Blockadefibel — Anleitung zum Sitzenbleiben
Summary
The pocket-sized German-language blockade guide — affinity-group prep questions, consensus stages, spokescouncil moderation, flowing through police lines, and the legal basics of German sit-blockades.
Body
Blockadefibel — Anleitung zum Sitzenbleiben (“Blockade Primer — A Guide to Sitting It Out”) is a pocket-sized German-language handbook on sit-blockades, originally published in the anti-nuclear movement and now circulated across the broader German gewaltfreie-Aktion tradition [source: blockadefibel-sitzenbleiben]. The booklet is built around the practical problems a small affinity group faces on a blockade day: how to organise before dawn, what to bring, how to set up a sit-position that is both legible and hard to remove, how to keep the group together if police move in to lift people, and how to handle the immediate post-arrest handoff to legal observers [source: blockadefibel-sitzenbleiben].
The Blockadefibel covers four operational layers: (1) affinity group prep — who decides what; how to settle a disagreement; how to support a participant who is wavering on the morning of the action; (2) the action itself — sitting, linking, dealing with police orders to disperse, what to say and not say to police, what to do if the group is kettled; (3) consensus stages — what kind of agreement the affinity group needs before, during, and after; (4) spokescouncil moderation — how the affinity group sends a mandated spokesperson to a spokescouncil, how the spokesperson reports back, and how the group is bound by the spokescouncil decision [source: blockadefibel-sitzenbleiben].
The booklet ends with a short section on the German legal framework (Versammlungsrecht, Strafbarkeit einer Sitzblockade, what to expect at the police station) — explicitly dated, jurisdiction-tagged, and explicitly not legal advice [source: blockadefibel-sitzenbleiben]. The document is free, license copyleft-style but not explicitly CC — treat as link-only and paraphrase.
Use it for
Pre-action prep for an affinity group planning a sit-blockade; designing the morning-of-action checklist; training the spokescouncil mechanic.
Related
- boycotts-and-strikes
- dilemma-actions
- escalation
- methods-of-nonviolent-action
- noncooperation
- nonviolent-direct-action
- pillars-of-support
- structure-tests
- the-tactic-star
Open Questions
- Confirm current PDF URL — the Blockadefibel has been republished by Graswurzelrevolution and other German activist publishers; pagination varies between editions.
- Note German jurisdiction only — for other countries, look for equivalent pocket guides (e.g. Ruckus action grid for US).