Community and Politics
Bechert was raised in the Lutheran Church. He had refused to join the Nazi Party, and in promoting his Jewish colleagues at the Institute for Theoretical Physics of the University of Mainz, he angered the Party. He also protected local citizens from the Nazis by hiding them in the surrounding forest.
In 1945, the Allied Military Government for Occupied Territories appointed Bechert mayor of Donsbach, Westerwald and the Oberschulrat in Dillingen, where, on behalf of the Allied Military Government, he built a secondary school/high school.
While at the University of Mainz, he was a member of the Senate Commission for Atomic Questions. Since the 1950s, he was a member of the Kuratorium of the Deutsche Friedensgesellschaft (DFG) - the German Peace Society. In 1951, Bechert joined Victor Paschkis in founding the Society for Social Responsibility in Science. In 1955, he became a member the Church and Politics working group of the Evangelist Church in Hesse-Nassau. The next year, he joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany – the SPD. From 1957 to 1972, he was an SPD delegate in the German Bundestag. From 1962 to 1965, he was also chairman of the Committee for Atomic Energy and Water Management. In the beginning of his political career he fought against nuclear armament. Later he opposed also the so-called "peaceful use of nuclear energy" ("friedliche Nutzung der Kernenergie") which was the official political aim of the SPD (and the other political parties at that time). He argued that the development and use of nuclear plants never could be safe and the problems with nuclear waste were impossible to solve. He became the "father of the german anti-nuclear movement" as the Manchester Guardian called him in 1981 and one of the precursors of the German Green Party. Bechert was also part of the Pugwash movement and member of the World Union for Protection of Life.
Read more about this topic: Karl Bechert
Famous quotes containing the words community and, community and/or politics:
“I don’t think Dr. King helped racial harmony, I think he helped racial justice. What I profess to do is help the oppressed and if I cause a load of discomfort in the white community and the black community, that in my opinion means I’m being effective, because I’m not trying to make them comfortable. The job of an activist is to make people tense and cause social change.”
—Al, Reverend Sharpton (b. 1954)
“The peace loving nations must make a concerted effort in opposition to those violations of treaties and those ignorings of humane instincts which today are creating a state of international anarchy and instability from which there is no escape through mere isolation or neutrality.... When an epidemic of physical disease starts to spread, the community approves and joins in a quarantine of the patients in order to protect the health of the community against the spread of the disease.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)
“When feminism does not explicitly oppose racism, and when antiracism does not incorporate opposition to patriarchy, race and gender politics often end up being antagonistic to each other and both interests lose.”
—Kimberly Crenshaw (b. 1959)