Future Training Camp: practicing solidarity & resistance in collapse

02/02/2026

Dear friends,

Today I'll talk about the event on which I'll be concentrating my political energies this year, a new kind of event that you may have heard described as "collapse LARP", whereas I've mostly referred to it as a "Future Training Camp", and which for my "operational partner" (Abre numa nova janela) Scully/Cindy Peter and me – here's the link to their exciting blog Disrupt (Abre numa nova janela) – represents the logical next step in developing a politics of solidarity in collapse. And because the baby still doesn't have a name ("LARP", Live Action Roleplaying, would be imprecise, because we're not actually planning actual role-playing...), I'll start the story the other way round, with the question: what do we want to achieve, and what kind of event would need to be designed to reach this goal?

Knowing that there are as many narratives and stories about the new "collapse movement" as there are people who feel they belong to it, and therefore just as many strategic ideas and plans for “what now?”, I want to tell the story here of why, after the huge success of Kollapscamp 2025, Scully and I aren't involved in organising Kollapscamp 2026 (but we're in friendly communication with the folks who are organising said camp), but will be putting together, along with a number of other experienced comrades, a completely different event. One that's quite challenging for us, although the work has barely begun, because we're something that's just as hard for us as it is for anyone else: questioning our own business as usual, and doing something fundamentally different.

Death of a trans man, or: Pink Panthers, assemble!

My journey towards the "collapse movement", which was simultaneously the way out of my climate/future depression (Abre numa nova janela), began on an extremely sad Friday morning in September 2022. The Saturday before, Malte, a young trans man, had been knocked down by a right-wing German-Chechen boxer when Malte, in his function as a Pride march steward, tried to position himself between the young attacker and a group of lesbians, in an attempt to protect them from verbal abuse. Malte gets punched in the head, hits the ground, falls into a coma, and dies 5 days later in hospital. By that point the media caravan has already moved on, and when I read about Malte's death on Friday morning on queer accounts in social media, I simultaneously notice that the rest of society, including left-wing and green bubbles, have barely registered this catastrophe. Just imagine how Germany would have reacted if an attacker had gone to the trade union May Day march and beaten a metalworkers' union steward to death there: that same evening there would have been affected speeches from all sides, from DGB and EKD, from VDA and BDI, from SPD and CDU.

A few weeks later I wrote this (Abre numa nova janela): "Germany's queer community is deeply shocked. If those for whom our mere existence seems to be such an affront that they have to insult us, spit on us, hurt us to defend their fragile masculinity can attack and kill us in our safe spaces, then no place is safe. Then none of us is safe. Nowhere. A trans friend has just sent me these lines: 'I'm done. Let them shoot me. I've already looked death in the face 3 times. What am I doing in a society like this? They should just be honest and shoot me, but this time for real. I don't know what to do with my feelings anymore. I'm emotionally broken. I've seen so many trans people go to their deaths, I just can't anymore.' Most people who read these lines will probably be briefly shocked, but then return to their own business as usual. 'Some queer-hating lunatic has beaten to death one of these suddenly oddly omnipresent trans people. Terrible, of course. A crime? Certainly! But compared with Ukraine, the energy crisis and inflation, hardly worth mentioning.' That's how the main evening news programme seemed to see it, which on Friday reported some 2-3 minutes about an electronics fair, but couldn't say anything about Malte's death."

But there were some who said something about it, who met with each other to mourn, but also to show our resilience and resolution. On the Friday after Malte's death, a few people in Berlin organised a vigil, and even though the 20 people who gathered on a Friday evening on Alexanderplatz almost seemed to disappear in the masses of drunk tourists, it was still a powerful experience for me – although I knew almost no one in the circle, it was immediately clear to me: these are my people, this is my community. These are the people who cared that an attacker beat a queer person to death on our most important holy-day. Who cared enough to do something. For me, that a personal breakthrough.

Because it left me with one question, and one question only: do we need to start organising queer self-defence on a larger scale? The answer to that was pretty obvious: yes. Absolutely, no doubt about it. And who is "we" here? Well, us queers. Queer self defense has got to sort of be our own handiwork.

