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This article narrates the development of the antinuclear movement from the bottom up, showing how local protests initiated changes in Germans' ideas about democracy and public participation, precipitating the Green Party's emergence. The narrative begins with the pre-history of the 1975 occupation of the Wyhl reactor site in Southern Baden. It shows that vintners' concerns about the future of their livelihoods underpinned protests at Wyhl, but argues that the anti-reactor coalition grew in breadth after government officials' perceived misconduct caused local people to connect their agricultural concerns with democracy matters. It then explains how local protests like the Wyhl occupation influenced the formation of the German Green Party in the late 1970s, showing how the sorts of convergences that occurred amidst “single issue” protests like the anti-Wyhl struggle enabled a wide variety of activists to come together in the new party. Thus, the article argues that particular, local concerns initiated a rethinking of participation in electoral politics. Far from fracturing society, these local concerns promoted diverse new coalitions and shaped an inclusive approach to electoral politics.

Wolfgang Gründinger, Drivers of Energy Transition: How Interest Groups Influenced Energy Politics in Germany (Wiesbaden: Springer vs, 2017).

Thomas Unnerstall, The German Energy Transition: Design, Implementation, Cost and Lessons (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 2017).

Jennifer Allen, Sustainable Utopias: The Art and Politics of Hope in Germany (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2022)

Kevin T. Hall, Terror Flyers: The Lynching of American Airmen in Nazi Germany (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2021)

Michael Hughes, The Anarchy of Nazi Memorabilia: From Things of Tyranny to Troubled Treasure (London: Routledge, 2022)

Mark Edward Ruff and Thomas Großbölting, eds., Germany and the Confessional Divide: Religious Tensions and Political Culture, 1871–1989 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2022)

Christoph Lorke, Liebe verwalten: “Ausländerehen” in Deutschland 1870–1945 [Managing love: “Foreign marriages” in Germany 1870–1945] (Paderborn: Brill | Schöningh, 2020)

John P. Miglietta, Hitler's Allies: The Ramifications of Nazi Alliance Politics in World War II (London: Routledge, 2022)

John Kampfner, Why the Germans Do it Better: Notes from a Grown-Up Country (London: Atlantic Books, 2020).

Karen Hagemann, Donna Harsch, and Friederike Brühöfener, eds., Gendering Post-1945 German History: Entanglements (New York: Berghahn Books, 2019).

Daniel Marwecki, Germany and Israel: Whitewashing and Statebuilding (London: C. Hurst & Co., 2020).

Robert Gellately, Hitler's True Believers: How Ordinary People Became Nazis (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020).

Thomas Fleischman, Communist Pigs: An Animal History of East Germany's Rise and Fall (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2020).

Joanne Miyang Cho, ed., Transnational Encounters between Germany and East Asia since 1900 (New York: Routledge, 2018).

Andrew Nagorski, 1941: The Year Germany Lost the War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2019).