Populist,
Pernicious and Perilous : Germany's Growing Hate Problem
“Germany
has a hate problem -- one that is growing.”
Even
as an image of a Germany taking great pains to welcome hundreds of
thousands of refugees has bolstered the country's image abroad, it
has also been accompanied by a wave of hatred that cannot be played
down. At the center of this second, disturbing narrative is Patriots
against the Islamization of the West, or Pegida, a xenophobic
grassroots movement that has manifested itself with demonstrations
each Monday mostly in Dresden in the east, but also in other parts of
Germany. But Pegida is only one part of a much larger problem, as the
following feature from the new issue of SPIEGEL illustrates.
October 23, 2015
Germany has a hate
problem -- one that is growing.
"You're as big
of an asshole as that idiot Ralf Stegner," a certain Birgit M.
recently wrote in a letter to Thomas Kutschaty, justice minister of
the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. It was a referrence to the
deputy party leader of state chapter of the Social Democratic Party
(SPD), who recently said the organizers of the weekly Pegida marches
in Dresden and elsewhere should be investigated by intelligence
services. "You should all be put in a sack and have a hammer
taken to you," Birgit M. wrote in her tirade.
Then there was the
man who called Dorothea Moesch, a local SPD politician in Dortmund,
late in the evening on June 30. "We're going to get you,"
he threatened. "We're at your door."
Another local SPD
politician in Hesse, district administrator Erich Pipa, has been
similarly threatened. "We can have you taken out at any time,"
he was informed in a letter.
And in Bernau in the
eastern state of Brandenburg, graffiti scrawled on the wall of a
warehouse namechecking the local mayor reads, "First Henriette
Reker (the mayoral candidate stabbed in Cologne last weekend), next
André Stahl."
These are but a few
examples -- four politicians who have taken a stand, and, if the
threats are to be taken seriously, may now need to fear for their
lives. Kutschaty fell into the crosshairs for saying, "Pegida is
not about protecting the Western world, it's about its demise."
Moesch, for her part, attracted ire because she organized a protest
against right-wing extremism. Pipa became the target of hatred
because he was recently awarded a Federal Cross of Merit, Germany's
highest civilian honor, for his longtime lobbying work on behalf of
refugees. Finally, Stahl was the subject of denigration because of
his public declaration that he wants refugees to feel welcome in his
city.
So far, none of them
have scaled back their political work. They all still say it's more
important than ever. But since the knife attack against Reker last
Saturday on the eve of her election as mayor of Cologne, they can no
longer feel entirely safe. District administrator Pipa is wondering
whether he should take police advice and wear a bullet-proof vest.
Rampant Hatred
Germany these days,
it seems, is a place where people feel entirely uninhibited about
expressing their hatred and xenophobia. Images from around the
country show a level of brutalization that hasn't been witnessed for
some time, and attest to primitive instincts long believed to have
been relegated to the past in Germany. The examples are as myriad as
they are shocking, and include the bloody attack in Cologne as well
as the mock gallows for Angela Merkel and her deputy Sigmar Gabriel
carried by a demonstrator at a Pegida rally in Dresden on Oct. 12.
But they also include the abuse shouted at the German chancellor when
she visited a refugee hostel in Heidenau near Dresden in August,
where she was called a "slut" and other insults, or the
placards held aloft by demonstrators on the first anniversary of the
Pegida rallies listing the supposed "enemies of the German
state" -- Merkel, Gabriel and their "accomplices." The
lack of inhibition when it comes to vicious tirades took on a whole
new scale on Monday, when Turkish-born German author and Pegida
supporter Akif Pirincci, said there are other alternatives in the
refugee crisis, but "the concentration camps are unfortunately
out of action at the moment."
There have been more
than twice as many attacks on refugee hostels during the first nine
months of this year as in the whole of 2014. The rising tide of
hatred is now reaching the politicians many hold responsible for the
perceived chaos besetting Germany. The national headquarters of
Merkel's conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party in
Berlin fields thousands of hate mails every week. As the architect of
the "we can do it" policy of allowing masses of refugees
into the country, Chancellor Merkel is their primary target. Within
the SPD, it is General Secretary Yasmin Fahimi, whose father is
Iranian. "Open the doors to the showers, fire up the ovens.
They're going to be needed," read one recent anonymous mail
addressed to her.
