The long
read
The trial
of Björn Höcke, the ‘real boss’ of Germany’s far right
As leader of
the AfD’s most radical faction, he is infamous in Germany and his critics have
long accused him of using language that echoes the Nazis. This year, a court
put that question to the test
By Alex
Dziadosz
Thu 29 Aug
2024 06.00 CEST
Björn Höcke,
a former history teacher who has become arguably Germany’s most successful
far-right politician since the second world war, has the sort of piercing,
deep-set eyes that, depending on your perspective, can either give you the
impression that he is wrestling with weighty matters of life and fate, or
thinking up elaborate ways to kill you – a philosopher-statesman’s eyes, or, as
the comedian John Oliver recently called them, “Nazi eyes.”
Höcke, 52,
is not like other figures in German politics. In a country where politicians
often deploy dullness as a prophylactic against charges of demagoguery, Höcke
gleefully takes a different tack. In his speeches, he thunders against a
familiar cast of the far-right’s villains – immigrants, Islamists, European
Union bureaucrats – but he also veers into an anecdotal, lachrymose style so
distinctive that even one of Höcke’s closest colleagues told me he used to find
it “strange”. His rhetoric of decline and redemption – he has told Germans they
must choose between being sheep or wolves, and urged them to be the latter –
has garnered comparisons to Joseph Goebbels, whose speeches many political
analysts assume he has studied. To his critics, Höcke is one of the gravest
threats to Germany’s postwar democracy since it was established. More than any
other person, he is responsible for the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD)
party’s metamorphosis from a Eurosceptic, economically liberal movement into a
nativist, anti-Islam, climate-denialist party. In 2020, Thomas Haldenwang, the
head of Germany’s domestic intelligence service, was asked whether Höcke was a
rightwing extremist. “Björn Höcke is the rightwing extremist,” he replied.
In the late
2010s, when I was living in Thuringia, the central German state where Höcke
heads the AfD, I heard his name come up all the time. But I didn’t really
understand why so many people were worked up about him until one day in May
2019, when I went to see him for myself. State elections were approaching and
Höcke was due to address a rally in Apolda, a once-prosperous industrial town
about a half-hour drive from the Buchenwald concentration camp memorial. Like
many towns in former East Germany, Apolda bears the scars of war, deportations
and communism’s collapse. Listless at the best of times, in the rainy weather
the streets seemed as if they’d been emptied by a plague. In the old town
square, a couple of dozen AfD supporters stood huddled by a food truck, smoking
cigarettes and eating sausage. An ageing keyboard duo called Easy Tandem sang
Love Is in the Air in heavy accents, occasionally muddied by the jeers of
anti-fascist protesters.
Over the
previous few years, Höcke had been busy. In April 2013, the same month the AfD
was founded, he set up the party’s Thuringia branch and quickly positioned
himself as head of a loose confederation known as The Wing. Defining itself as
a “resistance movement against the further erosion of German identity”, The
Wing leveraged its numbers to push the AfD far to the right. Many members also
seemed eager to downplay Germany’s Nazi past. By the time I saw him in person,
Höcke had weathered two attempts to expel him from the AfD, most recently over
a speech in which he had decried German self-flagellation over the Nazi era.
“We Germans are the only people in the world that have planted a monument of
shame in the heart of their capital,” he said, referring to Berlin’s Memorial
to the Murdered Jews of Europe. Both attempts to expel Höcke were spearheaded
by AfD leaders who saw his radicalism as a liability; both times, those leaders
ended up leaving the party instead.
As the band
broke into Gimme Hope Jo’anna, the anti-apartheid song written by Eddy Grant –
something of a surprise choice – a black sedan pulled up, and Höcke emerged,
dressed in a beige raincoat, white button-up shirt, blazer and jeans. In the
lashing wind, the grey coif of his hair betrayed the faintest of ruffles. For
several minutes, Höcke slapped hands and posed for photos, and then leaped on
to the stage. “The coldest May in 140 years,” he said. Then, with a comedian’s
timing: “Strong evidence of man-made climate change.” The crowd laughed; Höcke
beamed. If their numbers disappointed him, he offered no sign – he bubbled with
the energy of a man addressing a roaring stadium. “Thank you for coming out,”
he said. “Maybe you’ve managed to have a couple of beers, and a couple of good
conversations, and made one or two new friends. That’s the point of this event:
you are not alone.”
Over the
next hour, I watched as, without notes, Höcke offered figure after figure to
corroborate his audience’s vague suspicion that they were getting screwed:
4,000 EU bureaucrats earning salaries of more than €290,000 (“more than the
German chancellor!”); €60m wasted in Thuringia each year paying inflated
benefits to refugees who fake their ages. “Who gives, and who takes? We
Germans, we always give,” Höcke told the crowd.
A few months
later, Thuringia delivered him an unambiguous vindication. The AfD took nearly
a quarter of votes, outpacing the centre-right CDU and nearly tripling the
share of the centre-left Social Democrats. Far from consigning the AfD to the
wilderness, Höcke had brought the party closer to real power than anywhere else
in the country.
Five years
on, voices critical of Höcke within the AfD – once common in German media –
have dissipated. A few months after the 2022 party conference, where Höcke
embarrassed the party’s co-leaders, Tino Chrupalla and Alice Weidel, by
sponsoring a resolution to dissolve the EU, Der Spiegel declared him the “real
boss” of the AfD. Under Höcke’s influence, the party regularly polls as the
country’s second-most popular, far ahead of any parties in Chancellor Olaf
Scholz’s centre-left coalition. The AfD has won a district government in
Thuringia and a municipal government in neighbouring Saxony. On 1 September,
elections in those two states and later in the month in Brandenburg, also in
the east, could make the AfD the largest party in one or more state parliaments.
