Nazi Hits of the 1930s, 1990s and the Ugliest Chants of Today

‘No, that’s not true,’ said the petite woman into the microphone, ‘people can do something every day.’ She was disagreeing with a quote by Erich Kästner, which has been revived in the past few years. In it, he stated that by 1933, there was nothing that could have stopped the Nazis. Action should have been taken against them by 1928 at the latest. In his words: ‘You can’t wait until they label your fight for freedom “treason”. You can’t wait until the snowball has turned into an avalanche.’
I had been invited by the woman to give a reading in summer. She’s one of those who does something every day. In a small town in Saxony-Anhalt, where local industry had links to Auschwitz, the action she takes is to keep Nazi history alive.

Past and present

Keeping the past alive? What does that mean? Why is it still necessary? Isn’t it much more urgent for us to talk about the present? In the cultural commentaries of newspapers, debates rage over whether Höcke and his followers should be compared to the Nazis. Doesn’t this trivialise National Socialism?
The New Right itself brings up comparisons. After the director of the Buchenwald Memorial, Jens-Christian Wagner, appealed to the citizens of Thuringia, warning them about the AfD, his photo appeared on a wall commemorating the victims of the death marches.
‘Hold on,’ commentators argue, ‘the rise of the far right is just a thing that’s happening in the East, isn’t it?’ And while they argue, Björn Höcke laughs and drives his Simson moped [a brand associated with AfD sympathizers] around this Nazi stronghold.

At a demo in Bautzen where we’re claiming the right to openly love whoever we want, 700 neo-Nazis chant ‘East, East, East Germany’ at us and ‘Without the cops, you’re dust.’ 

Fascism is not an East German phenomenon. It’s everywhere. In the West German state of North Rhine-Westphalia, for example, 12 per cent of survey respondents recently stated that they would vote for the AfD in the next state election. Fascism has the face of Vladimir Putin, the hairstyle of Donald Trump and the voice of Viktor Orbán.
And yes, in East, East, East Germany too, this is the moment of decision: will fascism become Germany’s soundtrack once again? With the hits of the 1930s, 1990s and the ugliest chants of today? The avalanche is crashing across the east, so loudly and inevitably that you might almost miss it. Because it’s a noise you have to tune out or else go crazy.
On the way back from the Christopher Street Day parade in Bautzen, I take off my rainbow wristband before I turn into a gas station to fill up my tank: I’m scared. Have been for a long time. I look around. Who else is here at the gas station late at night? Do their car stickers tell me their views? What kind of shoes are they wearing? What make of jacket do they have on? My neck is tense as I clench my bunch of keys in my fist. It’s like being thrown back in time to the 1990s or the 2000s. This was all supposed to be over.

A huge weight lifted off my shoulders

In 2005, when I moved to Berlin, I remember the sudden relief of walking to my new flat in Schöneberg and seeing the street from the metro station lined with rainbow flags. Men were walking hand in hand through the streets. No one commented and there were no strange looks. A huge weight lifted off my shoulders, one I didn’t even know I’d been carrying, or for how long.
Nevertheless, even here in Berlin, I sometimes saw cars with an ‘88’ on the license plate [code for ‘Heil Hitler’: ‘H’ is the eighth letter in the alphabet.] When I pointed this out to my new West German friends, they shrugged and said: ‘You and your Nazi fixation. The “brown East!” It’s a cliché!’ These were people who had never even been to the Baltic Sea coast.
In the meantime, the NPD had won seats in the state parliaments of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and Saxony.
In 2011, the National Socialist Underground blew its cover. In its decade of underground activity, this group of right-wing terrorists carried out 10 murders, committed 43 attempted murders, and carried out 3 explosive attacks and 15 robberies. My Nazi fixation took the shape of two men and a woman from Jena who whistled the Pink Panther theme tune.
The perpetrators came from East, East, East Germany and the whole country wondered how such a thing could have happened. To us, the people who keep our history alive all the time!
If keeping the past alive always ends up with the conclusion that you can’t judge your grandparents because you don’t know how you would have acted yourself, then it has failed. In a 2018 study by Bielefeld University, 50 per cent of the 16- to 25-year-olds surveyed believed that the older members of their family had been victims of National Socialism. Keeping Nazi history alive has blurred into a narrative about victimhood. One in five respondents believe their family members had been involved in the Resistance.

