Hanging Out With the German Activists Who Glue Themselves to Things – By Bryn Stole (Mother Jones) / Feb 7, 2023
Letzte Generation aims to “disrupt daily life” to keep climate issues on the front burner.
This story was originally published by Slate and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
It took only a split second after the climate activists strode into the busy Berlin intersection for drivers on their morning commute to realize what was happening. Several leaped from their vehicles to wrestle the activists off the road, but two of the young people had already super-glued their hands to the freezing-cold pavement.
For the next hour, as traffic trickled through the partially blocked lanes, drivers regularly slowed down to hurl abuse at the activists. Police officers used cooking oil to dissolve the glue and remove the protesters from the blocked lanes as profanity-laced shouts of “Bums!” “Morons!” “Get a job!” and “You’re all nothing but failures!” pierced the cold December air. Even an ambulance driver, siren blaring, made a point of rolling down his window and letting the activists know just what he thought of them.
Unleashing anger was part of—or perhaps even the entire point of—the exercise. These activists, from Germany’s Letzte Generation (Last Generation) group, are here to annoy, irritate, and piss off German society. It doesn’t matter what you call them, as long as you’re talking about them. And on those terms, their project is working.
