Dhe conversation lasted barely ten minutes, then Albrecht Fester, Chancellor of Frankfurt’s Goethe University, left the hall, annoyed. The climate activists do not want to accept his proposal: Fester had offered to provide them with rooms for discussion events on the university’s Bockenheim campus, but also on the university campus in the Westend. In return, they should vacate the lecture hall that they have been occupying since Tuesday morning. But the squatters don’t accept the offer: “We’re staying here,” they explain to the university chancellor.
“End Fossil” is the name of the group that occupied the lecture hall on the Westend campus. The Frankfurt action is not the first occupation by its activists. At the end of October, a group of “End Fossil” occupied university rooms in Göttingen, and there were also actions in Marburg and Augsburg. The group has announced on its website that there will be more than 20 university and school occupations in Germany by the end of the year under the motto “End Fossil: Occupy!”.
Long list of demands
The Frankfurt branch calls your action on the Westend Campus an “open occupation”. Lectures are to be held in the lecture hall and the demands of the group are to be discussed. About 150 students gathered there on Tuesday afternoon. A banner with the words “Busy! For climate justice” hangs on the wall, sofas and armchairs have been moved into the hall and set up in a circle, bananas, hummus and pretzels are stacked on a table. At the entrance to the lecture hall, written on white paper with a permanent marker, hangs the list of the occupiers’ demands. It’s quite long.
The activists want the Juridicum on the campus in Bockenheim not to be handed over by the university to the municipal housing association ABG and not to be demolished either. Instead, initiatives should be able to use the building “in self-administration”. It is also required that the university terminate its contracts with the energy supplier Mainova and switch to a non-fossil energy supply. A professorship for climate and transformation is to be created, but “more queer-feminist research” is also to be made possible.
“We’re disrupting operations, but we don’t want to start a riot,” says Lukas Geisler, one of the squatters. The program was planned until Friday, and the group wants to discuss how to proceed in the plenary session. The university management has not yet said how they will react after the group’s refusal to move to other rooms.
