EA city is waiting for its fate. Schwedt is in the far east of Germany on the Polish border. The fortunes of the city are closely linked to the oil refinery located there, which has been supplied with oil from Russia for decades through a pipeline with the promising name “Friendship”. By the end of the year, the federal government has decided that Germany will no longer purchase oil from Putin. Schwedt makes the decision like no other city in the country: twelve million tons of Russian crude oil are processed annually in the Schwedt PCK plant. 1,200 employees depend directly on Putin’s drip, and thousands more are linked to the refinery as suppliers. If you include family members, the city estimates that up to 10,000 people are at stake.
The state politicians deny responsibility. The federal government is to blame for this, so it must also take responsibility for it. A task force has been set up in the Economics Ministry, but nothing promising has been heard from it. When Minister Habeck spoke at a protest event in Schwedt at the end of June, he was hissed at. Citizens roared loudest when he predicted that Putin would soon be “less and less able to buy himself with the money we give him.” People in Schwedt didn’t want to believe or hear such half-strong sentences.
Nobody seems to care
The mayor of the city is the social democrat Annekathrin Hoppe. When you talk to her on the phone, you can’t help hearing the desperation in her voice. There are still four months until the pipeline is scheduled to be shut down and it is still not clear what will happen to your city. There are vague plans to compensate for the oil inflow via the port of Rostock, but the amount promised would apparently not be enough to keep production going. The only hope left for Hoppe is that those responsible in Berlin will reconsider their decision.
The situation is getting worse in her city, says the mayor, people fear for their jobs and their energy bills: “And yet nobody in federal politics seems to be interested in whether there is a solution for Schwedt.” local politicians let down by big politics – that is of course a topos of the strategically shifted ethics of responsibility. And yet, at the moment, the uneasy impression could actually arise that in the back rooms of Berlin they had secretly agreed to reveal the city as a “pawn sacrifice”. “I don’t think that people stay calm here in Schwedt” – the mayor says that and hastily apologizes for her “dramatic” expression.
The specialist in this trade has fewer inhibitions. André Nicke, artistic director of the Schwedter Theater, was born in Saxony and is a vocal influence on the debate in his city. He organizes weekly dialogue formats, but also understands “a release of pressure on the street”. Referring to Heiner Müller, he argues that all fears that people express should be taken seriously. And what if the fear is expressed in the suspicion that aggressive war is being used to push through a “green ideology”? Then Nicke at least finds the idea obvious “that one uses certain historical situations to enforce one’s own politics, not to say exploits”.
Unusual words from a theater manager. But in Schwedt there is currently no time for mindful language. “We feel as if we should voluntarily let our necks be wrinkled,” Nicke calls into the phone and adds in the exuberance of the resistance feeling: “Germany’s freedom is not only being defended in Ukraine, it is also being defended internally. “
Schwedt – this is not just a social question. The case is also one of political culture. Basically, it’s about whether politicians can see the consequences of their actions. Whether she takes offensive responsibility for the consequences of her decisions. Or whether it tacitly accepts that the structurally weak east of Germany will once again become a powder keg.
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