 been on the stage a lot at CCC, but not for Couture Cosmod and the Fusion Festival, because usually I'm talking from the Zentrum für Politische Schönheit, the Center for Political Beauty. But early as a summer, this topic was in the medias a lot for police patrols on the Fusion Festival and I was very involved with this. So I'm doing this talk for you. And in the end we will have a Q&A and I've also brought Eule from Kultur Cosmos and he will also be available for the Q&A. Here's a short video. I'm Niels Hoffmann Ritterbosch. I'm the president of the police in Neubrandenburg. We have a statement for the security at this festival and we were criticized by this and myself I was also criticized for this. The will of the police is not to stop the fusion, to cancel the fusion, but the security needs to take care of this festival, this event without any dangers. The security process should follow nationwide standards and if this is happening for all the security officers, not only the police, the event should be safe for all visitors, which means visitors, normal visitors, artists, vendors, all of them, for all of them this festival should take place safely. Since November there were many talks which we have proved for the people who are organizing the festival and since that point in time the talks with the police were talking about the unspecific things in this security process and the police pointed out these legs in the security process. The police has pointed out that there might be dangerous people visiting the festivals and this is also due to a statement by the organizers. There are 10,000 links alternative visitors coming to the festival who I can't tell why the police should be on the festival. This would lead to dynamics which we are not able to be controlled. You have to agree that this statement is kind of extreme. I did remix this a little bit but mostly this is the original. Who was it? That's the police president, Niels Hoffmann Ritter Busch. Some parts of my movement tell him Ritter Kokosnuss and he is the police president from Neubrandenburg which doesn't mean the new Neuheer means not like an original packaging but he just joined in 2016 the police station there and in 2017 there wasn't a festival so in 2018 he was the first time seeing everything happening around the fusion and he wasn't happy with everything going on and the cooperation with the police and he wasn't happy about how this was going that the police was not present at the festival so in 2019 he wanted to change it. So this video was a press conference from the police station Neubrandenburg and the first thing he says, no one wants to cancel the fusion and on the 15th of April we got a letter which you can see here from the Polizeipräsidium Neubrandenburg to the local offices which says the police saying that the fusion festival can't happen actually and in this moment we were thinking in the previous talks in the previous meetings where we were willing to compromise and now we saw that we had to change this but like what is this actually all about? In 2018 just shortly after the festival there were meetings after the fusion where usually all the officers are coming together and talking about the water quality talking about security, how was the search and like the firefighters but only the police and the Ordnungsamt were joining here and they just listened to us and like what we were happy with, what we were not happy with and very quickly they changed the topic and they wanted to talk about how the cooperation with the police should happen in the next year and that they want a police station at the festival and want to be there 24-7 so this shouldn't be shocking to you because you already have a police station here at the festival it's just around the corner there we just took this picture but for us this was really a new thing because for over 20 years we didn't have a police station at the festival so here you can see the traffic controls and on the other side you can see what the police wanted to have at the festival so the blue arrow you can see the main entrance there is a footbridge from one side to the main festival area so there the police wanted to have an area for the police station and they wanted to have parking lots for 20 police cars where they wanted to have shifts and where they could drive in with 20 police cars to the parking lot and go out with 20 police cars when they changed the shift and for us this was a no-go because that would have been a provocation for the festival attendees so we said no so we said here at the red arrow you can have a police station where we have this red arrow and this outside of the main festival area it's still on the airport area but it's outside the festival areas so it's not in the inner area but it's a short walk over there and then the police had another offer which is the second blue arrow in the middle you see there where they just wanted to be behind our fence where people enter so the police could walk around freely on the festival area and they wanted to have several officers on the campgrounds and just being able to walk around so we actually made some mistake that our offer was already the maximum we were willing to offer and they were like oh we already have an offer which is here so like we have a different offer which is there and so we were only able to repeat the first offer we made saying either it's this or it's nothing so this was the first meeting I joined which was in April 2019 which is called an Empte Runde in Rübel so that's a place close by and in the last 10 years the festival didn't grow anymore it was 60,000 to 80,000 people for the past 10 years and like actually maybe more people because then people just jumped the fence so the festival states the same amount of people for the past 10 years but like the