Anti-WAAhnsinns Festival
[4] The line-up included some of Germany's most popular music acts of the time such as BAP, Die Toten Hosen, Udo Lindenberg, Rio Reiser, Herbert Grönemeyer.
From their engagement in culture-related work, the youth centre very quickly managed to come into contact with many Bavarian musicians like Haindling or Biermösl Blosn; who also argued against the building of the recycling plant.
While these festivals got more and more positive feedback from the public, the idea began to emerge of encouraging big-name performers, like BAP, Udo Lindenberg, or Herbert Grönemeyer, to take part.
Finally, because of the good relations with the management of BAP, the record label EMI Electrola was able to convince their - mostly left-leaning - artists to participate in the festival.
Although the Anti-WAAhnsinns-Festival had been officially authorised by the town, the Bavarian Ministry of the Interior and the local government of Oberpfalz voiced intentions to prohibit the event.
He considered this necessary in order to prevent danger being brought to the general public, their health, and material goods and to save them from heavy disturbances.
Although the 5th Anti-WAAhnsinns Festival (26–27 July 1986), a protest against the nuclear reprocessing plant, proceeded peacefully and without any violence, the state continued fighting it with undiminished rigidity.
The opposition to the WAA ended abruptly with the sudden death of Bavaria's minister-president Franz Josef Strauss on 3 October 1988.
The operating company DWK (Deutsche Gesellschaft für die Wiederaufarbeitung von Kernbrennstoffen = German Corporation for Nuclear Reprocessing) and the politicians in the CSU then had diminishing hopes that the WAA project could be realised successfully.
On 30 April 1989, Dr. Rudolf von Bennigsen-Foerder, former chairman of the board of VEBA, announced that German energy companies would retreat from reprocessing technology.
It was matchless not only because of the 100,000 visitors and all-time greatest spectrum of top musicians, who performed coherently for one special purpose – the building freeze of the WAA.
