Women’s Resistance In Hunsrück: The Small, Tenacious Protest Camp

In the early 1980s, the arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union also involved West Germany. The US deployed medium-range missiles and soldiers there, and built radar stations and barracks. In addition to the peace movement, there were women’s groups that clearly protested the arms race as preparation for war; called affinity groups, they had names like ‘Aktion Gegenwind’, ‘Organisiertes Chaos’, ‘Widerspinst, Bella Blitz’, ‘Radicarla’, and ‘Die Militanz’. 

From Headwind to the Women’s Resistance Camp

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Plans for an antimilitaristic women’s camp at a site where nuclear weapons were being deployed was first discussed at the 1982 Summer University for Women in Berlin: „We invite all activist women, lesbians and straight women, antimilitarists and women for peace, autonomous and anti-imperialist women, eco-freaks and Runway 18 West (Frankfurt airport) protesters, housewives, nannies, garden and church women, and, last but not least, witches and astrology women to come together for a workshop to build a women’s resistance network.“1<p>Schecke, Birgit: “Frauenlager gegen Atomwaffen,” in: (Über)lebensstrategien – 6. Sommeruni für Frauen des AStA FU-Lesbenreferats, Berlin, 1982, 80.</p> The planning meetings that took place throughout West Germany were documented in a brochure. The women decided to set up a protest camp in the Hunsrück region, where ninety-six US cruise missiles were to be deployed in late 1986 on the former drill grounds of the German army in the town of Hasselbach. For their camp, they were able rent a meadow that belonged to Adele, a farmer and retired agriculture teacher, in the nearby village of Reckershausen.2<p>On the chronology and assessment of “political camps” see the text by Professor Christiane Leidinger in the bibliography.&nbsp;</p>

Political Camping on Adele’s Meadow

In July 1983, women from throughout West Germany and West Berlin came together at the Women’s Resistance Camp: most were part of the independent women’s and lesbian movement and left-wing, Christian, and/or spiritual circles. Many women’s experiences in the peace movement showed that it was impossible to analyse the parallels between militarism and patriarchy in groups with a lot of men. They therefore met without men and developed their own resistance strategies. The women lived together for several weeks outdoors in tents—a counterpoint to patriarchal normalcy. 

The Hunsrück camp was inspired by the women’s resistance camps in Greenham Common (UK), Comiso, Sicily (La Ragnatella, “the spider’s web”), as well as Seneca Falls (New York), where the Cruise and Pershing II missiles were stored before being deployed in Western Europe. 

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At the first Hunsrück camp, hundreds of women arrived over the four-week duration of the camp, with about two thousand participating in the ‘action day’ set in the middle. There were kitchen tents for small groups to gather and orient themselves, and a camp plenary meeting took place regularly. There was no organized hierarchy or leadership. Every woman could organize actions, but no one was obligated to participate. 

Chores were divided up and the water supply and grocery shopping were organized. Diverse women often found common ground in the practical, shared jobs, such as cooking. Discussions took place from morning to night. Music, dance, and creativity—also as part of the protest actions—played an important role.

Resistance as a Residence

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The women carried out several spectacular protest actions against the US military, some of them not always legal: „This is about defending ourselves against the prevailing (male!) violence that we are confronted with in the form of military, arms race, and everyday violence. The male principle of power and violence that has prevailed for millennia has been based fundamentally and from time immemorial on the worldwide oppression of women and is expressed in an ever-escalating form of exploitation, striving for power, and destruction. Our aim is to resist militarism as a direct outgrowth of the patriarchy and not merely join the peace movement with its general, humanitarian goals, since it is not willing to question the patriarchal structures that we feel are integral to any analysis.“3<p>NL-FWH CI,23, Infoblatt Presse NRW Zeitungen zum 1. Camp Köln, Maria Finnemann und Gesine Endmann.</p> There was intense discussion within and outside the camp about whether or not the resistance should always remain nonviolent, and the image of the ‚peaceful woman‘ was questioned.

The resistance actions from 1983 to 1985 centered around the military base in Hasselbach. Construction of the wall enclosing the area was disrupted when women occupied a construction crane and some women moved entirely from the Reckershausen camp to the forest adjacent to the site. Some of them even registered this base camp of their resistance at the site’s main gate as their official address. After that base camp was cleared, the boldest of the women entered the missile base and camped one night on a bunker lid—that is, on top of the cruise missiles.

