The twin sister of the dead Berlin cyclist calls on the “Last Generation” activists to reconsider their protest methods: “I think I would just like to tell them what I experienced and then I would like to give them the chance to see themselves to put in this hell. To think about whether there might not be another way to fight for the survival of our planet without possibly harming other people,” said the sister of the dead, Anja Umann, the “Spiegel”. When asked how she was doing, she replied, “How are you supposed to be when you’ve lost everything?”
How exactly the accident was caused is still unclear. The 44-year-old woman was run over by a cement mixer on her way to work on Monday morning last week. A special vehicle of the Berlin fire brigade got stuck in a traffic jam that may have been caused by a blockade by the “last generation” climate activists. The vehicle should help with the recovery.
“My sister and I share the goals of the movement 100 percent,” Umann continued. She herself founded a vegan, sustainable fashion label with her sister, she doesn’t own a car and rides her bike a lot in Berlin. But it hurts her very much “how ignorantly some climate activists accept the deaths of people who may work for environmental protection and other people themselves”. Umann also criticizes the extreme demands for political consequences. When asked about the statement by Alexander Dobrindt (CSU), who linked the activists to the RAF, and the preventive detention for some activists in Bavaria, Umann said: “I have the impression that drastic reactions are drastic – something extreme is coming up , which I’m not sure I support that much. I’m someone who seeks the gentler middle ground and togetherness without hardening fronts in order to solve problems.”
Anja Umann opened the door for her and said: “Please drive carefully, I’m looking forward to seeing you later.” In an interview, Umann describes her sister’s last days in the hospital, how she said goodbye to her and how intense the relationship with her identical sister was was twin sister. “She was my world, just as I was her world.” Her sister, says Anja Umann, was autistic and had suffered from depression all her life. She worked in a clinic where she helped other people with depression to better cope with the illness.
You left home when you were 16, your parents were dead: “It was always just the two of us, no partners, hardly any close friends”. She knew immediately something was wrong when her sister didn’t come home from work at the usual time on the day of the accident. She then called hospitals and found out pretty quickly what had happened. In the hospital she was allowed to live with her sister. “You hardly get a chance to touch her because everything is so broken, so full of injuries that there is hardly any place left on her body where you can just touch her for a moment to be with her, to hold her.”
She was later told that the effects of the accident could not be finally clarified. Two days after the accident, she was told that there was no more hope. “The morning examinations had shown that the brain is gradually dissolving over its entire surface. Unfortunately, nothing more can be done for my sister.”