Germany, the world champion in the culture of remembrance

Recently on a radio program, lawyer and writer Achim Dörfer complained that Germany, the world champion in the culture of remembrance, completely excludes the memory of Jewish, Sinti and Roma and other groups persecuted by Nazi terror. Everyone knows the Scholl siblings, but who knows the Jew, Eva Mamlok? No schools or roads are named after her. Only a small Stolperstein memorial in Berlin pays tribute to her. In 1933, at the age of 14, she climbed onto the roof of a Berlin department store and wrote the slogan ‘Down with Hitler’ on the façade for everyone to see and distributed leaflets with a group of like-minded women. Only one of them survived.
This story is not part of our remembrance culture. Our resistance is Aryan.

Very late one night when I’m returning from an event, I listen to a radio feature about Erich Kästner to keep me awake. ‘No matter what should happen, you must never sink so low that after being tarred and feathered you proceed to eat crow.’ I notice that my emotional house has shifted closer and closer to the water in recent months. Moisture and cold have crept into my bones and the fear I might be washed away is growing. I often find it difficult to get up. To get going. To keep fighting. To believe that people can do something every day.

Outlawing works

It’s wrong to outlaw people, that’s what they say. And that the strategy of outlawing the AfD has failed. But it was never properly tried in the first place.
Outlawing is a very successful strategy, as we proved in the 2000s after the NPD’s success in elections. No one suggested that the other parties should talk to or collaborate with them. No one felt an obligation towards their voters or labelled them ‘concerned citizens’ whose fears and worries should be taken seriously.
Even the failed application to ban the NPD didn’t stop them from vanishing from the political map. Attitudes towards the NPD were clear-cut.
But with the AfD, it was different from the beginning. Attempts were made to trivialise it as a ‘professor’s party’ – a reflection of its founding members’ professions – although it was clear early on that old NPD structures were joining forces, and that this new party was deliberately targeting the fringes of far-right to exert pressure on politicians.

Nazi or not?

A year after the founding of the party, Björn Höcke suddenly appeared in Thuringia and repeatedly caused scandals with his speeches, that were laced with allusions to Goebbels’ phrases. As a reward, Günther Jauch gave him a slot on Germany’s most prominent political talk show. In an article for ZEIT ONLINE, Toralf Staud commented on his appearance with the eye-catching title ‘Höcke is not a Nazi. Those who paint him as one haven’t understood him, and are only helping him.’ Staud writes about the differences between National Socialists and conservative revolutionaries, the young conservatives in the Weimar Republic. I don’t think these differences matter.
In the box-office hit Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow, which was released in 1997 and is as much a part of my youth culture as Doc Martens on playgrounds, it’s said that there are countless words for snow in the Inuit language. That’s known to be incorrect. I know nothing else about the Inuit language. But I do know that in German, there are countless variations for explaining why someone is not a Nazi. And there are many ways more to explain why the far right isn’t as bad as people say, and why people who vote for them aren’t members of the far right and don’t want what the far right wants but something completely different – something born of misery, that has risen from sheer despair and helplessness. All these statements repeatedly lead to the same thing: the policies of democratic parties follow the demands of the far right.

Höcke’s model of government 

During a speech in Schweinfurt in 2016, Björn Höcke stated that the greatest social issue of the 21st century was no longer the redistribution of wealth from top to bottom, but the ‘transfer of national wealth from home to abroad’. What he was referring to was German social benefits being transferred abroad by refugees.
The German government has no data about how much money is involved, not even an approximation. Experts assume that it can’t be a very large sum of money because the total sum is severely limited by the low level of unemployment benefits.
Nevertheless, Höcke’s claim was used to justify the introduction of a ‘payment card’ for refugees. In 2019, when he and the AfD called for refugees to be granted benefits in kind rather than money, there was a huge outcry. But in the meantime, it has become a regular topic of political debates. The CDU’s frontrunning candidate in Thuringia, Mario Voigt, boasts in electoral arenas and discussions that his district councillors have implemented all these measures better than the AfD district councillor.

