The Protest for Peace: Opposition to Remilitarisation and Nuclear Weapons (1950 to 1969)

Abstract

When in October 1983 over half a million West Germans assembled in the Bonn Hofgarten to be addressed by such renowned public figures as Willy Brandt, Petra Kelly and Heinrich Boll, the spectacular nature of this event was such that the West German peace movement, for the first time the recipient of wide-scale international attention, was seen to have established itself as a significant new force within German politics. In fact, the German peace movement of the 1980s has historical roots which go back not just to the early years of the Federal Republic but to the last decade of the previous century. Even before then the German philosophy of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, notably Kant (Zum ewigen Frieden — On Perpetual Peace), Herder (Briefe zur Beförderung der Humanität — Letters Concerning the Furtherance of Humanism, and Jean Paul (Kriegserklärung gegen den Krieg — Declaration of War Against War), had demonstrated a persistent fascination with the idea of peace. That it was at the end of the nineteenth century when this philosophical interest first assumed organisational form is undoubtedly related to the emergence at that time of a German imperialism which, fuelled by the reactionary and militarist traditions of the Prussian Junker class, pursued from the outset a foreign policy based on aggression and aiming at aggrandisement.