The hatred comes in
many forms. It's expressed on the streets and on the Internet.
Sometimes it's loud. Other times it's unspoken. It eminates from
every class and every section of society. According to studies
conducted by Andreas Zick, the respected head of the Institute for
Interdisciplinary Research on Conflict and Violence at the University
of Bielefeld, who has been researching German prejudices against
different groups for many years, almost 50 percent of Germans harbor
misanthropic views. Zick warns of a shift in norms that will be
difficult to get back under control.
Tougher Response
Needed
Politicians need to
find a way of dealing with rampant hatred. Dialogue and compromise --
the bedrock of Germany's culture of debate -- no longer appears to be
working at the moment. It's hard to get through to people who have
been consumed with a hysterical degree of hatred.
The country's
security agencies also need to take a decisive stance. Are they once
again being too slow in monitoring and clamping down on this new
radical scene? In most states, Germany's domestic intelligence agency
is not keeping tabs on Pegida. Theoretically, however, police and
public prosecutors do have the tools to take action to squash
troublemakers.
When it comes to
dealing with radicals, society needs an inner compass. It has to
decide how indifferent to politics it can afford to be and how far
voter turnout can fall -- it reached a record low in Sunday's mayoral
elections in Cologne. In short, it has to decide how much room for
manoeuver it is willing to grant far-right firebrands.
But the damage
already runs deep, as evidenced not only by the attack on Henriette
Reker. Politicians across Germany are reporting a rise in the number
of serious threats issued against them.
In Dortmund,
Dorothea Moesch is used to being the butt of hostility. Four years
ago, she opened a home in the district of Westerfilde for needy
locals, immigrants and their children. Volunteers taught German
language classes and helped translate letters from the authorities
for the residents. Mainly they simply made themselves available.
Moesch promoted a "welcoming culture" long before the term
was coined. Protest was inevitable. Until now, abuse along the lines
of "Bloody Turks, get them out" and "Piss off,
cripple" bounced off her. Wheelchair-bound due to a joint
disease, Moesch is all too familiar with discrimination.
'You're Going to
Burn, Witch!'
But it's different
these days. On June 30, after registering a demonstration against the
far-right, she received an anonymous call on her mobile phone.
"You're going to burn, witch, just like all the other cunts,"
said a male voice. He called again that evening. Moesch was
frightened. "You can't shrug that sort of thing off," she
says.
Sebastian Koch is
the Social Democrat mayor of Wenzenbach near Regensburg in Bavaria.
He feels the same. He's accused of pandering to asylum-seekers and
regularly gets told he should deport himself to Syria. He drew
criticism for berating a man who rents out refugee accommodations for
leaving furniture and stoves broken and exposed electrical wiring
dangling off walls. He also complained about the way refugee children
had to take trains and buses from Wenzenbach to get to school,
arguing that it was too much to ask of kids their age who couldn't
speak German.
A letter
subsequently reached the town hall saying that what the refugee
children needed wasn't a train to school but to a concentration camp.
Germany's domestic intelligence agency, which monitors extremist
activity, has launched an investigation to ascertain if this amounts
to incitement to hatred, and police regularly patrol the area around
the refugee home. "It's not that I'm afraid," says Koch.
"But these expressions of hatred got to me and unnerved me."
Exposure to such
anger on the part of the people, through letters, Tweets, Facebook
postings and physical attacks like the one in Cologne and through the
hateful epithets of the type being volleyed against them in Dresden
is a new experience for most politicians.
Heinz Bude, a
sociology professor at the University of Kassel, describes the Pegida
movement as a "communications-free high-pressure chamber."
"The people who go to Pegida have the feeling their problems are
existential, but they feel there's no one they can turn to. That
reinforces the feeling that politicians aren't facing up to reality."
Based on his surveys, he says the potential for the number of people
who could feel degraded in this way is 25 percent.
From the Margins to
the Mainstream
Groups on the
far-right spectrum discovered long ago the potential of frustrated
people.
For example, the
people behind the German blog Politically Incorrect (PI), founded in
2004, the same year the Dutch film director and Islam critic Theo van
Gogh was murdered, have long pursued their goal of discrediting
people they deem to be "Islam sympathizers" or "do-gooders"
using all means conceivable, an internal missive states.
