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Glued hand on a street: The "Last Generation" blockades provoke violent reactions.
Photo: Filip Singer / EPA-EFE
SPIEGEL:
Mr. Müller, a year ago you warned that the climate protests would become more radical, as would the repression.
In the worst-case scenario, the “green RAF” would emerge.
The term got around, now the last generation, which you don't belong to, is constantly being compared to the RAF.
Was it a mistake to make that thinly veiled threat?
Müller:
It wasn't a threat!
SPIEGEL:
But it should sound a bit like one.
Müller:
I wanted to warn Germany of an internal social conflict like the German Autumn, which I hope no one wants to return to.
I certainly don't.
Nevertheless, in hindsight, speaking of the RAF was a mistake.
I wanted to show a scenario in which protest becomes more militant, in which a car is sometimes broken.
But many understood it as if I believed violence against people to be possible.
Or even desirable.
SPIEGEL:
Now pretend you're more naïve than you are.
That is exactly what the RAF stands for, of course.
Müller:
I also spoke of Sabotage for Future or climate partisans and let myself be carried away in search of a catchy formula.
In doing so, however, I made it easy for the right-wingers to denounce the climate movement.
The climate movement would never attack people, in any escalation scenario.
It's about the dignity of every human life, that's the raison d'être of climate protection, the whole purpose of existence.
As I said, that was a mistake.
But something was also right.
MIRROR:
What?
Müller:
The analysis that there would be a triple radicalization was correct: a radicalization of the climate crisis, then social repression and, as a result, the radicalization of the climate movement.
We have been in this scenario since the accident at the very latest.
SPIEGEL
: You mean the accident in which a cyclist was run over in Berlin and died a few days later.
In between, it was unclear whether a traffic jam caused by protests from the last generation prevented the woman from receiving the best possible medical care.
Mueller:
Exactly.
Since this accident there has been an open, ongoing conflict between the climate movement and mainstream society, which is losing all sense of proportion.
"The comparison with the RAF is 100 percent projection."
SPIEGEL:
The last generation last presented - when 19 of its members were in preventive detention in Bavaria - posters with portraits of the members who were incarcerated in the Stadelheim prison.
Is that wise if you want to avoid being compared to the RAF and their prisoners at Stammheim?
Müller:
The comparison with the RAF is 100 percent projection, which can be applied to everything.
As a left-wing resistance group in Germany, you cannot avoid being compared to the RAF.
If the last generation in yellow robes sat singing Kumbaya in the street, some would still be reminded of the RAF.
SPIEGEL:
You say you wanted to warn against reacting hysterically to the climate movement, but that's exactly what you encouraged.
Müller:
I probably have. But I would also say that we are not in the scenario I warned about because of me.
We all want climate protection, but there is no such thing as climate protection.
We don't want such a brutalized debate, and yet we're right in the middle of it.
SPIEGEL:
You also contributed to the brutalization by tweeting after the cyclist's accident: "Shit happens."
Müller:
That was a really stupid, disrespectful and irreverent tweet.
How stupid and irreverent I realized when I overheard an interview with the woman's sister, who said my tweet was like a dagger being thrust into her.
I felt really bad with guilt.
My tweet contributed to the brutalization of the debate, I casually devalued a human life, I don't want to be like that and I'm incredibly sorry.
SPIEGEL:
Then why did you write the tweet?
Müller:
Terrible things will happen in the climate crisis, climate protests will have consequences.
At some point people will probably be harmed by a chain of unfortunate circumstances.
That's what I wanted to say.
But when it happens, it's terrible, you have to do everything you can to prevent it, and that's why you can't talk so coldly about a woman whose life is in danger.
I can only ask for forgiveness for this, even though I don't expect my family to forgive me.
SPIEGEL:
In this case, it seems that there is no connection between the blockade and the woman's death.
But of course it is conceivable that climate protests are part of such a causal chain.
Does the movement have to look for forms that exclude something like this?
Müller:
When something like this happens, you have to stop and see what you can do to prevent something like this without stopping your actions because of it.
Just as it happens after every accident at a football game or stampede in a club.
Activism cannot guarantee that no one will ever be harmed accidentally anywhere.
Every major social event harbors small risks.
SPIEGEL:
I couldn't think of a plausible causal chain that would lead from mashed potatoes to panes of glass in front of pictures to someone dying.
In the case of roadblocks, the risk is considerably greater.
Müller:
Road blockades are a completely accepted form of political protest, from anti-nuclear protests to tractor demonstrations by farmers.
