'Like
a poison': how anti-immigrant Pegida is dividing Dresden
A
year since its launch, German protest group has evolved into slick
operation whose polarising rhetoric is increasingly blamed for
attacks on refugees
Kate Connolly in
Dresden
Tuesday 27 October
2015
With her shiny
evening heels clicking on the cobbles, Steffi Klein stops to take in
the view of crowds gathering just metres away on Theaterplatz in
Dresden.
She and her partner,
Frank, both dressed up for an evening at the opera, take it in turns
to share a pair of opera glasses to read some of the banners the
protesters are holding aloft. The couple tut under their breaths and
she rolls her eyes.
“My daughter
wanted us to babysit our grandchildren so she could go to that,”
says the 59-year-old. “I said: ‘You must be joking, my darling.
I’m going to the opera, not to that nonsense.’”
On stage at the
Semperoper is Albert Lortzing’s comic opera Der Wildschütz (The
Poacher), in which a man almost loses his betrothed as punishment for
poaching until it transpires the roebuck he had killed was in fact a
donkey.
Colourful banners
hang between masts at the front of the baroque opera house, reading
“Open your eyes”, “open your hearts” and “The dignity of
humans is sacrosanct” – quoting article 1 of the German
constitution. A large white LED screen hanging at the front of the
elegant building flashes the message “We’re not a backdrop for
intolerance”.
The square in front
of the opera house is being used as a stage for the weekly Monday
rally of the anti-immigrant campaign group Pegida, which is meeting
here for the 37th time.
“They do their
thing, we do ours,” says Joachim Schneider, pointing at the
Semperoper. “We’re proud of that house, just as we are of a lot
of Dresden’s cultural treasures,” the 62-year-old unemployed
computer scientist says, fondly recalling the days when he could buy
an opera tickets for just 17 East German marks. “But they’ve not
endeared themselves to us by coming up with slogans like that, or
letting migrants sleep in tents in front of the theatre.” The LED
screen has switched its message to “We’re not a stage set for
xenophobia”.
“The fact is,”
Schneider says, “this is the only place I have to go – no one
else represents my frustrations better than Pegida does.” He thinks
this is about his 20th rally.
On stage is Lutz
Bachmann, Pegida’s founder and leader, and his sidekick, riesling
vintner Siegfried Daebritz. Bachmann fires up the crowd with the
latest statistics about the large numbers of refugees arriving in
Germany, raising the loudest response when he talks of the number of
people whose asylum claims have been turned down. He says they have
avoided deportation and are now “roaming free”.
When he tells his
audience that a hotel, the Prinz Eugen, was bought by the city
council on Monday for €3m (£2.16m) to house refugees, the crowd
responds with loud jeers. “I tell you, it won’t be long before
that burns,” Schneider says, quickly adding he does not condone
arson.
In front of him two
young men with shaven heads, one of whom wears a hoodie bearing the
phrase “Dresden, my neighbourhood” in gothic script, are also
heard to mutter “that’ll soon be in flames”.
The rally, attended
by an estimated 10,000 people, takes place at a time of heightened
tension across Germany, when virtually every town and community is
gripped by the question of how to house its share of the refugees
that have been arriving in their thousands every day, with no sign of
a let-up.
Pegida started as a
small protest group in October 2014 and grew to 30,000. But in the
summer its size shrank to a negligible few hundred disgruntled souls
and was considered by most to be on its way out. Many supporters were
said to have been put off by Facebook images of Bachmann posing as
Hitler that went viral. But in recent weeks the movement has been
given a fresh lift by the refugee crisis, not least by the
uncertainty and fears as to how it might develop.
To some extent the
concerns of those gathered in the square are little different to
those heard elsewhere in Germany – namely how many people are still
to arrive and how they are to be housed and integrated. Neither do
Pegida’s demands – among them the suspension of Schengen
agreement and a freeze on the admission of asylum seekers – seem
out of step with the public discourse at a time when estimates say
between 1 million and 1.5 million refugees are expected by the end of
December.
But it is the hate
with which most “pegistas” – as they’ve been nicknamed, or
“patriots” as Bachmann prefers to call them – are brimming that
is the standout factor. That and their strong, almost overpowering,
sense of victimhood.
The wrath at Pegida
rallies is reserved almost exclusively for Angela Merkel, who is
repeatedly referred to as a “traitor of the people”. The German
chancellor – whom many hold responsible for the crisis, namely for
her “open door” policy towards asylum claims – is depicted as
everything from a euro dictator, dressed in a Nazi-style uniform with
red arm bands showing euro signs instead of swastikas, to a state
security informant called Erica.
In between speeches
the crowds chant “Merkel raus!” (Merkel out), “Widerstand”
(resistance) and “Wir sind das Volk” (We are the people) – a
rallying cry stolen from the 1989 dissident protests that were
crucial in bringing down the Berlin Wall. Alongside German flags,
scores are waving what under the bright lights initially looks like
the Norwegian flag but is the black, red and gold cross emblem of the
Nazi resistance movement led by Claus von Stauffenberg – who was
executed after his failed attempt to assassinate Hitler on 20 July
1944.
“We are resistance
fighters like him,” an elderly woman trying to push a bike through
the crowds says. “We have hardly ever been so vulnerable in our
history as we are now, with the borders open and everyone and anyone,
including suicide bombers and economic freeloaders, pouring in.”