local officers joining in for this meeting just continued to be more institutions involved and so there were a lot of local institutions involved which were invited to this meeting and at the meeting a lot of them asked to not be invited because they didn't know what they were doing there actually and Ms. Siegmund at this meeting at the beginning of this meeting there is one new thing this year which is that the police will have a police station at the festival area and like everyone was looking here how do we get you down from this tree where you just catapult yourself on top of because like this is not where we are going so this was the first part of the meeting and like for five minutes a lot of the local officers said yeah everything is fine and some just said we don't know what we are doing here we don't want to be invited anymore and in the second round we had there was just the health services and the police and the ordnungsamt and us and so then we talked again about the police station and we said in our security concept we won't have a police station at the festival area and the police said first of all we won't agree to the security concept in this case no matter what else is in there there can be ten pages or a thousand pages as long as we don't have this police station in the security concept and the security concept is made by us and as long as we don't write this in there the police said we won't agree to the security concept and in this moment the police the local police said that's no longer our area and they moved it up a level to the police president of Neubrandenburg, Niels Hoffmann, Ritter Busch and this was the person we were then supposed to talk to then there was a lot of hassle with lawyers we told all rights position in this case that we don't see any justification for the police in this case and then the office two weeks later gave this letter that the whole festival was to be prohibited so this was just a simple letter in which the official office was denied the allowance to have the festival but the main reason they gave for this was that there was no common agreement with the police on the security concept they said there has to be an agreement on the security concept with the authorities but we're not going to explain so they said if there is no agreement there is no festival but we thought well I'm good but the police is going haywire and we made our plans for fighting against this so at this point we said there's no backdoor policies anymore the only thing that helps in this situation where everyone is kind of working against us we'll have to take this discussion down to a facts level and we have to change something so one of the elements that we thought about down was to have a campaign and one side of this was to have a very openly formulated text get or evoke as much civil society pressure as we could manage so this is what we did we put a website online which I'm showing here this is an old version so there's a couple of thousand people more who signed this but in the first few weeks almost 140.000 people signed this already for the freedom of arts and culture in addition a lot of organizations have signed of course the KS Computer called it as well but also the FDP which is the German Economist Party and there was also like a liberal organization called Kine-Kneete-Kine-Fiete and if they with the Economist Party agree on this common signing of the fusion festival having to happen then that's something so for over 20 years we've never gone public and usually we also avoid media work or press relations because usually it works in the way that you talk to your friends about fusion festival this is what we like but for over 20 years we've never really put efforts into doing press work no advertising for the festival and also there's no accreditation for any journalist on the grounds of the festival so we're kind of asking ourselves how to do the work with the press first of all we needed a press team I was part of the press team because I've been guiding this progress for a while now also from the CCC someone joined whose name of course I'm not going to mention but I'm saying thanks Linus you did a great job in this and we thought ok how to frame this whole thing what are going to be our arguments and something that we then put into every interview a phrase that we then generated was the police patrol without cause or reason and the police patrol so without reason means without any outer cause and the police patrol means to be observed by the police patrol so huge parts of the population will say that nothing has to be observed by police patrol without any outer given reasons so a mid-festival around the clock and surveillance these are the things that when looking at the press interviews that we gave out in this time we always managed to fit these phrases in so first we wanted to wait for a week to prepare for all the press work we had a couple of pre-talks with journalists to see how they felt about it what their opinion was they of course wanted to do their media releases and we got a lot of questions from journalists that all wanted to come out with our articles by Thursday and with us we confronted the police president of Neubrandenburg giving them a deadline on Friday and this is something new cause not every day some of the main newspapers in Germany call the police president of Neubrandenburg so they were quite this caught their attention and they didn't have the time as a press and then we took flight and went to the radio station Mecklenburg-Vorpommern which is a neighbour state we said ok our questions regarding the security concept have remained unanswered for 24 hours although they had been there so apparently there is security standards about that don't that are not related to the police patrol directly but rather