So it makes perfect
sense that those behind Politically Incorrect have joined forces in
recent years with similar people sharing their views to form a
right-wing network that includes groups like the Bürgerbewegung Pax
Europa (the Pax Europa Citizens' Movement), the German Defense League
and the Bürgerbewegung Pro Deutschland (Pro Germany Citizens'
Movement). Together, they have been trying to push their political
views from the margins into the mainstream, and this is where
Pegida's role comes into play.
Just one example of
the extent with which Politically Incorrect's thought leaders and
followers are working closely together with Pegida is Michael
Stürzenberger. A prominent opinion leader at PI, he's also the
chairman of the far-right extremist party Die Freiheit (The Freedom)
and appears regularly as a speaker at Pegida events.
In the city of
Duisburg in western Germany this summer, he told the crowd how a
young woman had almost been raped by three asylum-seekers in
Miesbach, a small town in his home state of Bavaria. Stüzenberger
said he received news like this every day. "Do you really want
for our women to no longer be able to walk on the streets at night
without worrying?" he shouted into the microphone. "No,"
the crowd chanted back. What Stürzenberger didn't tell his audience,
however, was that police announced shortly after the alleged incident
that the woman had fabricated her story.
Platforms like
Politically Incorrect have long cultivated this form of agitation,
and Pegida is now bringing it into the town squares of Germany's
cities, bringing the virtual and analog worlds together and making
the hatred tangible, audible and physical.
"Pegida is a
grassroots movement," says Jürgen Elsässer, "It's perhaps
the last chance we have left to save our people." Elsässer is a
former teacher and member of the now defunct Communist League in West
Germany, who may have once written for prominent far-left
publications but is now a popular speaker at Pegida events.
Even today, he
continues to lash out at the "imperialism" imposed by the
Americans and calls for "resistance against the international
financial capital and its warmongers in Washington, London and
Jerusalem." Writing on his blog in September, Elsässer called
on the Bundeswehr, Germany's armed forces, to occupy stations along
the German borders in order to stop the flow of refugees. "Fulfill
your oath!" he wrote. "Don't wait for orders from above."
In his magazine Compact, Elsässer currently features an image of
Angela Merkel with the headline, "The Queen of the
People-smugglers."
Elsässer is one of
the people shaping Pegida's political views. He's also illustrative
of how perfidious far-right intellectuals are when it comes to the
issue of violence.
A New Culture of
Hate
On his blog,
Elsässer distanced himself from the attack on the Cologne mayoral
candidate. He also rejects the use of the gallows as a symbol.
"People, let this absolutely misleading nonsense be," he
wrote. At the same time, though, he also posted an interview with the
man who carried the gallows at a recent Pegida march in Dresden on
his magazine's website, providing the man, who does not reveal his
name, with a platform to state that the gallows for Merkel and
Gabriel was intended as "satire." The teaser for the video
states that the "courageous man" is now going tell his
story, which will give you "goose bumps." The idea of
heroification while at the same time feigning distance is one of the
hallmarks of the new culture of hate.
Elsässer is
expected to give another speech in November, this time at the
invitation of the so-called Institute for State Policy, which is
housed in a manor in Schnellroda in the eastern state of
Saxony-Anhalt. The organization's co-founder was Götz Kubitschek,
who studied at university to become a teacher and was forced to leave
his position as a first lieutenant in the Bundeswehr in 2001 after
participating in "right-wing extremist endeavors."
On Oct. 5,
Kubitschek spoke to protesters gathered at Dresden's Neumarkt square,
where he called for civil disobedience and propagated the alleged
right to resist. "It's good that things are starting to
escalate!" he told the audience. The crowd chanted back,
"Re-sis-tance."
Kubitschek enjoys
moments like that because they show him that theory can also be
turned into practice. In small groups of like-minded people, he spent
years mulling what could be learned from the leftists when it comes
to the battle for minds. He invited people in Internet forums to
conceive original and provocative forms of agitation. In one form of
"conservative-subversive action," he and other activists
gatecrashed left-wing events like a 2008 reading by Günter Grass.
'Increasingly
Martial Language'
He discussed which
issues would be well suited for making neo-fascistic ideas palatable
to the masses. And how normal people could be convinced to accept
breaches of the law or misdemeanors in the pursuit of them. How could
the right-wing prevail over the "cultural hegemony?" In
Pegida, Kubitschek has finally found precisely the type of agitation
he had long been searching for.
