What the Water Cannons Were For

Stuttgart 21 is a railway infrastructure project that has been dividing Baden-Württemberg for years—a plan to sink the city’s main station underground at a cost that keeps climbing past eight billion euros, requiring the partial demolition of the historic Schlossgarten park and the felling of old trees that have stood there longer than anyone currently arguing about them. A lot of people think it’s unnecessary. Today, the state moved on the park. And on the people standing in it.

Thousands had gathered—students, schoolkids, elderly residents, the full cross-section of a city that had simply decided enough—and what they got in return was water cannons, pepper spray, and truncheons applied without warning to a crowd that wasn’t doing anything requiring truncheons. Children were among the people hit. There is footage. It isn’t ambiguous.

You can think S21 is good policy. You can think the protesters are obstructionist, technically naive, or just wrong about the engineering. None of that matters once the state starts beating people for standing in a park—that’s a different conversation, one with no timetables in it. Some protesters pushed back; that deserves a mention. But Bild, Germany’s highest-circulation newspaper, ran the whole thing as a small item in the ticker, eventually, which tells you most of what you need to know about whose violence registers as violence.

I hope there are consequences. I don’t expect there will be.