Abstract In recent years, Berlin has emerged as an epicenter of climate activism in Germany. There, a range of groups have mobilized in opposition to the role of the German state and the EU in accelerating the climate crisis. Many activists now see conventional political responses as exhausted and have turned to increasingly radical forms of civil disobedience. Street blockades in particular have become a favored tactic. These interventions in public space draw attention to the lives and conditions of those most affected by climate change. Yet they unfold amid police violence and verbal abuse from bystanders, experiences that generate both trauma and solidarity. In these contested spaces of listening, activists forge cathartic and conflictual forms of collective endurance as they struggle with the feeling that the world is falling apart.
Max Jack (Thu,) studied this question.