like migration and other other situations that could be related to security also our security concept hasn't shrunk compared to the previous years and we have a lot of people compared to the previous years but it's rather increased with every subsequent year and every year it's been enough but then it had to be increased and increased and apparently it was never sufficient so we see that this was apparently a fake reason a reason they put forward to somehow put through this police patrol on the festival grounds and they told us so if you're not able to write a sufficient security protocol or security standards then you have to at least accept the police patrol on the grounds of the festival so the intermediate status on Friday was the fusion at zero points police had won and then on Monday the fighting started so the whole public mood was suddenly against this on Monday so one of the main or the Aussie title that something with the fusion festival and one of my favorite headlines is the the police the fusion festival is the most popular festival in the world and the fight for it has begun so the intermediate state on Monday was this was really a home run for us because then all the news people were aware of fusion at three points against the police of only one point so we didn't allow them to instrumentalize us but rather people realized that we didn't have much press work but we did have a lot of visitors people went home with a lot of fun in their hearts and it's also a good a good average of overall society people that wrote the articles of new the festival they had even been guests and visitors of the festival themselves and they couldn't really understand what this was all about then there was the press conference of the police in Neubrandenburg with all the invited authorities and we also had a couple of journalists that came and reported from there so this was a very very just useful and ugly building and for about 200 people that had been filled with a couple of people that they then invited when the remaining seats were still open we at the same time did our press conference in the Maxim Gorky theater in Berlin and I want to show you a couple of excerpts from this press conference ok so I'm asking the mayor of Miro which is the city closest to fusion festival I thought that in the last 20-30 years I had never seen so many people from different social and other groups being united being enraged about what happens regarding fusion festival and about the position that the police president stands for that there should be a mobile watch and police station on the festival area and also about the quote that nobody intends to prohibit fusion and it sounds very much like the German quote nobody intends to build a wall you don't believe this this is the people that decide these things are just an impression of the festival or are in office haven't been in office for a long time and we really have no words for them taking this decision in our government nobody says we're blind to death but all of this discussion goes to the responsibility of the police president this is nothing that we want and this is going for any aim festival is a cultural space all of us know that whatever challenges we face the organizers do not wish for police patrol on the festival area only if the situation requires it and police experts tell me that this is actually no problem to put down all these arguments but we can rather solve these with the security concepts given give me any region in Germany or even Europe where we managed to have such a big society of people together and nobody feels threatened or unwelcome we can have a look at everyday police report and this is rarely the case we have to ask ourselves now what does this situation mean the females in the region had this joke that they said the police president really also wants to join the fusion festival for once we said it's possible to do this it may sound weird but I'm sick of after 20 years suppressing subcultures and then there's going to be articles in the newspapers about eastern Germany say authorities in my opinion you should invite the authorities we did manage a lot that has never happened before and I should be invited to look at how these things work out on the festival area and everything is totally well organized there's been 20,000 people coming together celebrating together and our security promise really relies on us communicating and interacting together and having these structures organized and I'm totally angry about these structures being destroyed by the authorities every time and the damage caused by this single president every single one has to rebuild and has to put in the effort to make up for this so we're refusing point blank to have the station on the grounds and we have to deny this to the police straight away I also talked to my fellow mayors let's have a look at these structures at these subcultures and I think we can learn a lot more from these than we can anywhere else this is Henry Tesh Mayor from Miro he's in the CDU the Christian Democratic Party which is rather conservative so that's quite extraordinary for him to speak out like this so here is a crossword puzzle where it says festival where the police is in charge and the solution is fusion and then we hear that the newspaper Decide has got documents that the police is trying to prepare for the fusion festival and a lot of people and they have documents where there is 1,000 policemen being deployed for the festival and previously there were 200 so if you have in visual terms you see this tiny policeman down there and so like 1,000 if you put this in relation to this one person is this big one do you even see the small policemen and other thing in the documents was water cannons and here I just brought you a picture and tanks which we