That was the origin of a thought that it took me a year to properly formulate, when I traveled to Sweden to encounter “Preppa Tillsammans”: that catastrophe itself is a strategic space, that an enemy offensive doesn't represent the end of the fight, but simply the point at which it becomes necessary to switch to defensive mode. And that this "switching to defensive mode" would need to be organised and implemented. Seen from there, the first step on the way out of my depression (which manifested in me as total meaninglessness of my life: if all struggles are already lost, why do anything at all except get totally fucked and constantly fucked?) was virtually unavoidable: if my community (queers) is going to be increasingly under attack, then the best thing I can do now is to think about how I can contribute to enabling, strengthening, expanding the self-defence of my community. If we're under attack, and we can't be sure that state and other social institutions will defend us, then we're left only with (potentially militant) self-defence. If the brownshirts want to pin pink triangles on us again, we become the Pink Panthers.

"Let's talk about queer self-defence. (Abre numa nova janela) I'd like to call our coming, literally hard-hitting organisation 'Pink Panthers'. This form of self-defence already existed (naturally inspired by the Black Panthers) under this name in 1990s New York, as a gay task force against homophobic assaults. Queer-haters should think twice about attacking a queer person in future, and then not do it – because they know: Queers can defend themselves. And if they do: they can and will hurt you.”

From queer self-defence via Preppa Tillsammans to the "collapse movement"

For me, the origin of the idea of a “collapse movement” lies in the self-defence of my own community, in the hope of quickly (let's say: within one or two years) creating structures that would be able, for example, to protect a Pride somewhere in Naziland, in such a way that Nazis potentially wanting to attack a Pride march would be deterred from doing so (and should they still decide to go ahead, structures that would be able to dole out adequate punishment).

Alas, the initial response from within queer millieus was pretty unenthusiastic, and at no point did I have the impression that any real momentum could emerge behind the idea. The idea of "prepping for collapse and catastrophe" hadn't arrived in polite society yet, there was no real space of resonance in which the idea "let's learn to defend ourselves against the Nazi attacks that are certainly going to become more and more frequent, because we can't trust the state on this" could make sense, in which it didn't end up sounding like paranoid tinfoil hat-brigade bullshit.

So a certain social inertia stood in the way of realising the goal "creation of autonomous structures capable of action that can provide certain vital inputs in catastrophe situations, from security through communication to medical care". It was clear to me that "help us queers defend ourselves" wouldn't be able to motivate enough people. This possibility only opened up for me when I travelled to meet my old friend Pär Plüschke in Sweden, and there experienced for the first time the coherence, intelligence and force of the "solidarity prepping/prepping together" frame. This frame allowed me for the first time to see the outlines of a "just collapse movement". (Abre numa nova janela)

"We need to learn to organise something like this effectively, in solidarity and openly, just as the comrades from Preppa Tillsammans are starting to do. But at the core of an agenda of 'solidarity prepping'... is the insight that 'prepping' isn't about supplies, but about relationships. Prepping first of all denotes nothing more than 'preparation for crises and catastrophes', and isn't Nazi stuff per se – but it could become that if we don't get our arses in gear soon. And how do we get our arses in gear? Obviously, with a new cycle of movement, a movement that takes seriously that the global socio-ecological catastrophes (not just climate, but also biodiversity et al) go hand in hand with a massive increase in the fascist threat."

When towards late 2023 I began to invest my energy in the possibility of the emergence of a "just collapse movement" based on the strategy of solidarity prepping (broadly understood), (Abre numa nova janela) and from 2024 onwards put all my resources into organising Kollapscamp 2025, the original motivation wasn't to organise yet another activist camp, and I also thought of the "movement" primarily as a means to an end. That end? Creating structures capable of action in concrete catastrophe situations, whether in a heatwave, a flood, or a catastrophic Nazi attack. Activist flood readiness; Pink Panthers; Autonomous aid networks in an inner-city heatwave. That's what I wanted to organise, that's what it was about for me.

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From Kollapscamp 25 to... working title: Future Training Camp

The first Kollapscamp was a huge success, and we – Scully and I – are super excited that there will again be a large, colourful, diverse Kollapscamp 26 this year, where people can find an entry point to the just collapse movement. But from our “publicly visible antifascist queers” perspective, meaning from the point of a view of people who are actively and directly and in the short term threatened by collapse and fascism, we've also noticed that last year we didn't really get closer to our goal of creating organisational structures that could immediately or at least quickly deploy into catastrophes. To achieve this goal, we believe, other formats are needed, formats that allow us to go deeper than we could in a two hour workshop.