Experts like
political scientist Armin Pfahl-Traughber of the German government's
Federal University of Applied Administrative Sciences categorize
Kubitschek's movement as right-wing extremist. "With their
writings, they are striving for a recasting of the Conservative
Movement during the Weimar Republic that had positioned itself
clearly against the democratic, constitutional state," says
Pfahl-Traughber. In recent weeks, he says he has also observed
"increasingly martial language" among its leaders and
followers.
Last Sunday, a
friend of the right-wing extremist revolutionary appeared on
Germany's leading talk show. What was most conspicuous about his
appearance on Günther Jauch's show was that, at the very beginning,
he hung a German flag from the right armrest of his chair. The guest,
Björn Höcke, is a former physical education and history teacher at
schools in the western state of Hesse. Now he's the head of the state
chapter of the Alternative for Germany (AFD) party in the eastern
state of Thuringia. Höcke has maintained an interest in the
ideologies of the new right for many years.
Höcke is also
leading protest marches against the "stream of refugees,"
like one that took place on Wednesday in the eastern city of Erfurt.
At the event, Höcke sought to portray himself as a victim of the
"lying press" -- the term being used by the far-right these
days to disparage the media -- the last true patriot standing in a
society that has otherwise been blinded. Höcke said he didn't bring
the flag from the talk show because someone told him he should take
good care of it given that it might wind up exhibited in a history
museum someday. It's exactly the kind of thing he likes to hear. In
his state of megalomania, he apparently already seems to view himself
as the history-making leader of a new movement. It appears that the
AFD party's national leader Frauke Petry is wising up to this as
well. She cancelled her scheduled appearance at the Erfurt
demonstration.
The way in which the
party deals with Höcke is proving to be an acid test for leaders of
AFD, which has grown increasingly populist in tone since its creation
in 2013. AFD's deputy leader Alexander Gauland may view him as a
"legitimate voice in the AFD choir," but Petry would prefer
to neutralize far-right outsider Höcke. "He doesn't speak for
the national party," she recently clarified in a letter to party
members that has also created pressure for her. This letter was not
agreed to by the executive committee and isn't supported by me,"
Gauland says. The truth, he says, is that Höcke "is not a
Nazi."
Petry's desire to
distance the party from the far-right and anchor it firmly in
mainstream society will be very difficult to fulfill so long as
Höcke, AFD's best-known representative, continues with his bluster
about the "thousand-year Reich." Björn Höcke's version of
AFD is precariously close to the organized right-wing extremism of
the neo-Nazis. He even openly admits to having ties to Thorsten
Heise, a leading figure in the National Democratic Party (NPD), which
the German government sought to ban in the past because of its
xenophobic and anti-Semitic positions. Höcke's friend Kubitschek was
keen to join AFD, but the party leadership refused to let him in.
Undeterred, Höcke
continues to consolidate his links with the Pegida movement, saying
he would like to see his party work with it "much more closely"
-- and also with Germany's new far-right intellectuals. Along with
Jürgen Elsässer, Höcke will be speaking at the fall conference in
Schnellroda hosted by Götz Kubitschek in what is expected to be a
summit of the far-right's masterminds.
A Weak Official
Response
Even as the
organized far-right is exploiting public unease about the refugee
crisis and frustrated citizens are venting their anger in hate mails,
the authorities' response has been astonishingly weak. Interior
Minister Thomas de Maizière might describe Pegida's leaders as
"hard-core right-wing extremists" but the domestic
intelligence service he oversees states that it isn't even monitoring
the movement -- so far, it says, there has been insufficient reason
to do so.
Gordian Meyer-Plath,
president of Saxony branch of the Office for the Protection of the
Constitution, also seems reluctant to take on the increasingly
radical movement. "We're not watching it," he says, because
the argument that it is harmless has so far prevailed. Its organizers
distanced themselves from violence, for example. "People held up
pictures of Merkel in an SA uniform at the demonstrations," says
Meyer-Plath. "Real neo-Nazis would never do that." So far,
he maintains, it's a "populist far-right movement rooted in
anger but not a threat to German's freedom and democracy."
"We cannot
label every anti-asylum-seeker protest as being far-right," he
says.
