During the summer of 1975, the occupied site at Wyhl became a symbol. People from across Western Europe were drawn to the occupation; they came away awed by the “example of Wyhl” and determined to recreate it elsewhere. It was not long, however, before these visitors discovered the difficulty of simply exporting “Model Wyhl.” Years of alliance building and countless smaller actions had preceded the Wyhl occupation. The police, too, had learned from Wyhl and were better prepared to defend other construction sites. Thus, the attempted occupations near the northern German town of Brokdorf descended into pitched battles between protesters and police. Even so, concerns about nuclear energy became increasingly commonplace after Wyhl, drawing in an ever wider cross-section of the population. In this sense, the grassroots movement against reactors that took place along the Upper Rhine played a major part in making nuclear energy a hotly contested issue throughout Western Europe, and it marked the a signal early success for the German anti-nuclear movement. According to Stephen Milder (2013), many of the Wyhl occupiers were conservative farmers and vineyard owners. Cooperation between these rural people and scientists from nearby University of Freiburg connected local knowledge of the region with technical expertise. Most importantly, collaboration between French and Germans allowed for the creation of an imagined community of the “affected population” that spanned the Rhine and positioned itself as an alternative to the central governments in Bonn, Paris, and Stuttgart (the capital of Baden Württemberg). At the end Wyhl was not constructed, and neither was the nuclear plant Kaiseraust in Switzerland, but Fessenheim in Alsace was built. The European, international character of the protest was supported by activists such as Petra Kelly already in 1975 (then working at the EEC in Brussels). Thus, Jan-Henrik Mayer (2014) agrees that the site occupation at Wyhl in 1975 is rightly considered the symbolic birthplace of the West German anti-nuclear movement but it may also serve as the starting point for a transnational or at least European history of anti-nuclear protest. Local crossborder cooperation among protesters at Wyhl deeply impressed those antinuclear activists in the mid-1970s who considered nuclear power a global problem and encouraged them to take their protest to the international level. Internally, it is argued that the German Energiewende movement came out of the movement against nuclear power in the 1970s. The decision to build a nuclear power station in Wyhl turned out to be fateful, for it created a strong, sustained resistance movement across large parts of society. Students from nearby Freiburg joined forces with Kaiserstuhl winegrowers and scientists like Florentin Krause, one of the authors of Energiewende.

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