also apparently need there and also a special unit against blockages which we know from Wendland if someone is locked down to something and then there was a person from the AfD the right wing German party and in our case this was this person like what's his name I forgot him Klaas Ulf Ulf Theodor Klaasen he's a policeman or he used to be a policeman so he is in the AfD and he is from the police so he had an info point for the AfD and there were people who were peacefully holding banners and he sprayed them with pepper spray ran away bought pepper spray which is less severe and like sprayed around with it a little bit and then when he was arrested he pretended to have used the less severe pepper spray so then he had to so then he was officially moved to University of Augusto a police university where he was supposed to teach new police people and training and he told one student to do one essay on how the police should be dealing with the fusion and in this combination having this AfD politician who is also with the police and who is teaching there and then the fusion just started tweeting oh no the police started tweeting about the fusion festival that they weren't planning to have water cannons or tanks and then the build was publishing an article about water cannons or tanks at the fusion so the police was going down and saying like no actually not these documents are very old and like actually these documents were just one or two weeks old and then we had a demonstration in Lerz Lerz is a small place where the fusion is happening hello okay hello and good morning I'm amazed by this when we said spontaneously on Wednesday we have to do something because some people said what is happening here about the fusion this can't be this is why we are here I'm amazed by the situation for your information I'm from the area and I co-organized this meeting this demonstration here who are we why are we here what do we want we are just citizens simple citizens citizens who live in this area why we are here we are here to make a sign what we want we want to show that we don't agree to the police work here and where they want to have a police station at the festival we don't agree to this we are saying this can't be the case this video is on youtube and on other channels so you can watch the full video you can watch the whole thing it's very interesting fusion in the Bundestag then the fusion was debated in the Bundestag so the nationwide government said we are that's not our responsible and then it was moved to the government of Brandenburg and the Landtag and the Die Linke brought up this topic and these documents are very old they are no longer up to date and there will be no police patrols on the festival then we updated our security concept and renewed it which had a lot of updated stuff but no police patrol no police station on the area and it had a lot of stuff included which we already had offered and we just put the label new on it and put it on the table again and the police just agreed to it right away because they were under pressure from the public sometimes it can be that easy and then actually the police showed up two days previous to the event and put up this container which doesn't have the tiff so it doesn't have the official guarantee so it is allowed to be put up so then we said without the tiff, without this official label you can't have this container because we can't put up stuff without this official label and then the police said it actually has the tiff label but we just didn't bring the label here and then the festival just happened and the police just had to suck it up basically and they weren't interested to escalate it anymore and we had a new person from the police to talk to and next to the police control station someone put up a poster which said love fusion hate cops and we got a call can you put this down and we said well no that's just like opinion being stated and then in the end when the fusion was over they actually asked whether they could take the poster with them so after the festival there is another festival close to Neustadt-Glewe and that's a different festival where people have flags from Germany and there is a lot of police being stationed and the police had this video being produced the hashtag says the festival only works together thank you for the police that they make the summary why we don't want to have some there and I'm closing this now I talked about our fight and the question is what do we learn here I think we learn that it's possible to fight these very strong forces from the state when you go to the public when you find a topic where you have an emotional connection to the civic society to the public then you have this moment where you can just fight back against authorities and the last thing we have here is a song from a citizen close by and I want to say we as cultural cosmos we don't own the messages in this song but I want to show this video to show the all the opinions from the people from this region and after this video is over Euler is joining me on stage and we are doing a Q&A so I'm here in this garden I want to play a song for a police president Mr Brandenburg Mr Nils Hoffmann who is involved I think you know about the discussion around the fusion just for you a small boy sat at home he felt lonely his parents were never home and he didn't have friends so some hours felt actually rather painful he was very small and not very bright but especially someone like this needs attention he was alone and said you will notice me when I'm tall, when I'm going up I will be ready his childhood of Nils Hoffmann Heller Busch was shitty and mean so his career as a police president was like no, I'm being angry about your nice childhood we are celebrating the fusion festival for over 20 years we are meeting people from