They speak about it very openly

We have to do something every day because the far right is doing something every day to change this country. And no matter how much effort is made on all sides to trivialise, contain and make the AfD palatable, they openly express what they think and speak about what they plan on doing.

In the face of this shifting reality, poetry fails me

‘The party of the lean, strong, healthy. This must be the AfD’s image,’ wrote social media strategist Erik Ahrens on X. He designed Maximilian Krah’s campaign, the AfD’s front-running candidate for the European elections. On his X account, Ahrens muses about all the people in this country who are expendable. And why the excess of men in East Germany will lead to a war in which all the expendable elements are eliminated. He writes about genetics and racial studies. Ahrens is not a marginal figure of the AfD: he is at the centre of its propaganda.
In January of this year, I felt a brief flicker of hope. When millions of people took to the streets to protest against plans to expel migrants, Germans from ethnic minorities and political dissenters, it seemed for a moment that civil society was going to oppose the rise of the far right with all its might. There were demos everywhere, even in East, East, East Germany.
However, the European elections brought a period of disillusionment. And almost every day, it becomes clearer that the far right is already well on its way.
In Bautzen, the CDU approved an AfD application to abolish the district commissioner for foreigners. Now there is no one responsible for the interests and needs of migrants. Three representatives of the Reichsbürger Freie Sachsen Party were also elected to Bautzen’s district parliament. Among them is Benjamin Moses, a well-known neo-Nazi.
Poetry fails me in the face of this shifting reality. I can’t think of any nice, comforting words that might soften the blow of this breakneck takeover.

Solidarity with NSU supporters

On Instagram, Benjamin Moses, the newly elected district councillor of Bautzen, recently appealed to people to think of ‘our prisoners’ and to take ten minutes to write them a letter. In the background was an envelope addressed to convicted NSU supporter, Ralf Wohlleben.
East, East, East Germany. Again and again.

But even if I’m scared every time I drive to Saxony, even if I check my car after every event in the East to see if nails are lying about, or there’s something stuck to my tyres; even if I check logos on T-shirts, stickers on cars, and tattoos on upper arms; even if I don’t want to drive there sometimes, I have never felt more understood than by the people in East Germany who do something every day, especially in the last two years. They sense that the avalanche might already have buried them and that their efforts are like digging out of a snowdrift with their bare arms. 

Left in the lurch 

My anger is not only directed at those who want to see the far right in power in the East; it’s also directed at all those who have left people in the lurch who do something every day. All those whose disinterest throws this small group under the bus along with their creative definitions of Nazis who aren’t really Nazis. Definitions that are used so that they can say: Look, the East isn’t right-wing at all. Those who don’t want to admit that our country transformed long ago. Those who don’t want to believe that the cruelties Höcke considers necessary will also affect them. Those who believe fascism is a historical phenomenon that should be put in an exhibition so that we can all shudder at it. Those who trivialise the far right by accusing the ones who call it by its name of trivialising the unprecedented nature of National Socialism.
The purpose of keeping Nazi history alive is not to create a narrative of exoneration. It doesn’t matter what we believe, how we would have acted, or what we would have done or not done. We know how opportunistic we are. We don’t want to be in the minority. And it’s hard to stand up to the mainstream in places where the far right has become mainstream. It’s dangerous and is not without consequences. Houses are set on fire, people are beaten up, and threatening calls are made at night that keep you awake and scared. Colleagues avoid you, teachers harass you.
And newspaper columns are asking: Are we back in the 1990s?

The 1990s? No, it’s much worse than the 1990s. We live in very different times now. A time when every third person in Thuringia and Saxony wants to see the far right in power. That didn’t happen in the 1990s. The last time that happened was in the 1930s.
The question is not, what would you have done? The question is: What are you doing now? What are you doing every day?

Under the title “Poetic Positions” in the “DIE KUNST, VIELE ZU BLEIBEN” program, the writers and playwrights Sivan Ben Yishai, Manja Präkels and Deniz Utlu also took a stand on current events alongside Anne Rabe. The fund is now making their contributions available to read in its online magazine. Photographer Sebastian Bolesch accompanied the Fund's series of events and captured impressions from the surroundings of the individual stations in pictures.

Translated from the German by Lucy Jones.