Qualla: Free Republic of Wendland

Free Republic of Wendland: Introduction

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Fatelessfear, CC BY 4.0. For ten Deutsche Marks you could buy a passport at the information center. It came with an entry stamp, and the people who issued it declared it good "for the entire universe [...] so long as its owner could still laugh." The country it admitted you to was about a month old, occupied roughly the footprint of an exploratory drilling site in a Lower Saxon peat forest, and would be gone before midsummer. On 3 May 1980 some 5,000 anti-nuclear activists walked onto the ground around drill site 1004, between the villages of Gorleben and Trebel, and refused to leave. Within a week they had built a town. Within a month the state's interior minister was calling it high treason.

Image: Fatelessfear | CC BY 4.0

Free Republic of Wendland: Sites 1002, 1003, 1004

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Holger10, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt had begun drilling at Gorleben in 1979, testing the salt domes beneath the Wendland for their suitability as a permanent store for radioactive waste. Local activists occupied drill sites 1002 and 1003; both attempts fizzled. So the organi...

Image: Holger10 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Free Republic of Wendland: A Village Built in a Week

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit In Memoriam: Christopher Bulle from Berlin, Germany, CC BY 2.0. The ground was sandy and scorched, burned over during the 1975 fire on the Lüneburg Heath, and on it the occupiers raised roughly 110 huts of wood and clay. Hut-building was the anti-nuclear movement's signature form of protest at the time, but this went well past gesture. There ...

Image: In Memoriam: Christopher Bulle from Berlin, Germany | CC BY 2.0

Free Republic of Wendland: Valid for the Entire Universe

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bruno Jargot, CC BY-SA 2.5. On the approach road the occupiers built a border checkpoint with a boom barrier and raised two flags over it: the arms of the Wends, and the anti-nuclear Smiling Sun. An outfit calling itself the Underground Office of Gorleben-Shall-Live — Untergrundamt Gorleben-Soll-leben — dec...

Image: Bruno Jargot | CC BY-SA 2.5

Free Republic of Wendland: Thirty-Three Days of Assembly

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Montecruz Foto from Berlin, Alemania, CC BY-SA 2.0. About a thousand people stayed on permanently, and they organized themselves around grassroots democracy — a spokespersons council, decisions taken in regular mass meetings. On the question of the eviction everyone expected, the broad consensus settled on passive resistance, over...

Image: Montecruz Foto from Berlin, Alemania | CC BY-SA 2.0

Free Republic of Wendland: The Morning of 4 June

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Karlklaus, Public domain. Chancellor Helmut Schmidt gave the order, and on the morning of 4 June 1980 the Lower Saxony police and the Federal Border Guard cleared the site with roughly 3,500 officers. The legal grounds were almost comically mundane: forestry laws, building regulations, the Field and Fores...

Image: Karlklaus | Public domain

Free Republic of Wendland: What the Salt Never Held

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Vgerbud, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Wendland flag is still a standard of the German anti-nuclear movement, sold in a hundred places, and stamped Wendenpässe still turn up at protest camps. In 2006 a five-page advertisement ran in a local paper under the republic's name. On the thirtieth anniversary of the evict...

Image: Vgerbud | CC BY-SA 4.0