But intelligence
services in other states beg to differ. Pegida movements in Duisburg,
Düsseldorf and Thuringia are officially being watched, with
authorities concluding that the majority of organizers and speakers
belong to the far-right scene.
The authorities were
even stymied by the blog Politically Incorrect, deciding that
although it propagates anti-Islamic and often racist propaganda, "it
does not use typical far-right argumentation" -- as the
authorities put it in response to an inquiry from the Left Party. The
authors of the blog have so far managed to out-manoeuver the
authorities by using two simple tricks. Firstly, its stance is
overtly pro-American and pro-Israeli, which appears to confuse the
German bureaucrats, who assume that to be a neo-Nazi is to be
anti-Semitic. Secondly, the most egregious expressions of vitriol
appear in the comments, for which the blog's authors cannot be held
responsible.
In 2013, the
Bavarian intelligence service became the first to start observing PI,
a move prompted by the blog's industrious Munich chapter, headed up
by the rabidly anti-Islamic Michael Stürzenberger, a frequent
speaker at Pegida rallies.
Death Threats, Every
Week
The authorities were
completely unprepared for the knife attack on Henriette Reker, even
though the 44-year-old suspect Frank S., an unemployed painter and
decorator from Cologne, had long been a neo-Nazi sympathizer and
first become active in the far-right scene in Bonn at the age of 18.
In 1993, he was sighted at a memorial march for leading Nazi Rudolf
Hess in Fulda; and, in 1994, he was involved in aborted plans for a
similar march in Luxembourg to mark the anniversary of Hess' death.
He also appears in
domestic intelligence files as one of government informant Norbert
W.'s assets. Norbert W. was regional manager of the Free German
Workers' Party (FAP), a neo-Nazi political association outlawed by
the Constitutional Court in 1995.
In 1995, Frank S.
began to attract attention with a series of violent outbreaks. He
beat up a man wearing red shoelaces because he thought he was an
anti-fascist activist. He threw a beer bottle during a fight in a
disco. By 1998, he had twice been convicted of causing bodily harm
and once of extortion. He spent several years behind bars.
But in 2000,
intelligence services lost track of him. He briefly returned to the
radar in North Rhine-Westphalia in 2008 when he appeared to look into
joining the NPD. After that, however, he dropped completely out of
sight. The intelligence services were unaware that he contemplated
suicide three months ago -- as he revealed after his attack on Reker.
Nor were they aware of his meticulous planning ahead of it.
The domestic
intelligence services' fight to stop spiraling aggression is one
thing. Society and politics' answer to the public hatred, anger and
frustration is another. Is it still possible to have a conversation
with people who send politicians hate mail and death threats? Justice
Minister Heiko Maas doesn't think so. His Facebook page regularly
overflows with abuse. He was one of the first leading German
politicians to deem Pegida a German disgrace. Now trolls -- who even
give their names -- leave messages for him on Facebook such as
"Heiko, your time's soon up" and "shut your face or
I'm coming for you!" The Justice Ministry passes on a handful of
death threats to the Federal Criminal Police Office every week.
'A Form of
Terrorism'
Maas sees it as his
duty to get tough. "We've reached a point where certain things
need to be spelled out," he says. He proposes that anyone
participating in a demonstration should be made to account for the
aims and the organizers of the rally. "It's too easy for people
to just go along with it," he says.
SPD General
Secretary Yasmin Fahimi has also had enough of the far-right talk of
recent months. "It is not the job of politicians to counsel
these people," she says. "We're talking about rabble
rousers and firebrands who are issuing death threats. They've turned
away from the Constitution and towards extremism." She points
out that they are also the sort of extremists who accept authority
and that it therefore makes sense to show them "the strong arm
of the law." This, she argues, requires police, public
prosecutors and courts to play their part. She would also like to see
associations and employers reacting to rabble rousers and anyone who
expresses xenophobic opinions by withdrawing membership, warning them
and potentially firing them.
Psychologist Andreas
Zick also urges politicians to take a tougher line on far-right
populists. "We need to see racist violence in Germany for what
it is," he says. "A form of terrorism."
By Melanie Amann,
Markus Deggerich, Jörg Diehl, Hubert Gude, Horand Knaup, Martin
Knobbe, Conny Neumann, Maximilian Popp, Jörg Schindler, Barbara
Schmid, Fidelius Schmid and Andreas Wassermann
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