And that's exactly what we want to organise this year: an event that takes up and deepens the spirit of Kollapscamp, that in itself represents a break with the weekend activism that's become largely dominant amongst many climate and many other "activists". An event that brings us closer to the above-mentioned goal, not just apropos protection/security for queers, but also in relation to other possible catastrophes and collapses.

Before I get into explaining why we're planning what we're planning, it might be helpful, after three pages of "Grandpa's telling war stories again" history, to finally and first of all say what we're actually planning:

What? A week-long intensive course in collective collapse- and catastrophe-preparation.

There will be four four-day intensive trainings in the following thematic strands, in the sense of "X in catastrophe": Supply/logistics & transport; Communication; Self-protection/security; First aid and everyday medicine. After a day's break, what's been learnt will then be tried out at the weekend in scenarios, planning and role-playing games (it'll be neither full immersion role playing, nor pure tabletop strategy game, but rather a hybrid form: scenarios played out live) and reflected on together.

When and where? 21-27.9, Alte Hölle, Brandenburg (about an hour from Berlin)

Who? In contrast to the "classic" Kollapscamp, which this year will take place from 5-9. August at Kuhlmühle, this event won't have open registration for limited tickets, and this time we don't necessarily want to attract those who want to engage with the topic of "collapse" and "prepping together" for the first time. We're planning an event for those who take the current situation as seriously as we do; who know that we need to prepare now for climate catastrophes, for fascist takeovers, for system breakdowns, not in a few years; and who know that preparing for a catastrophic future means investing time and resources in this preparation now.

How many? We're expecting about 200 participants, on average 40/50 per "training strand".

Registration/participation: we don't yet know exactly how we'll organise this, but let's put it this way, if you're interested, get in touch with us (scully@systemausfall.org (Abre numa nova janela); tm@friedlichesabotage.net (Abre numa nova janela)), then we can have a conversation. We particularly want to talk to people who aren't just interested in the event itself, but can imagine (or ideally have already decided) to actively continue working and organising with what they've learnt. We also have to assume that there'll only be limited institutional funding for a project like this, which is why we have to rely on crowdfunding (starting soon) and participant contributions, and we hope of course that as last year at Collapse Camp '25, the principle will apply: if someone wants to come and can't pay, we'll find a solidarity way.

Path, goal, error tolerance

Our as-yet nameless event is an attempt not just to open up a new topic, but to learn a new kind of activism. One that recognises that more risks are coming our way, that more preparation and training is needed than was the case, for example, for a classic Ende Gelände action. We know that taking off a week in September is a big commitment, and we know that this will make participation in our event difficult to impossible for many people. But we're fairly certain that there are now more than just a few amongst you who are willing and able to make this commitment. This event is for you.

We also know that the event is an experiment: neither Scully nor I have ever organised several multi-day trainings in multiple fields in which we have practically no expertise, and although the work in the respective training strands, where we're working together with people who in most cases have been dealing with these topics for years or decades, who in some cases have completely different backgrounds to the people we usually organise with, has already begun and is going very well, we know that we'll probably mainly learn a lot about what we cannot do. And that's as it should be, because if collapse really represents a historic turning point, and very, very much will change, then it's also reasonable to assume that "activism" will change. What it will look like then, we don't know. But in September at Alte Hölle we want to get a bit closer to this activism of the future.

If it goes well, awesome. If it goes badly, we'll learn from it, because the goals will remain the same: to be immediately practically capable of action in catastrophes; to defend one's own and other threatened communities against increasing threats and attacks; to create spaces of solidarity in catastrophe, and thereby take away space from the right.

And if you want to give yourself the full collapse movement hit in summer: why not check out both! At the beginning of August Kollapscamp '26 at Kuhlmühle, in September then the training camp/collapse LARP, you name it (really, I mean it: please do name it, we still need good brainwaves :)).

I'll leave it at that, it's long enough now anyway. If you have questions about the nameless event, get in touch, if the answer already exists, you'll get it. And think about whether this event might be for you. If so: get in touch.

With movementist greetings,

Yours, Tadzio