Since the Brokdorf decision of the Federal Constitutional Court in 1985, this has repeatedly been decided by the courts.
We can't give that up.
SPIEGEL:
What the last generation is doing is designed to cause outrage: they want someone to be bothered by them.
She provokes repression.
How then can one complain about repression?
Müller:
The last generation doesn't get upset about repression at all, I do.
Your strategy is based on the civil rights movement in the USA.
She went to Selma, Alabama, knowing that the reactionary sheriff would hit hard there, which would provoke particularly great outrage.
“They tend to create alienation and repression.
It's not the activists' fault at all, but it's their problem."
SPIEGEL:
At the time, the civil rights movement violated the laws it denounced.
Rosa Parks, for example, against the obligation to vacate her seat on the bus.
She provoked repression and made it clear how unjust the law is.
The Last Generation breaks laws that even they do not consider unjust.
Müller:
The civil rights movement wanted to take away the privileges of the whites, the climate movement wants to take away the privileges of the industrial societies.
The important difference is another: the USA was an open society, not a displacement society like Germany's.
They began to confront 80 years of racist Jim Crow legislation.
SPIEGEL:
There is another difference.
In the struggle for civil rights, suffrage or decolonization, abrupt change was possible.
Movements could work to change the law that would upset the situation.
There is no such cathartic moment in climate protection.
Müller:
I admire the last generation, but I think they're making a mistake because they don't see the differences from back then: their actions are supposed to evoke solidarity, but they tend to create alienation and repression.
This is not the activists' fault at all, but it is their problem.
SPIEGEL:
So what can the climate movement strategically learn from this debate?
Müller:
Since the attacks on the Nord Stream pipelines and the railway infrastructure, but also since the violent reactions to the road blockades, I think sabotaging critical infrastructure is the wrong approach.
This is currently no longer an option.
SPIEGEL:
You have a newsletter called "peaceful sabotage."
Müller:
I was convinced of the idea for a long time, but now I'm very afraid of the overreaction in society.
That could really become repression on the level of the German Autumn.
In Sweden I saw how society turned against the anti-globalisation movement after the riots on the sidelines of the 2001 EU summit in Gothenburg.
Cars accelerated at crosswalks and tried to run over us.
I hid in the basement of my then-girlfriend's parents' house for a week.
I never want to go back there.
SPIEGEL:
One could have guessed that relevant sections of society wouldn't think it was great when they were stuck in traffic, right?
Müller:
That depends on the assumptions.
I have suggested that society responds rationally to circumstances and incentives.
If the costs of the climate crisis become too great, then there will be climate protection.
This is how everyone in the climate movement imagined it.
In the meantime I have to say: this is obviously wrong.
The reaction is not rational, repression increases.
MIRROR:
What do you mean by that?
Müller:
Almost everyone says they want climate protection, and meanwhile the government is pushing ahead with the gas expansion of the third fossil age - in this situation, climate activism is being suppressed because it reminds us that we are all doing wrong and living wrong.
We know from relationships what the reaction is when you address the repressed.
This often triggers an aggressive counterattack.
If, for example, the largest newspaper in the republic, the picture, writes: May I stick climate stickers?
Or when Olaf Scholz compares an activist's interjection with fascist terror.
What a moral and intellectual blunder!
Where does it come from?
It's repression.
SPIEGEL:
If Germany is a displacement society, what are the consequences?
Müller:
Then it has to be on the couch.
SPIEGEL:
You can't lay a country on the couch.
Müller:
Yes, that is the problem.
In addition, you have to want to lie down on the couch voluntarily, otherwise the best therapy will not help.
SPIEGEL:
If we are dealing with a suppressive society, is the provocative approach of the last generation a strategic wrongdoing?
Müller:
It would be a dead end if it were the only way.
But there is the theory of the radical flank: it takes the radicals for society to talk to the moderates.
SPIEGEL:
But society is already talking to the moderates, isn't it?
Luisa Neubauer sits with the finance minister and meets the chancellor and, if necessary, will probably get an appointment with the British king the day after tomorrow.
Müller:
It would be good if the moderate wing moved, but Fridays for Future is unable to act and is standing still.
The climate movement currently has a radical flank, but in fact no moderate flank.
That can change again, but there is currently no strong center.
SPIEGEL:
Couldn't it also be that the radical flank is delegitimizing the center?
Müller:
For years, society has pulled us to its bourgeois bosom and said, nice that you're here, we'll just do the energy transition from now on, then we'll even earn money with great technologies.