Sensational actions such as the (constant) vigils, rotating blockades, and rally and political action days, which also opposed the brothels used by the US soldiers, disrupted army operations, and spread the camp’s feminist messages: that the arms race was not a deterrent but was hostile to life and that militarization and imperialism were an expression of the patriarchy and mirrored personal experiences of violence. The camp women declared: „There is no significant difference between the rape of a woman, the conquering of a country, and the destruction of the earth.“

Hunsrück, United Women’s Land?

Completely different worlds confronted each other when the Women’s Resistance Camp came to tranquil Reckershausen. There were some attacks on the camp as well as incidents of violence against local women by their partners, who felt provoked by the Women’s Resistance Camp. At the camp, there were also some disturbances of the peace and violations of the regulation not to walk around the camp naked. Cooperation between local Hunsrück women and camp women seemed promising at first. But soon there was criticism by some of the Hunsrück women who did not feel sufficiently supported in their efforts to mediate between camp women and locals: „It seems as if for some of you we are nothing more than what we are for the American army: the deployment site. … We cannot and will not participate in a camp that represents an irresolvable contradiction to our life here in the Hunsrück and to our political work before and after.“
4Brief der Hunsr&uuml;ckerinnen, in: Frauenwiderstandscamp (Hg.): Frauenwiderstand im Hunsr&uuml;ck vom 2.7.-31.8.84, Staffhorst/Reckershausen 1984, S. 20.

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While some Hunsrück women remained connected to the camp, collaboration from 1984 on was less frequent. A ‘women’s land’ as an alternative to the patriarchy was not easy to implement, neither within the camp nor beyond it.

Resistance in a State of Flux

The women’s resistance camps showed great continuity, with eleven camps between 1983 and 1993. However, at the same time there was some fluctuation in the camps: women participated for different lengths of time and with varied regularity, and some stopped participating altogether. There were diverse reasons for this: changes in one’s living situation, court cases following illegal protests, or a new focus on different issues.

After court proceedings against several camp women in 1986–87, part of the resistance shifted to the Gossberg, the site of a US radar station since 1956. From 1984 to 1989, a thirty-meter-deep bunker was excavated to serve the NATO control centre as an early warning system. The flora and fauna of the mountain had suffered serious damage as a result of the construction work. With the disarmament that began in 1987, the site never went into operation. This disarmament also led to a decrease in the number of participants in the women’s resistance camps.
 

In many respects, the camp women had a lot in common: most of them were white women with German citizenship who lived their everyday lives without disabilities; they were largely students and nonconformists. Their own privileged status led them to consider: How could women with disabilities be better accommodated in the camp? Why were there very few women of color in the camp, and how was the experience for those who did participate? After 1989, the question arose of how to reach out to women from the former GDR.

Early enthusiasm collided with daily routines such as cleaning the toilets and organizing the next camp. Considering all the openness, what did the political common ground look like? There was tension between lesbians and straight women, as well as problems for the mothers who brought their young sons to the camp. The camp was renamed the Lesbian/Women’s Resistance Camp in 1990 and the Lesbian/Women’s/Girls’ Resistance Camp the following year.

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In addition, the notions of resistance changed over time. Whereas in the early years, it was mainly about highly visible actions protesting militarization within the context of a critique of patriarchy, the focus shifted starting in 1990 to the women’s own experiences of violence and the general themes of the women’s and lesbian movement: violence against women, racism, classism, environmental protection, lesbian identity, antisemitism, the situation of women with disabilities. Was an annual camp still the proper form of resistance? The last women’s resistance camp in the Hunsrück took place in 1993, but plans for a camp the following year were never implemented.

The Tenacious

As strange as many locals found the activities of the camp women, the camps had a lasting impact on the Hunsrück region. Many (former) camp women moved to the area, making it a contact point for other women’s projects, such as the annual women’s music festival from 1994 to 2015. The women who moved there founded the first women’s emergency hotline in the area, initiated projects to reexamine the Nazi history of Hunsrück villages, worked in the Ravensbrück Memorial Museum, or imparted regional women’s history in theatre performances. To this day, they remain politically active in multiple ways.