Dear friends of leisure and music at the week’s finale,

maybe it already got through to you and if not, please be strong now: There will be no StiWo (Start ins Wochenende – Start of the Weekend) this summer.

This hasn’t been an easy decision for us. Several offers for help reached us from our supporters, which made it twice as hard to cancel the StiWo for this year. But these also brought us to put some explaining words down on paper.

Since we began five or six years ago – we actually don’t remember exactly – to open the outside grounds of the AZ for the start of the weekend on Wednesdays, the StiWo has developed to one of our most successful and popular events. In the beginning it were mostly the users of the AZ themselves, who together heralded the weekend with drinks, music, workshops and table tennis on Wednesday, while in the following years more and more people joined to celebrate a prolonged weekend instead of neoliberal madness and boring monotony of the daily grind.

Unfortunately we had to experience in the latter years that this revitalizing large get-together evolved into a challenge which could not be managed by a few organizers anymore. In this development we again find the general problems with which activists of AZ Conni are confronted: Planning, organization and implementation of numerous events, that satisfy the political, cultural and culinary needs of our guests, take up a lot of time and power, which less and less people are able and willing to sacrifice for their fellow beings. The result is: Tasks pile up on few people’s shoulders, who frequently burn out facing the missing support or despair of the crucial test of school, studies, labour and the pressing will for political participation.

In order to not further extend this issue and not further thin out our already shriveled group, we decided this year with a heavy heart to pull the plug. We would like to use this opportunity for a call to all users and sympathizers of AZ Conni: We can’t fulfil your wish for a well-balanced, emancipated and especially full event schedule much longer

We need more folks who put effort in the necessary resistance against the Saxonian common status despite their enforced disposition in these circumstances. There is a need for places like AZ Conni and people who manage it continuously and committedly, so that autonomy, cooperation in solidarity and alternative political education have a concrete space. Without such places we can neither test nor develop our views of a better society. This is much more pressing in face of the upcoming municipal and state level elections, where an unwelcomed surprise might wait for all progressive thinkers.