around the world it's so beautiful how people treat each other no one of us calls the police the police aren't actually willing to go here and want to disturb this event but we need to work there and have to work for Nils the childhood of Nils Hoffmann Heller Busch for his career as a police president he went into every ass what is our conclusion for this boy can we help him I think it's too late if it goes badly for him he will be alone again but helpful will be coffee we should look at the local politicians who are on their side through the election we have some influence whether they will be paid by our tax money so the childhood of every small human should be protected loved and safe as we can see when someone has a bad childhood with a bit of bad luck a tiny human will become a cop so I want to say to where I am I am I am I am I am I am I am to say to apologize for two things if you are a police president he don't have to be a pig like some people who came before you have actually proven this and I would be ashamed in your place actually and the second point to compare you to a pig is not quite Right, I brought up two boys with a bottle, and they are very social. Greetings from my place here. So now we have a round of questions. Whoever has questions, come on stage. So we have two angels with microphones, please line up in front of them. Is there a question from the internet? Okay, apparently not. So here's the first question. A police president had a very dilettant attitude. Like a beginner, is there any consequences for him? I've never heard about any negative consequences for any police president. There is one, but it's not official. He just messed up totally within his region. People say about him, things ranging from, I don't know him, he destroys everything. But the microphone doesn't run, so there has to be an exchange. So the mic will be shared? Do you want to give an answer to that question? So he's still a police president. But to be honest, he's not and a focus for us. We have totally different people with whom we talk. Also after the festival there was a new relation who introduced herself very nicely. And we expect that we don't have to expect an attack like this year again. With the little they had, afterwards the small police patrol, they were quite satisfied. And those seven suing regarding very little things. So they were regretting entering this whole discussion about safety measures and leaks in the security plans. In the end everything worked out very well. The cultural cosmos has organized the festival very well. If there was any problem, it was solved right away. And this is a very different basis for the whole agreement on security for next year. Thank you very much, that's another question. A major part of the fusion guest is very political and there has been a grassroots movement in case that there might have been police on the festival area. Were you prepared for a serious escalation of things? Could there have anything happened from your point of view? Well, as long as we assume that they don't move and they put through this police station, then we expected a certain potential for conflict. You really don't want to imagine what will happen then. We said that there has to be a consensus on action that we don't determine, but where people can choose on which level they want to push it through, which is also bearable for us. But in reality it would probably have not been feasible in a practical way. Do you have any questions from the internet? No additional questions? Here's another question. So fusion is not just any festival and also not very small. So my question is how can you transport what you've learned to any festival that's smaller? In those recent months it became clear that clubs or other events near Berlin have similar problems. So how can you use your experiences for any festivals or groups that are not as well set up organization-wise as you are? So of course we talk to different organizers and it's pretty cool if a 70,000 people festival has made this point first. So nobody can easily say that we have another 70,000 people festival where this doesn't work out as well. And there could be a situation where 10,000, 15,000 people festival says, why won't it work for us like this if it worked at fusion? Also the absence of cultural cosmos from public has changed slightly. So probably they will be involved more into political everyday business again. For instance regarding the support of the new police president in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. And there's also initiatives, initiatives for collaboration of the different festival organizers, asking themselves what are we confronted with, how do we cope with increased fuss about security? How can we still realize what our cultural imagination and ideas are? How do we deal with security plans we want to fulfill or don't want to fulfill? And how do we cope with the authorities and agree on how to put this through? There's a lot of demand for communication internally and also with the authorities. And we don't want to resist against this, we're open for discussion and to see how we can involve others in this. Okay, unfortunately we have to close the session. So this next question will be answered directly by the speakers. So on a different note, an advertisement, the speaker is going to be on a different stage on Sunday. In the three-headed monkeys, it's going to deal with a police president who is still a police president, also the state lawyer who is still a state lawyer. Most importantly, I want to mention what I forgot in the beginning. I really want to thank all participants, everyone who made this camp possible, every organizer, every angel, every helper. Thanks for this cool camp. Thanks. This was the talk. Thank you, Stefan. Thank you for listening.