Thomas Weidenbach

Fortune, as you know, favours the bold and the active, so at one point the sun did come out for a bit, we struck out in our rubber dinghy, into the water with the life rafts. We lashed them to the bridge where the poisonous acid was loaded. And there we were. The press was there. We had achieved our success. And then a truly incredible thing happened. We had thought, “Oh, this protest will last maybe an hour, two hours, then the river police will come and arrest us, haul us off and it will all be over”. That didn’t happen. No chance! We stayed there for a week because Bayer, the global corporation, was so taken aback. They never counted on ten or twelve committed people from Cologne, including myself, someone doing his A levels, having the audacity to get in their way and block their operations. And the river police thought it was so great that we were taking this action. They weren’t there to arrest us; instead they brought us coffee and congratulated us for finally doing something against the damn pollution, this dumping in the North Sea. And then we got into a bit of a mess because we were there for a week and hadn’t really prepared. When you’re on site for a week, what do you need? Food and a toilet. Maybe we hadn’t organized things properly. And as absurd as it sounds, we were incredibly relieved when all of a sudden in stepped the Leverkusen-Mitte branch of the German Communist Party, a kind of old men’s veterans club we had nothing to do with. But those old men still remembered how to instigate a revolution, so to speak! They knew you need pea soup and portable loos. So all of a sudden a loo was there on the riverbank and, thank God, we were able to take turns leaving the life rafts and have a pee. So on the one hand we had been thrown off course, but on the other hand we were on cloud nine a bit. Because all of a sudden we were the ones in the dominant position there on the banks of the Rhine in front of Bayer Leverkusen. We had been in the news on TV every day. The daily newspapers were full of the story of a small group of people who dared to challenge this big company and draw attention to the massive mess they were making. I think all the ordinary people were also totally on our side. It just couldn’t be that poison was being shipped away and, without any treatment, simply dumped into the North Sea, hundreds and thousands of tonnes of it. That message got through to every ordinary citizen: this cannot be!