Like many here, she declines to give her name or any other details
that might identify her.
Just how much the
movement has polarised Dresden, Ulrich Wolf can testify. Having
worked as a reporter with the Sächsische Zeitung for 11 years, he
has spent the last 12 months focussing almost solely on Pegida. He
has received plenty of hate mail and threats and even had to block
friends from his Twitter account. An entire wall in his office is
taken up with a chart detailing the Pegida kingpins, and their
various connections to far-right groupings around Europe.
“A year in, the
topic of Pegida has crept into every family, every workplace, every
sports club, you name it, like a poison. The main question being
asked is are you for or against it?” he says, over lunch in his
newspaper’s canteen. “If it’s a Monday, it’s raining and
you’re riding the tram, you can’t help but ask whether the person
sitting opposite you is going to the rally.”
He defines the
protesters as the “verbitterte Mitte”, the embittered centre, who
lost their sense of “Heimat”, or belonging, when communism
collapsed and have never found it again. Many, he says, work in the
service industry, often in call centres or logistics firms, on low
wages, which only adds to their sense of humiliation.
“This region is
something of a low-wage test lab. People are often not represented by
a trade union. Neither do they belong to a church. They’ve seen
industry around them collapse, the local fire brigade is no longer
financed,” Wolf says.
For many their
strongest sense of belonging until now came from the football club
Dynamo Dresden. Many of Pegida’s rallying cries, such as “liar
press”, were heard in the stands there long before the Monday
demonstrations began.
Had the refugee
situation not exploded as it has, Wolf strongly believes the
organisation might have died a death. “But instead it has had a lot
of oil added to its flames,” he says. While some were put off by
Bachmann’s Hitler impersonation, most now brush the incident off,
saying it was indicative of the way the group is victimised by the
media.
Since the early
rallies, which consisted of little more than a caravan, a microphone,
and a few muffled speakers, the events have grown in stature and
sophistication. Now the sound system is loud and clear, the event is
live-streamed to about 15,000 people, and Bachmann’s language has
changed. He started off talking of “asylum seekers”, which became
“asylum spongers”, and now he is frequently heard saying
“invaders”. In the same breath he will often talk of criminals
and rapists. “He moves in steps,” Wolf notes.
Bachmann is under
criminal investigation for his inflammatory language and last week
came under fire for putting on stage the German-Turkish author Akif
Pirinçci who said it was a shame that “concentration camps are no
longer in operation”. The week before, a man turned up with a mock
gallows from which hung a noose reserved for Merkel. He is also under
criminal investigation.
“Both of those
went too far for me,” says the woman pushing her bike. “Though
the gallows was only small. No one would have noticed it had it not
been put on the internet.” Asked why she continues to come to the
rallies, she replies: “Because something’s got to be done.” Her
husband joins in the cries of “Widerstand!” and she nestles her
head on his shoulder.
But as it has
evolved, the Pegida rhetoric has been increasingly blamed for stoking
anti-immigrant sentiment across the country, including goading into
action those behind the hundreds of arson attacks that have taken
place on asylum seekers’ homes this year.
The justice
minister, Heiko Maas, was quick to make the connection following the
race-motivated stabbing of Cologne mayoral candidate Henriette Reker
10 days ago, when he said: “There’s no excusing those who choose
to follow gallows and Hitler moustaches. Pegida is sowing the hate
that leads to violence.”
While the tourist
office says numbers of visitors to Dresden are down considerably
owing to Pegida and the universities and business leaders talk of
academics and foreign investors being put off, there is much
fulminating over how the city should deal with the group. An online
campaign called #IchBinDresden (I am Dresden) has been launched, with
figureheads declaring: “I am one of more than 500,000 Dresdeners
who don’t go to Pegida. But so far it has had little effect.
“We are at a loss
to find the right recipe to effectively oppose Pegida,” Silvio
Lang, spokesman of the association “Nazi Free Dresden” admits. He
was among those who criticised the mayor, Dirk Hilbert, for going on
holiday rather than joining a counter-demonstration on Pegida’s
first birthday.
Timo Lochocki, an
analyst of European populism and fellow at the German Marshall Fund
thinktank, says Pegida’s presence had been sharpened by the fact
that its political goals have become far more clearly defined since
the refugee crisis took off.
“The supporters
feel that there’s no conservative party any more, that their nation
is being sold out, either to the EU or to migrants. An
anti-establishment feeling is growing, with a sense of ‘them up
there’ doing what they want, while those down below feel they’re
increasingly losing control,” he says.
He adds it is only
necessary to consider how radically Germany has changed over the past
20 years to understand the sentiments. “It’s far more open, more
European, more multicultural, and within just a matter of weeks
Germany has thrown its migration politics of decades out the window.
The psychological impact this is having on people is completely
understandable.”
The next six months
will be crucial, Lochocki says. “If the government can give people
the feeling they are in control again, that those who should protect
them are doing so, that might take the wind out of the sails of the
protest. But I do not believe the far right is strong enough to turn
this to their advantage.”
Klein, the
opera-goer, says she and her daughter are among many Dresdeners to
have fallen out over Pegida.
“She got a
babysitter tonight and as far as I know is in that crowd with her
whistle and flag,” she says before going inside the opera house to
take her seat in the stalls.
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