Big things start small: German climate activists Luisa Neubauer and Helena Marschall speak at Carleton
Neubauer and Marschall spoke to Carleton students in October, emphasizing that organizing for change isn’t easy and doesn’t always start out perfectly.

On October 10, 2024, Carleton held an event in the Weitz Center titled, “Organizing for Climate Justice in Germany and Beyond.” The one-and-a-half hour talk was sponsored by Carleton’s Department of German and Russian as well as the Heinrich Böll Foundation — a nonprofit organization based in Berlin that promotes dialogue about climate change and environmental movements.
Luisa Neubauer and Helena Marschall, two of Germany’s leading climate activists, spoke to an audience of Carleton students, staff, and faculty for the event. They also met with various groups during their visit: German students at a special German lunch table, students who work with Carleton’s Sustainability Office and the Carleton Student Organic Farm, and student activists living in the Wellstone House of Organizing and Activism (WHOA) on campus.

“Each event was a chance to learn from each other,” said Kiley Kost, lecturer in German and one of the main organizers of the visit. “Luisa and Helena are the experts on climate activism, but they were also eager to hear from young students in the U.S. about how they engage in politics and how they think about climate change.”
During the talk on October 10, Neubauer discussed her journey to becoming an activist for climate change. Initially, she had been studying geography at university. She described the fascination she felt in her studies and discussions she would have in the classroom and out in the field. She also mentioned that learning about climate change was a less fun aspect of her university career.
“Increasingly, from one semester to the next, I got this feeling that there was something unjust about me having to sit down, learning of [climate change],” Neubauer said. “I felt they could have mentioned, once in a while, what to do about these things.”
She then showed a line graph, spanning the last 100 to 1,000 years, and the trajectory of climate change.
“I got angry about this,” Neubauer said. “We would walk down to lunch and pretend that what we learned in the classroom didn’t exist. This was something we would learn theoretically but practically wouldn’t have in our lives.”
She continued, “I got this feeling of disrespect toward us young people, that they would make us learn stuff that would impact our entire lives without that little side note of how to deal with it — emotionally, critically, socially.”
At that point as a young student, Neubauer described attending the United Nations Climate Change Conference and looking for the practical solution, for “the man in the suit who was going to solve this problem; as you can imagine,” Neubauer said, “he didn’t exist.”
However, it was at this conference that Swedish activist Greta Thunberg spoke, and introduced the concept of school strikes, soon dubbed the Fridays for Future movement. This “shook something” in her, Neubauer said. She recalled bringing school strikes to Germany, but feeling herself unable to participate in them, she just wrote about it; she soon realized, though, she would have to actually do it.
“I hated the idea of organizing,” she said. “That was my first encounter with [the edge of] my comfort zone.”
Neubauer described the initial protests as small, somewhat awkward, and uncertain, as many participants — including herself — didn’t know what to do.
“It was everything but revolution, but it didn’t matter, because it was something,” Neubauer said.
Fridays for Future quickly built momentum, and Neubauer said that they found joy in the work.

“Something that’s really important and good doesn’t always feel important and good — often it feels tiny and insignificant,” she said. For this reason, she explained, it is important to tell people, like Carleton students, about those initial, awkward moments.
Marschall — who was organizing Fridays for Future strikes in Frankfurt, Germany at the same time as Neubauer’s strikes in Berlin — concurred with Neubauer on this. She added that she wanted the audience to take away two lessons from their story.
The first one: “Big things start small.”
“When you tell it now, it’s like, ‘of course!’” Marschall said. “But we did not know that then. We were so scared, so lost, and so bad at what we did… We didn’t know we were supposed to yell things so we just kind of walked around. It did not feel like the beginning of something great or the beginning of something big.”
Marschall described the kind of mythic idea that often surrounds activism, and how common it is to believe that there is someone else better equipped to make a difference than oneself. However, Marschall counters this with her second lesson: “There is no one better equipped than us in that moment.”
“If you are unsatisfied with the status quo, and you want to change something, then that is everything you need,” Marschall said. “That is what has allowed this movement to become so big and for us to do climate strikes in hundreds of cities at once.”
With the rise of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Marschall and Neubauer’s Fridays for Future strikes and protests were put on hold. They both described this as difficult, as the movement had built up a lot of momentum, leading into critical European elections.
“Our whole thing was bringing masses of people onto the streets,” Marschall said. “Suddenly that was impossible, unsafe, and irresponsible.”
Neubauer explained that what they learned during the height of the pandemic was “activism is often portrayed as charity for the climate or nature or the environment. But most of all, what we found is that it is actually an investment in ourselves and our own capacity and resilience.”
“What gave us the most strength and inspiration and mental stability during the pandemic,” Neubauer continued, “was that we knew we have been standing up against one crisis, so we know what it takes to stand up in another… We knew the key thing: community.”
Neubauer described setting up programs, education, digital engagement, and street murals while their strikes and protests were paused. It takes effort to face crises, she said, but especially in today’s digital world, where the news is so easily accessed, “it takes almost as much effort to ignore it, to push it away, to look away, rather than to rise up with it.”
As a recent example of how their activism work has expanded, when the Russian invasion of Ukraine began, Marschall and Neubauer recalled the peace protests being easier to organize now because of all the work they had done before.

For Kost, a key takeaway from their visit is that activism and demonstrations have the power to shift social norms and contexts, which is exactly what the Fridays for Future movement did in Germany.
“We can question what is considered normal in terms of fossil fuel usage and instead establish new norms centering on renewable energies and making decisions that will have a positive impact in the future,” Kost said. “Another important detail that Helena and Luisa emphasized is that everyone has the right and the power to demand action against climate change, no matter their fossil fuel consumption. The idea that you need to already be living the most perfectly sustainable life in order to demand policy change only prevents people from speaking up. We are all implicated in a messy, dirty system, and that’s exactly why we need to show up and push for change.”
Marschall and Neubauer concluded their talk with the argument that it is the collective process of activism, not just one court ruling or one specific successful protest, that makes change happen.
“It’s showing up,” Marschall said, “even when we think we might fail — especially then.”