Peace activist: “In West Germany, only the ideological construct ‘The Russian’ is known”
Kristian Golla has worked in the peace movement for over three decades and is one of the managing directors of the Peace Cooperative network. An interview.
Kristian Golla has been working in the peace movement for over three decades and is one of the managing directors of the Peace Cooperative network. In this interview, he explains the changing protest culture of anti-war activists today, the differences between East and West Germany, and why negotiations are always the better way forward.
Mr. Golla, you have been active in the peace movement for a very long time. You have been involved since the late 1980s and have been active in the Peace Cooperative Network for over 30 years. Can you explain how the Peace Cooperative Network, a service and information office for the movement that supports and organizes campaigns and activities and publishes the magazine " Friedensforum ," came into being?
When I started at the University of Bonn after studying political science and public law, our organization was not called the Peace Cooperative Network, but the "Coordinating Committee of the Peace Movement." It was the Bonn-based umbrella organization of the West German peace movement. I was tasked with coordinating an event in 1988, and that one event quickly turned into 30 years, and "politics academic" became "politics practical." The network had two major tasks at the time: to be able to take action at the then seat of government in Bonn and, if possible, to organize over 100,000 people for a demonstration. Because in the 1980s and 1990s, the saying always went that if you had something to say, you had to fill Bonn's Hofgarten. I managed that twice in the 1990s.
It seems as if there aren't the necessary anti-war protests of the same magnitude today as there were in the 1980s after the NATO Double-Track Decision. What has changed: the people, the times, the means of information and communication?
Today, there are many different ways to express one's voice, such as online petitions. In Berlin, of course, demonstrations continue to work. But in Bonn, people knew that people would come from everywhere, just not from the city. Bonn only has 300,000 inhabitants. In Berlin, with its 3.7 million inhabitants, things are a little different today. In Bonn, the big advantage was that you knew roughly how many people would come once the buses and trains had registered – that was in the old days when people still worked with faxes. In Berlin today, you can achieve great success with the same amount of work. Or you can organize something that no one notices because another rally is taking place three meters away. These are simply different factors; it has to do with the size of the city, but also with the context of the last 30-40 years, in which many things have changed. Today, you can express protest even with three or four million signatures.
What tasks does the network perform? Is it active on its own initiative, or does it function more as a coordinating body?
From the beginning, the Peace Cooperative Network had two tasks: first, to be able to take action at the seat of government, and second, to initiate and coordinate actions. You can do that from anywhere; you don't have to be based in Berlin. We do that from here in Bonn: to initiate and coordinate actions. One example is this year's Easter marches, which are traditionally organized, managed, and paid for regionally and locally. We offer a nationwide connection. People organize an event locally, and we show which 80-90 other cities are also hosting events. If someone lives outside of the larger cities and doesn't have these contacts, they can use the overview provided by the Peace Cooperative Network. We also collect speeches and appeals, and publish material—not just for Easter, of course, but also when there are focal points for action, such as the war in Ukraine.
The peace movement in Germany gained significant momentum in the 1980s with the NATO Double-Track Decision . It was about nuclear weapons buildup. Now we're experiencing another massive arms buildup. Have you noticed that, in the context of the war in Ukraine, a larger portion of the country's population is once again opposing it?
The peace movement is a social movement. And social movements in general have cyclical ups and downs. Of course, you can compare the 1980s, when hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets, with today. But such a comparison doesn't do the matter justice, because society has changed in the last 30 years or so. There are other forms of protest today that didn't exist back then. Many things can be done differently and more easily today. Whether social media is merely a reflection of this change or also a driver is debatable. In any case, everything in the 1980s simply took much longer. The NATO rearmament process took more than three years. In 1979, NATO said: We will station missiles if we haven't reached an agreement with the Russians by 1983. Today, the delays are 14 days or a week, sometimes not even that long. There are also several parallel histories and developments. In the 1980s, there was a doomsday scenario: nuclear death. The question was: What if everyone pushed the button? Back then, nuclear weapons could destroy the world fourfold; today, with existing nuclear warheads, the majority of which are in the possession of the Russians and the Americans, it can still be destroyed twice as much.
The potential nuclear apocalypse is still a possible scenario—why isn't it mobilizing like it did back then? Especially since it's being discussed again in the context of the Ukraine war, for example, in the context of tactical nuclear weapons?
Among other things, because today another doomsday scenario has emerged – climate catastrophe. Nevertheless, there is, of course, an influx of peace initiatives. When journalists tell me that there is now a threat and we need to rearm, I always counter with the following example: What are the real threats facing modern industrialized nations? Today, in my view, it is climate catastrophe, pandemics, and right-wing populism. Soldiers and rearmament will not help against any of these three things. In fact, it actually just steals our resources. Because all the money we put into armaments now is missing from the other three areas. Things were different in the 1980s, when there was one focus: NATO rearmament, because the "evil" Soviets supposedly wanted to attack us. Now we have the advantage of knowing from history that things were perhaps a little different than they were portrayed in the 1980s. We know that the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact states were just as afraid of the West as the other way around, and that the threat scenario was more of an assumption. The three points I mentioned, which I consider urgent today, involve international cooperation, because we can only solve the world's most important problems together, not against each other. At the moment, however, this necessary cooperation is very difficult to imagine.
