Southeastern Europe: A Bus Gets Democracy Rolling
The Omnibus for Direct Democracy has travelled 8,000 kilometres. It began in early September in Wiesbaden and then journeyed across southeastern Europe. The bus is back now and it’s time for a look back at an adventurous voyage to the birthplace of democracy. By Julia Amberger
A mountain pass in the Balkans: a 30-year-old bus rumbles over hairpin curves, bend by bend it rolls the narrow road up the mountain. The words “Omnibus for Direct Democracy in Germany” glow in green letters on the white metal. Above it hangs a banner with “Democracy in Motion” on it in twelve different languages. Now and then the double-decker vehicle begins to dodder and then the windows rattle and there’s a draught. Up here, more than 2,000 metres above sea level, the wind blows cold. No wonder, for in Sarajevo, the bus’s next stop, winter will soon begin. Persevere to the goal: Athens.
The bus travelled through twelve countries and parked on 20 market squares, perplexing the passersby in Budapest, Sarajevo and finally in Athens. In front of its doors, Maxie Zurmühlen and the Omnibus team sparked discussions about democracy, based on artist Joseph Beuys’s “expanded concept of art.” He compared society with a painting: every person is an artist in the figurative sense and ought to shape politics with their fellow people. Beuys used a bus for his first grassroots democracy campaign to symbolize the free and self-determined participation of all in the community.
In 1987 Johannes Stüttgen, a former master class student of Joseph Beuys, carried on his mission: he co-founded the Omnibus for Direct Democracy as a “travelling school of self-rule.” The journey to Greece is mainly focused on Europe: how we can work together towards a self-determined society and what responsibility we bear as parts of society.
Maxie Zurmühlen has worked for the Omnibus for Direct Democracy for six years and travelled all the way to Athens in it. “We first asked ourselves whether it would be at all possible to carry on discussions about self-determined society in all of the countries we were travelling through. How we could convey democracy in countries that have enough other problems to deal with,” Maxie Zurmühlen says, “but then we encountered strong initiatives and movements in those places where we would never have expected to find them.” In Athens, pupils debated Beuys’s ideas. A year ago, after a teenager was killed by police bullets, they went to the streets and occupied the school. This taught them that even minors can have an impact on their society. The Goethe-Institut Athens is the initiator of this bus journey. Along the route, the sister institutes supported the travelling group and announced the discussions. The Omnibus for Direct Democracy in Germany has been around for a long time, but this is the first time it has travelled beyond Germany’s borders.
