their window and see the neighbor they’d never spoken to putting on a Widersetzen vest. They would put on their own vest, leave home at the same time, and the whole city would begin walking together toward the meeting point.

A friend told us afterwards that’s exactly what happened. She woke up around four in the morning, looked out her window, and saw her neighbor putting on his vest. They’d never spoken before. A few minutes later they left their homes for the blockade. It was the thing we had been telling people throughout the campaign. Then, on the morning of July 4, it was actually true.

One older person told us it felt like 1989 again. The last time they’d felt that sense that something was moving—that history was happening around them—was before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Hearing that was really incredible.

Aaron: You didn’t stop the AfD congress. For many people, that’s where the story ends. But after everything we’ve talked about, that seems like a very narrow way of measuring what happened. What do you think remains in Erfurt now, and what comes next?

Charlie: Of course, in the end we didn’t stop the party congress from happening. We always told people, “We need you because together we can stop this.” But what we achieved was that there wasn’t a single road into the congress that was open. We were so many people that it was impossible to get through the civil disobedience. That was a crazy win.

Of course, we can never trust the state in the fight against fascism. In the end they’ll always find a way around us. It was the SPD Interior Minister marching in the front row of the anti-fascist demonstration while secretly planning with the police to shuttle AfD delegates into the city between 1 and 3 a.m. During the day they marched with us; at night they protected the fascists. That really showed people you can’t trust the state in the fight against fascism—it radicalized people. Even my mom was like, “What the fuck just happened?”

It’s a win that we made it so the fascists only felt safe between 1 and 3 a.m. They couldn’t move through the city during the day because society was so clearly against them. We didn’t stop them—the state did everything it could to get them in—but we won Erfurt.

And that’s what remains. We built structures and helped people discover their own ability to organize. We had a meeting yesterday (July 8) to look back on the campaign and think about what comes next. People were saying things like, “We have to look at this strategically,” and I was thinking, you weren’t saying that four months ago. They learned so much. They made such big steps. They know themselves what is best for the movement now.

I don’t know exactly what comes next in Erfurt—we still have to talk with the people here. In the end, it’s not our decision. We came here to help start a movement and build structures. Now it’s their responsibility to build the group and decide what comes next. If they don’t do it themselves, they’ll never really own it. They know how to organize now, and they can do it in their own way. We’re trying to put as little pressure on them as possible, because it’s important that they decide what is best for the movement. I really trust them.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”
Featured Image credit: Steffen Prößdorf; modified by Tempest.