A hunger strike by four climate activists has been going on in Berlin since the beginning of March. They want to get Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) to recognize the urgency of climate protection measures. The initiator of the “Starve until you’re honest” campaign is Wolfgang Metzeler-Kick from Munich. According to the support team in the protest camp, his condition was recently “acutely life-threatening”.
Metzeler-Kick had originally announced that he would not drink anything from this week onwards. Now he is changing his strategy: he wants to eat solid food again. The Chancellor’s government statement on Thursday contributed to this change in strategy. The activists see it as positive that Scholz has identified a connection between the flood disaster and the climate crisis. Metzeler-Kick: “It’s not enough yet, but we see positive changes in the Chancellor’s statements.”
A camp spokeswoman said they hoped the government would be willing to talk in the coming days. The activists wanted to use the temporary interruption of the strict hunger strike to refute the accusation that they wanted to blackmail politicians. They wanted to give the government a little more time to “prove its goodwill.”
If there is no further compromise, the hunger strike will continue next week. Metzeler-Kick stressed that he does not want to die, but: “I am prepared to risk my life so that the scientific facts about the climate catastrophe are finally made public.” The group’s demands include that the Chancellor should publicly declare that there are already hundreds of gigatons of CO₂ too much in the atmosphere. Metzeler-Kick also demands that Scholz declare: “The continued existence of human civilization is extremely threatened by the climate catastrophe.” And: “We must now, even if years late, radically change course.”
Metzeler-Kick, 49, is one of the best-known and most radical climate activists of the “Last Generation”; however, the hunger strike, which has been joined by three other men, is not an action by this group. Michael Winter from Garching called off his hunger strike in mid-May after 31 days due to serious health problems.
The camp is registered as a permanent meeting. It was initially located not far from the Reichstag, but since the end of April it has been in the Invalidenpark near the Ministry of Economic Affairs. On Tuesday evening, Metzeler-Kick was admitted to a Berlin clinic due to circulatory collapse, according to the camp team.
Would the Berlin authorities allow someone to starve themselves to death in a public space? A spokesman for the Berlin police explained that their job is to guarantee freedom of assembly. If someone in the camp is in mortal danger, emergency services will of course be alerted. It may be necessary to check whether it is legally possible to exclude certain people from the assembly, i.e. people in mortal danger. The initiative to clear the camp in order to prevent a death would have to come from the responsible Mitte district office.
A spokesperson for this authority explains that they are only allowed to intervene “in an extremely serious acute situation” when a participant in the meeting is in an “acute psychosis”, i.e. is no longer of sound mind. The health authority is not responsible for “intentional self-harm”. They cannot and do not want to brand an expression of opinion as the result of a mental illness. “The latter must be avoided with all possible force, because this would be an illegal infringement on the freedom of those affected.”