Now it's becoming increasingly clear that it won't be that nice.
Former US President George HW Bush said at the first Earth Summit in Rio in 1992: The American standard of living is non-negotiable.
However, climate protection means that we reduce our prosperity.
German prosperity is based on fossil cars.
A prosperous Germany is a climate-destroying Germany.
With this insight, the climate movement inevitably becomes the other again, which is pushed out and expelled from society.
SPIEGEL:
Sounds like the next radical thesis that could fall on the movement's toes: By climate protection, we mean the shredding of your prosperity.
Is that so clear?
Müller:
We know that economic growth is closely linked to greenhouse gas emissions.
Our wealth is based on the poverty of others.
The sociologist Stephan Lessenich has put this into two beautiful formulas: not after us the deluge, but next to us the deluge.
And we don't live beyond our means, but beyond the means of others.
The great promise of green capitalism is to change all that and decouple growth from exploitation.
But that's an illusion.
SPIEGEL:
The connection between economic power and ecological destruction can still be proven today.
But there are first signs of decoupling.
And if you are serious about the fact that an epochal break in human history is ahead of us and that the greatest economic transformation of all time must be tackled, then this does not necessarily mean that the connection will continue.
Müller:
Even if it were the case that we saved resources, they wouldn't stay in the savings stockings or the earth.
When crude oil began its triumphal march, it did not replace coal, from then on both were burned.
Also, shifting away from fossil fuels as prosperity increases would require so many resources that it would push the climate over the cliff.
It is true that I cannot say that green capitalism cannot exist, but we have only a few years left and in that time the scenario can be shelved.
SPIEGEL:
If all green utopias are based on false assumptions.
Which society do you imagine?
Müller:
My vision is a society that is not ashamed but takes responsibility.
SPIEGEL:
That could also be said in a Sunday sermon or at a shareholders' meeting.
Can you be more specific?
Müller:
My dream scenario is that society sits on its ass and says: We have to deprive ourselves for ethical reasons.
We have climate debt to the Global South, we need to stop building these damn cars and build new fossil fuel infrastructure.
I do know, however, that this is vague and magical thinking.
No elite has ever voluntarily given up their privileges.
Germany cannot stop producing cars tomorrow, so it can only continue to be ashamed and suppress that shame.
And when shame becomes too great, people sometimes choose death rather than face it.
SPIEGEL:
What does that mean for the climate movement?
Give up?
Müller:
The climate movement is completely uncoordinated.
The most important actors of the last few years are culturally alien to each other and work side by side.
The last generation is attracting huge amounts of money from anti-repression funds - that's okay, but something like this needs to be coordinated lest other groups be sidelined.
Fridays for Future should stop organizing climate strikes that don't achieve anything, but to which everyone has to dodge to keep the movement from looking ridiculously small.
We need a Movement Council for something like this.
SPIEGEL:
In politics, they say: If you don't know what to do, you set up a working group.
Müller:
I know that sounds helpless.
I'm pretty clueless.
The climate movement is at a loss.
All realistic scenarios are through.
All of our previous strategies have been defeated.
We have tried everything.
That doesn't mean we can't come up with new ideas.
Marx once said that he could not have imagined communism without the Paris Commune.
SPIEGEL:
You're referring to the weeks in the spring of 1871, during the Franco-Prussian War, when an uprising broke out in Paris and a kind of socialist Soviet republic was improvised.
Müller:
We need what the Paris Commune was for Karl Marx for the climate justice movement.
A new impulse, a place that shows that the impossible becomes possible.
The last generation at least keeps the space for ideas open, but in the end it remains the case that society must act.
The ball is hers.
At that point I'm certainly not saying I'm going to sabotage and become an enemy of the state, I'm not stupid.
You do.
I really don't feel like it anymore.
SPIEGEL:
Does that mean you're announcing your retirement as an activist yet again?
Müller:
No, I will not say goodbye to the climate movement, but I will try to develop a second mainstay.
Attacks on queer people are increasing, this year six Christopher Street Day parades in Germany were attacked.
The fascist wave is rolling on, and it will break particularly violently over these communities.
That's why I want to organize queer self-defense with a Pink Panther brigade.
Let's see if that works.
SPIEGEL:
To put it in the terms of the climate debate: Are you focusing on adaptation instead of mitigation, on trying to fundamentally improve the situation?
Müller:
Exactly, I rely on adaptation in order to defend a small, safe space in this crowded-out society.
I will still fight for something better, but I no longer believe in climate protection.