Mennonite Weekly Review

REGENSBURG, Germany — Liesa Unger knows one person can accomplish much.

Unger

Unger, who with her husband is pastor of a Mennonite church in Burgweinting, a district of Regensburg, used polite letters and persistence to stop noise pollution in her city created by low flights of planes in the national air force.

For years Regensburg citizens had tried unsuccessfully to stop the low flights over Burgweinting. In January, about a year and a half after Liesa and Wilhelm Unger moved to Regensburg, they experienced the noise of an extremely low flight.

Liesa Unger, who earlier directed the Young Anabaptist Mennonite Exchange Network for Mennonite World Conference, wrote to the air force, asking for an explanation.

The air force said flights as low as 150 meters are legal anywhere except over cities with a population of more than 100,000. Burgweinting has a population of only 9,000, but for more than 30 years it has been a district of Regensburg, a city of more than 100,000.

Unger wrote another letter, this time to the Department of Defense. She asked politely why the air force was not respecting the city’s political boundaries.

The Department of Defense responded with a letter of thanks to Unger for exposing a mistake in air force maps. The Minister of Defense then instructed the air force to stop low flights over Burgweinting.

It took only two letters to end the flights. Because of Unger’s persistence in getting a satisfactory explanation for the bothersome noise, many of her neighbors are now thankful.

One elderly man, who had lived in the community all his life, came to the Unger’s church on a Sunday morning looking for “the pastor who had stopped the low-level flights.”

He said the flights had annoyed him for years, but he had no idea where to start to do something to stop them. He thanked Unger and said, “This is not the last time you will see me in your church.”

Unger became famous in the city when the Regensburger Rundschau headlined a March 26 feature story, “Pastor Defeats Air Force.”

The story concluded by noting that it was the pastor of a historic peace church who beat the air force in a peaceful way.

Information from Die Brücke contributed to this report.