On Wednesday morning, shortly before eight o'clock, the time has come.

At an intersection at Frankfurt Airport, on the Airportring, an access road to the cargo area, five activists take a stand.

They sit on the street, hold up placards that say "Save food, save lives".

Alexander Juergs

Editor in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

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The traffic comes to a standstill and a traffic jam forms.

One of the slowed-down commuters gets out of his car and talks to the blockers.

He's annoyed, but he stays calm.

“What's that about?” he asks the activists: “We have to go to work, why are you blocking the road?

You can also demonstrate somewhere else.”

The group responsible for the protest action in the middle of rush hour calls itself "uprising of the last generation".

The activists have already caused a stir and a lot of media coverage in the past few weeks with illegal blockades.

In Berlin, they paralyzed traffic on the city autobahn with sit-ins.

And there, too, commuters who were stopped reacted with incomprehension and tangled with the radical climate protectionists.

Then, on Monday, the “Last Generation” blocked Hamburg's Köhlbrandbrücke in order to disrupt the movement of goods at the port.

On Wednesday they are now protesting at airports: the group announced that protests were taking place in Munich and Berlin at the same time as the blockade in Frankfurt.

The "Last Generation", which is active in Germany and Austria, sees itself as a radical arm of the climate protection movement.

When choosing her forms of action, she goes far beyond groups like “Fridays For Future”.

With the means of civil disobedience, she wants to force the government to take drastic measures against the climate crisis.

Sonja Manderbach is the spokeswoman for the blockade.

She came from Oldenburg to paralyze traffic at Frankfurt Airport.

She has been active in the climate protection movement for a long time.

She also ran for city council in her hometown, she says.

And that she wants to fight to ensure that her daughter, who is 14 years old, can still grow up in a world worth living in.

Manderbach says that the legal protest for climate protection has not achieved enough, which is why she is now involved with the "Last Generation".

"Far too little is happening in climate protection," she says. "What is being done is nothing more than green washing." That's why she wants to shake up the population and show how precarious the situation is already.

"Greta Thunberg said the world is on fire, and she's right about that.

Our protest is the fire alarm,” she says.

The “uprising of the last generation” emerged from a hunger strike that took place in Berlin in the summer of 2021, during the federal election campaign.

At the time, the activists called for a public discussion with the three chancellor candidates Olaf Scholz (SPD), Armin Laschet (CDU) and Annalena Baerbock (Greens).

After Olaf Scholz agreed to talk to them after the general election, they ended their strike.

Some of the hunger strikers had to be treated in hospital at the time.

On the Frankfurt Airport Ring, it takes barely a quarter of an hour for the police to reach the blockade with blue lights.

An activist now opens a tube of superglue, smears her hand with it and presses it firmly onto the street.

Activists of the "last generation" taped their hands to the street, which has also happened several times in previous protest actions.

The police quickly got the blockade under control.

Traffic will be diverted to an oncoming lane.

After just a few minutes, the cars are driving again and the traffic jam clears.

The protesters did not achieve their goal of effectively disrupting operations at the airport.

A second planned blockade near Zeppelinheim never materialized.

There, the police stopped the activists before the start of their action.

On the airport ring, the protesters refuse to voluntarily clear the road, so they are each grabbed and carried away by two police officers.

A good hour after the start of the blockade, only the woman who stuck herself there is still on the street.

The police officers are waiting for the fire brigade, who is supposed to use solvent to free the woman's hand from the asphalt.