Greta Thunberg in March: "Finally going back to school"
Photo:Virginia Mayo / dpa
In August 2018, Greta Thunberg started her "school strike for the climate", which soon resulted in a worldwide movement for more climate protection under the name "Fridays for Future". In the 2019/2020 school year, the now 17-year-old had virtually no time and no space to work on her school leaving certificate - meetings with politicians like Barack Obama or, most recently, Angela Merkel left little room for other things.
Something could change about this setting of priorities for Thunberg - not ideologically, but in terms of time: The teenager and probably the world's best-known climate activist has announced on social media that she will go back to school.
"My year off school is over, and it feels so good to finally go back to school!" She wrote about a photo of her with a bicycle. Perhaps she wants to use it to make the way to school completely climate-friendly.
Thunberg is working on the BBC documentary series
At the end of last week Thunberg took part in a protest in Berlin and visited a researcher from Potsdam. "Thanks to Prof. Ricarda Winkelmann for an instructive and interesting day," she wrote. The researcher's Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research is to be part of a planned BBC documentary series for which Thunberg has already been on the road a lot in recent months.
Together with three fellow campaigners from "Fridays for Future", she had also met Chancellor Merkel - and demanded more courage. People have to get out of their comfort zone, she said. Together with Luisa Neubauer, Anuna de Wever van der Heyden and Adélaïde Charlier, she had formulated a catalog of demands.
According to a report by the "taz", however, there was also strong criticism of the activists' advance at the base of Fridays for Future. Accordingly, some local groups had distanced themselves from the meeting with Merkel because they felt overrun.
Icon: The mirror