It's understandable that the diversity of controversial and urgent issues has changed the forms and focuses of protest today. But has the war in Ukraine, overall, prompted more people to protest and resist?
I'd say there are two different things. One is: What does the population think? And the other: What are people doing, or not doing? Even in the 1980s, of course, not the whole world or the whole of Germany was involved in the peace movement. But it was the overarching theme, and everyone referred to it. Even Helmut Kohl changed the saying "Creating peace without weapons" to "Creating peace with ever fewer weapons." So peace was the reference point. I believe there are still enough people who view current developments critically. But not everyone wants to immediately turn that into protest. There is a healthy skepticism towards armaments, towards military solutions, or even supposedly military solutions, because it's not really about military issues. It seems like déjà vu: 'The Russians want to occupy us again,' which is of course a half-baked threat assessment. I don't want to belittle this, because in my view, what Putin is doing is imperialist action—occupying a foreign country and threatening others, such as the Baltic states or Poland. In Germany, as a nation of perpetrators, we have a healthy skepticism. We "unleashed" two major wars that brought great disaster to half the world, and it's clear that there are people who ask whether there aren't other ways to resolve the conflict.
Both Poland and Germany are probably special cases in this regard. Do the prospects look different further west?
The issue is handled very differently in France and England. There, there's no such healthy skepticism toward military solutions, and that, too, has something to do with the history of those countries. To return to Germany: If you ask people sitting at home on their sofas what their position is in opinion polls, they naturally get good answers. But those same people don't immediately take to the streets to protest. Many say they are against it and express that what politicians are offering us is more of a helpless reaction to the idea that rearmament is the order of the day. Many are convinced that states need to engage more in dialogue with one another and that it's more about striving for forms of collective security. So, it's about engaging in dialogue with Russia. This war didn't spring out of a vacuum, even if it's completely clear who started it. Nevertheless, the question remains: can this conflict be resolved militarily? Probably not, because it's not a military conflict, but a political one. And this can only be solved politically, namely primarily through dialogue and negotiation.
Such calls for excessive willingness to talk and compromise are sometimes dismissed in Germany as appeasement or sympathy for Putin. Do you also experience this in your network? Are you facing massive criticism for your positions?
Even in the 1980s, politicians – Helmut Kohl, for example, and also the SPD, which worked on the NATO Double-Track Decision – tried to "discredit" the peace movement. I wouldn't say it was more or less. Yet it's quite clear today that labeling someone as a "Putin sympathizer" is a rather unsuitable tool for doing so. It's clear that if you want to negotiate, the other party isn't your friend, and it will be difficult. This conflict can't be resolved militarily, and yet the dominant narrative is: we have to rearm. If we look at how past wars ended, very often negotiations first took place behind the scenes, where people agreed on things away from the public eye, which were then put on the table again at official negotiations. I very much hope that this is also happening at the moment.
Were the negotiations between Russia and Ukraine, which now took place in Turkey, the right step – even in the reduced format?
Regardless of what I think of Turkey's constitution or of Recep Erdoğan politically, it is a good sign that he is offering spaces where people can exchange ideas. The same applies to Saudi Arabia, which of course is not a democracy in the Western sense, which I and probably most people would like. Nevertheless, spaces for discussion are being opened up there. And it doesn't matter what you think of Donald Trump, for the time being. In any case, he has brought about change; for whatever reason, he did what other politicians have not done in the last three years. And that is actually the path we must continue on. Because in the last three years, hundreds of thousands of people have died, civilians and soldiers, regardless of what uniform they were wearing.
Speaking of the last three years, how do you assess the policies of Olaf Scholz's federal government regarding this war? Couldn't they have acted differently, avoiding war?
Like many other people, at the beginning of 2022, I couldn't imagine that Russia would start a war, that Putin would act so aggressively against his own interests that he would reject offers of negotiation. And that he could wage a land war in a country with functioning nuclear power plants that, if hit, would also affect Russia. I couldn't or didn't want to imagine any of this. I can't say now what the German government did wrong three years ago; that would be a counterfactual discussion. Once the first shot has been fired, it's always very difficult to reverse it.
But wasn't it rather the case that shortly before the outbreak of war the West did not want to negotiate and insisted on Ukraine joining NATO, which German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy opposed in 2008, half-heartedly but still?
