Christopher Street Day in Wolfsburg: Will the parade be disrupted?

Wolfsburg-Wolfsburgh. On Saturday, September 14, the participants of the Christopher Street Day (CSD) will parade through Wolfsburg in a colorful and loud manner. The parade is scheduled to start at 2 p.m. at Brandenburger Platz and move towards the town hall. The aim of the event is to reach even more people and to raise awareness of the needs of those celebrating. A message is circulating on Facebook that the CSD will be massively disrupted by a right-wing demonstration. Wolfsburger Verkehrs GmbH (WVG) announced in a message that bus routes would be changed due to a parade on the occasion of Christopher Street Day (CSD). Demonstrations have also been announced for this day, according to the WVG press release.

“The police are aware of the announcement,” says Wolfsburg police spokeswoman Sina Matschewski. However, on Wednesday morning the police had not yet received an official registration for a demonstration. The city of Wolfsburg, which must approve the demonstration, will comment at a later date.

“We assume there is a disruption”

“The parade is to be disrupted,” says Kevin Kluge, spokesman for the CSD at the moment. He is referring to announcements on TikTok, and right-wing people on Telegram have also called for a networked disruption. He is in close contact with the police. “But a demonstration has not been registered, as far as I know,” reports Kluge. He regrets that CSD participants have already canceled out of fear of right-wing groups. “But the CSD will take place,” says Kluge, “the police have assured us that they will have emergency personnel.”

Most recently, after the CSD in Gifhorn, there was a wave of hate-filled comments on Facebook: Around 2,500 comments were saved. A large number of them contained insults and threats, the police reported. Dominik Ruder, head of the Queer Network Gifhorn association, which organizes the Gifhorn Christopher Street Day and runs the queer meeting point Spektrum on Torstrasse, had telephoned the state security service about this.

In August, around 5,000 people took part in the CSD in Braunschweig. In the run-up to the parade, a group of 15 people provoked people and subsequently got into arguments with participants.

And in Bautzen in August, rainbow flags were burned, pyrotechnics were set off and right-wing extremist slogans were shouted amid cheers when Christopher Street Day took place. This was a shock for many of the 1,000 participants. Around 700 right-wing extremists let their hatred run free in counter-protests – including numerous violent neo-Nazis. The shock was still felt in the queer scene days later. “I am shocked that people who peacefully take to the streets for freedom and democracy are being attacked like this,” the Federal Government’s Queer Commissioner, Sven Lehmann, told the RedaktionsNetzwerk Deutschland (RND). “The attacks by neo-Nazis against the CSD in Bautzen were a deliberate attempt at intimidation.” There was great concern that there could be further attacks by right-wing extremists at future CSD events, especially since there had already been corresponding calls on Telegram and TikTok.

AZ/WAZ