Pershing (UA) |Ein Recherche-Projekt zum 40. Jahrestag des Pershing-Unglücks auf der Heilbronner Waldheide von dura & kroesinger

In the organizer's words:

January 11, 2025 marks the 40th anniversary of the Pershing accident on Heilbronn's Waldheide. It was this event, in which three American soldiers were killed and 13 other people were injured, some of them seriously, that briefly made the town the focus of the West German peace movement in the 1980s. The explosion of a Pershing II missile engine in the immediate vicinity of the nuclear warheads stored on the Waldheide had not only startled the people of Heilbronn. On February 2, 1985, thousands of people demonstrated against the missile deployment with a silent march from Heilbronn to the Waldheide, and on February 8, an indefinite blockade of the Pershing site began. Suddenly, even the last person realized how quickly a catastrophe could occur in the immediate vicinity of the city. Barely two weeks after the accident, the Heilbronn municipal council, which had not been allowed to deal with the "Waldheide missile site" for years, passed a unanimous resolution to remove it. As a result, the citizens of Heilbronn, together with local and national peace activists and prominent representatives of the peace movement, demonstrated against the direct effects of the NATO dual decision. The protests became so worrying for those responsible in politics that the then Minister of Defense Manfred Wörner came to Heilbronn on 25 April 1985 to calm the population - without success. The protests finally ended with the signing of the INF Treaty in 1987.

What has not happened since then? Two years after the accident, the major powers mutually assured each other of their disarmament efforts in the INF Treaty, and just under five years later the Berlin Wall came down. The end of the Cold War was foreseeable and finally manifested itself with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1993. Suddenly - at least for a short time - a world seemed conceivable that did not dissolve into a bipolar balance of power, an open, pacified world in which diplomatic relations and mutual trust had replaced the arms race between the great powers. A utopia that was short-lived.

dura & kroesinger take the commemoration of the day of the Pershing accident on the Heilbronn Waldheide as the starting point for their research project. How did the Pershing II missiles come to be stationed in Heilbronn as part of the NATO Double-Track Decision? What did the city's politicians know about it and why was the population not informed about the missile site? What significance did the missile deployment and the Waldheide accident have for Heilbronn? And what traces did the accident and its consequences leave behind in Heilbronn's civil society? The documentary theater project questions the prehistory and effects of this drastic event in Heilbronn's city history - always with a view to our present. The result is a play specifically for the city of Heilbronn, which relates local circumstances to the reality of Germany then and now.