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Berlin, West Germany, September 1981. Thousands demonstrate against the visit of U.S. Secretary of State Alexander Haig.
arrested would have meant that the pigs had managed to stifle our will to resist the war politicians from the very beginning. Most of the people on the square must have felt the same. Everywhere stones were dug up, people organized chains. Suddenly a police van drove up in Macksenstrasse, near the Roland furniture shop, and told us that the demonstration was forbidden and that we would be allowed to leave the square via special "check points" if we would agree to being searched. Of course this was out of the question. Later I learned from people that at first these installations had not existed at all and later on, when they had been installed, people passing there had been beaten up by the police. At Macksenstrasse, where the police loudspeaker van was standing, the confrontations began. After having forced the pigs to retreat by throwing stones at them we were able to pull aside the barbed wire and to enter the street. The pigs who were now hiding behind their vans had to retreat further, although they tried to advance again from time to time. Unfortunately we did not have any idea if there were many pigs kept in reserve there and so it seemed too risky to venture too far into Macksenstrasse, although at that time there was the chance to break through to Kurfurstenstrasse (later we learned from comrades who had listened to the police radio-communication that at that time no police had been kept in reserve there.) It was a pity that we did not have a loudspeaker van or
good megaphones. There was no possibility of coordinating all the action on the square. Confrontation now started at all streets leading from the square. For us in Macksenstrasse, there was the danger of the police coming from Bulowstrasse or Einemstrasse and attacking us from the back by driving their vans through groups of people and thus cutting off our way of retreat. While the police in front of us got reinforcement from water cannons, we started to build barricades in the direction of Bulowstrasse and Einemstrasse by getting the expensive old-style furniture out of Rolands furniture store, piling it up and setting it aflame. But nonetheless, in such a situation of street fighting, everyone to a large extent is responsible for him/herself, keeping an eye on the surroundings, watching out for plainclothesmen, recognizing dangerous situations and retreating in time and calmly. All the time at the furniture store I did not see that anyone was wounded on our side, although many comrades threw stones while standing far away and thus endangered others. We were able to keep the police away from us all of the time. After about 1-1/2 hours I began to look around for my group that I had lost in the chaos. There seemed to be considerably less people on the square. Many had obviously managed to get out somehow. I met a group of about 500 people who had assembled at Bulowstrasse to try to break out there and I decided to go with them. The 14
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