The Specter of Nazism Is Haunting Germany

 

Opinion

Guest Essay

The Specter of Nazism Is Haunting Germany

 

Aug. 29, 2024, 1:00 a.m. ET

By Peter Kuras

Mr. Kuras is a writer and translator who covers German culture and politics. He wrote from Berlin.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/29/opinion/germany-afd-elections.html

 

Since it became clear that the far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, will emerge as a dominant force in eastern Germany’s politics after regional elections this September, I’ve been unable to get a photograph out of my mind.

 

The picture was taken in 1992, during a four-day pogrom in eastern Germany’s port city of Rostock. An estimated 400 right-wing extremists attacked the local immigration center and a housing complex that was home to much of the city’s small Vietnamese community, while a large crowd kept police officers and firefighters at bay. The picture shows a man named Harald Ewert. He’s wearing a German football jersey and a pair of jogging pants. His eyes are glassy and wild. His right arm is stretched out in the Nazi salute.

 

It’s one of the most iconic photos in contemporary German history, one that captures a period of intense social division and violence. It calls out with special resonance now. Bjorn Höcke, the AfD’s leader in Thuringia, where elections will be held this Sunday, has been convicted twice for his use of Nazi slogans. Between Mr. Ewert, who died in 2006 at the age of 52, and Mr. Höcke, there’s a clear line — proof that the specter of Nazism continues to haunt Germany.

 

Yet in many ways, the photo is misleading. The rioters who committed acts of violence that day, as the cultural critic Diedrich Diedrichsen wrote, didn’t look like neo-Nazis. Neither did the politicians who used attacks against minorities as a pretext to tighten asylum restrictions. As the far right comes ever closer to power, it’s plain that the focus on its traditional symbols — its slogans and salutes — has proved unsuccessful. By obsessing over images and signs, Germany has missed more dangerous developments beneath the surface.

 

In truth, there isn’t much difference between the AfD and the other right-wing populist parties that have spread across Europe in recent years. Like Law and Justice in Poland, Fidesz in Hungary and Golden Dawn in Greece, the AfD relies on a toxic combination of xenophobia, militarism and nostalgia to win votes. But this is Germany, the last country anyone wants to make great again.

 

Germany’s other political parties, unable to agree on much over the past few years, have accepted that you can’t let a party that flirts with fascism come to power and ensured the AfD’s isolation. In a country less attuned to the possibility of a fascist takeover, the party — with its disciplined organization and skilled use of the media — would almost certainly have amassed substantial political power over the past decade. Even now, the amount of concrete political power the AfD stands to gain next month is unclear. A shift of a few percentage points in the results could well make the difference between another coalition of established centrist parties and a state government led by far-right extremists.

 

Even if the AfD can form a coalition government somewhere in the east of the country, where all three of next month’s elections — in Saxony and Brandenburg, in addition to Thuringia — are taking place, it may not be able to rule. The German Constitution includes provisions that allow the federal government to depose a regional government that intends to undermine democratic norms. While the law is unclear, it seems inevitable that an AfD government would create some form of constitutional crisis.

 

To take one problem of many: Could federal police or intelligence services continue to share information with their regional counterparts under an AfD government? Germany’s Office for the Protection of the Constitution, a powerful domestic intelligence service, has identified the AfD in Saxony and Thuringia as right-wing extremist organizations. Sharing information with extremist organizations is a serious crime. On the other hand, there are legal obligations to share information among law enforcement agencies.

 

It’s hard to imagine that Germany would find a good way out of this bind. How can security services combat the threat of right-wing terrorism — far and away the predominant form of political violence in Germany today — if their bosses are right-wing extremists? Can a country discard the results of a democratic election in the name of preserving democracy? If the AfD takes power and the political establishment decides not to intervene, we will have an answer of sorts. It will also show that the commitment to stopping the far right was less steadfast than it appeared — that opposition to it was a matter more of image than of substance.

 

Political symbols are important, but there’s a real problem when they come to substitute for political content. It’s good to recognize that the Nazi salute and the swastika are evil. But sometimes it feels as though Germany’s sensitivity to political symbols helps Germans to forget rather than remember what their ancestors did. This has become especially clear since Oct. 7, when Germany’s concern with combating antisemitism often appeared to take the form of surprising calls for state violence against immigrants.

 

Though the firewall that has prevented the AfD from taking significant political power has held — at least for now — the party’s ideas and electoral tactics have quietly gone mainstream. Who needs the AfD when Chancellor Olaf Scholz is willing to call for deportations “on a grand scale” on the cover of Der Spiegel or when the Green Party leader Robert Habeck is happy to traffic in fear and xenophobia? In the aftermath of last week’s terrorist attack in the western city of Solingen, in which three people were killed, politicians of all stripes have predictably pushed for more deportations and tighter restrictions on migration.

 

The fact that Mr. Höcke used Nazi slogans at his rallies is important and demands a response from the country’s political class. But all too often, Germany has focused on the symbols of Nazi injustice while ignoring or even condoning the continuation of the brutality they represent. In practice, that has meant the far-right penetration of the security services, the laundering of extreme ideas in the media and the willingness of other political parties to adopt racialized fearmongering as an electoral tactic. While the AfD has been kept from power, the kind of hateful language that built its support has become a significant part of German political life.

 

Mr. Ewart’s fate is instructive. Although he never committed any acts of violence, he was one of the first people to face charges after the pogroms in Rostock — in part because of the notoriety conferred on him by the photo. He was fined 300 marks for showing the Nazi salute, more than half of his monthly welfare check. A vast majority of the perpetrators were never charged. And the worst of the damage was done soon after, when a coalition of centrist political parties curtailed the right to seek asylum in Germany. Many of those targeted by racists in Rostock were later deported or left the country.

 

In this way, it was an exemplary case of image triumphing over substance, in which the obvious awfulness of the photo could be castigated while the forces underpinning it — and the severe political response it gave rise to — could be safely ignored. This maneuver, sanitizing the past by selectively rebuking it, has held Germany in fairly good stead until now. But as September’s elections will make plain, the demons of both past and present cannot be denied.

 

Peter Kuras is a writer and translator based in Berlin. He has written about German politics and culture for The Economist, The Times Literary Supplement and The Guardian.