Now we're discussing larger political spheres. I'm a bit more modest in that regard. I have my opinion, but of course I have no influence in this area. In that respect, it's very easy to say, "if only, if only, if only..." As I said, this conflict didn't arise in a vacuum; that's always a very short summary of everything that happened beforehand. I believe the conflict is about a tough power game, which is sometimes the case in international relations. For a sovereign state, Russia, to deny another sovereign state, Ukraine, membership in NATO is not really acceptable. Nevertheless, one can understand it emotionally. When Angela Merkel expressed her concerns back then, a certain biographical context resonated with her. She grew up in the GDR and knew Russians. The perception of Russians in the GDR was, and is, not always positive, but one also got to know the people there personally. In the West, one only knew the ideological construct of the Russians or the Soviet Union. The writer Heinrich Böll, for example, also perceived things differently, precisely because he was in contact with fellow writers from Russia. Vladimir Putin, too, has a special biographical background, shaped by his work in the secret services, where everything works, except trust. It is therefore an even greater achievement for him to rely on trust and cooperation. He is who he is, and yet we must do business with him, and that means negotiating, because negotiating is always the better solution. If it is really true that there are certain American voices that say or have said: 'We will now fight the Russians down and disarm them through war,' I am still enough of a pacifist to say that people will die for over three years. It is all not worth it. But there are certain people who see it differently.
With Donald Trump's rise to power, which is more than controversial, is there now a real prospect that the war can be ended now and permanently?
Neither of us is sitting at the negotiating table and doesn't have to find a solution. The job of the peace movement is to draw attention to the fact that negotiations are important and that we must come together. Those sitting at the table, Ukraine and Russia, must find a solution that they can both accept, whatever that may look like. I can point to peace and conflict research and history, which show that just peace and just proposals work better and are more sustainable. Russia and Ukraine must find a solution that they can both communicate to their own people. Putin has achieved little in over three years. I'm not a Slavist, I don't speak Russian. But people who know Russia better than I do say that there is widespread dissatisfaction in society there, but that because of the authoritarian structures, it is not articulated and does not get through.
We've focused on the war in Ukraine. I'd also like to hear how activists and organizations in the network are dealing with the war in the Gaza Strip. Israel recently launched a new offensive, after imposing a devastating total blockade. Especially in Germany, as a nation that committed the Holocaust, many find it difficult to criticize Israel. What's the situation like in the Peace Cooperative network?
I think we have to separate them: the German past is one thing, one can talk about that at length. But the Israeli present is something else entirely. If you, as a German, try to reconcile the two, it doesn't work. The Israeli presence in Gaza is a complete disaster; nothing is being adhered to. Every kind of regulation, every kind of international law, is being trampled underfoot there. Either Hamas trying to drive all Jews into the sea, or right-wing Israelis trying to drive all Palestinians into the sea – that can't work. The only way to achieve this is through cooperation, because the people are simply there, and there have already been enough attempts to solve this. We have to get back to that. Hamas is taking its own population hostage, and the Israeli army doesn't care at all; it just keeps on keeping on, claiming that Hamas has its command centers under the hospitals. They probably are, too, and I don't know what's worse – simply using a hospital as a human shield, or ignoring all that and bombing the hospital. The situation in the Gaza Strip and Israel is even more deadlocked than in Ukraine and Russia, but there is currently little alternative to coexistence.
This is a perspective that is sometimes not accepted in Germany, for example, when I think of the pro-Palestinian protests that have been discredited by politicians and the media as anti-Semitic, or of entry bans for people like Yannis Varoufakis . Do people and organizations in your network also experience resistance when they engage in this issue?
Of course, the idea that anyone who speaks out against Israeli policy is anti-Semitic is also being exploited. This is a line of argument often used by the Israeli government. Anyone who is against us – especially from Germany – is therefore an anti-Semitic. However, there are also people in Germany who express themselves ambiguously. That's why I've tried to separate the German past from the current Israeli present. Discussing the two together can only go wrong. The term genocide is being used to describe the events in Gaza. As a German, I wouldn't want to use that term because, in my opinion, it devalues what happened in the Second World War. I don't want to. What's happening in the Gaza Strip is inhumane, but there's still a clear difference to the way the Nazis murdered in Poland or in half of Europe. But I can understand why people with Arab roots speak of genocide. And if you say that in Egypt, in Jordan or in Syria or wherever, it will be interpreted differently than if you say it in Germany.
Is the perspective you present also reflected in the positions of the majority of members of your network and, more generally, of participants in peace initiatives?
Yes and no. The peace movement generally calls for a differentiated perception of problems, not a black-and-white one based on the principle of: the bad Russians, the bad Israelis. It's about solutions, and it's about the fact that, regardless of what solutions are found, both sides have to accept them. The first step is always to stop the shooting. And that's already a long way to go. The next step, namely starting a dialogue with one another, post-conflict rehabilitation, is actually a much more difficult path and requires a lot more work to ensure that the end of one war or conflict doesn't immediately trigger the next one.
As a network, you are trying, as far as I can see, to do your part to raise awareness of these realities. What events are the focus of your work this year, beyond Russia, Ukraine, and Israel? August 2025 marks the eightieth anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was a crime against humanity, but to this day it is interpreted very differently in the USA, namely that the war against Japan was ended in one fell swoop. American society still needs time to recognize both that and that it was also a great crime against humanity. But we know from Germany that it takes a little longer for a nation to confront negative, dark aspects of its own past. In Germany, this concerned the Nazi past, the processing of which was initiated with the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials and the movement of 1968. It was important that this was addressed, and it is just as important now in the USA and in other countries where war crimes have been or are being committed.
Mr. Golla, thank you for the interview.
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