For years,
Höcke’s critics have insisted he represents something much darker than a
nationalist strain of conservatism. As evidence of what they see as far more
radical convictions, they point to phrases, peppered throughout his speeches,
in which Höcke has appeared to echo language of the Third Reich. In 2016,
Andreas Kemper, a German sociologist and author, claimed to have identified
more than a dozen such instances. These included calls for Germany to have a
“thousand-year future” and references to internal AfD rivals as “degenerate”.
Both terms are commonplace in German, but critics argue they have a different
resonance when uttered by a senior figure in a party enthusiastically backed by
neo-Nazis. Other examples, such as his reference to a political opponent as a
“Volksverderber” (“corrupter of the people”, used by Hitler in Mein Kampf) or
calling his movement the “Tat-Elite” (“action-elite”, used by the SS to
describe itself), are more unusual, and harder to explain away. (Höcke did not
respond to repeated requests for comment, but Torben Braga, an AfD politician
who has worked with him closely, told me that the criticisms were evidence of a
“pathological” obsession with tarring every rightwing conservative as a Nazi.
“I don’t know anyone, not even the federal president or the federal chancellor,
whose every speech is subjected to such deep analysis,” he said.)
In Germany,
using Nazi slogans is not just distasteful, it is criminal. But nothing Höcke
said had ever strayed into prosecutable territory, until May 2021. That month,
a Green politician in Saxony-Anhalt noticed that Höcke had ended one of his
speeches by saying, “Everything for our homeland, everything for Saxony-Anhalt,
everything for Germany.” Innocuous taken at face value, but the last phrase was
a slogan used by the Nazi SA paramilitary unit, and carved into its service
daggers. The politician brought a criminal complaint, and the public prosecutor
filed charges. Höcke, who denied knowing the phrase’s origins, faced up to
three years in prison.
Earlier this
year, ahead of the trial, Höcke declared on X that, “Once again, Germany is at
the forefront of persecuting political opponents and suppressing free speech.”
When Elon Musk, who had stumbled on the post, asked why using the phrase would
be illegal, Höcke responded: “Because every patriot in Germany is defamed as a
Nazi.” The criminal code contained provisions “not found in any other
democracy”. The point, he said, was “to prevent Germany from finding itself
again.”
One morning
this April, I headed to Halle, the capital of Saxony-Anhalt, for the first day
of Höcke’s trial. The case would concern whether he had violated Paragraph 86a
of Germany’s criminal code. The law, adopted after the second world war,
outlaws the “use of symbols of unconstitutional and terrorist organisations”,
which courts have interpreted to apply to a range of Nazi and neo-Nazi imagery
and mottoes.
The trial
was held in a modernist complex built on the site of an old East German car
factory. About 200 protesters were outside when I arrived, chanting and holding
signs reading “Stop the AfD” and “Björn Höcke is a Nazi”. Inside, the building
was drab: smudged tile floors, fluorescent lighting, walls plastered with
auction notices for foreclosed homes. Höcke’s name appeared on a list of
upcoming cases among instances of theft and cannabis dealing.
I was
whisked, along with a substantial share of Germany’s press corps, through a
metal detector, past a bomb-sniffing dog, and into a chamber of foam-board
panels and linoleum so reminiscent of a suburban office that I half expected to
spot a cubicle and a photocopier in the corner. A minute later, the line of
photographers at the front were jolted into action as Höcke entered. His
expression was grave. Three lawyers flanked him. A stack of history books was
tucked under one arm.
The cameras
had just a few minutes to capture the images that would fill the evening news.
As with most criminal trials in Germany, photos and recordings were forbidden.
The crews were ushered out, and two judges in black robes entered, alongside
two lay judges in everyday clothes. (In Germany, volunteer judges perform the
function of juries.) The presiding judge, Jan Stengel, had the weary manner of
a man who has spent his professional life dealing with difficult people.
I had been
warned that the first session would probably be dry, technical and short. But
Höcke’s defence team had different plans. Before the prosecutors could read out
the charges, one of Höcke’s lawyers asked that the proceedings be taped – a
striking request in a country where recordings are almost never allowed. “The
purpose is to ensure that the defendant receives a fair trial,” the lawyer
said. As a maligned public figure, Höcke faced the risk of “meaning-distorting
truncations” by hostile media.
The judge
took the motion in stride, but after a recess, it was rejected. Prosecutor
Benedikt Bernzen, a towering, bearded man in his early 40s, stood to address
the court. “The defendant, Mr Björn Höcke – ”
“Stop!”
cried a lawyer for the defence.
Most of the
journalists were familiar with the stout, bald man who had interrupted. Ulrich
Vosgerau had made the news a few months earlier when he had joined a meeting in
Potsdam between senior AfD officials and a far-right Austrian activist to
discuss the “remigration” – a euphemism for mass deportation – of migrants and
naturalised Germans. News of the meeting sparked nationwide protests, but left
the AfD’s polling figures largely intact.
Vosgerau
proceeded to reel off a list of complaints, including a demand that the case be
relocated to Merseburg, where Höcke’s speech took place, even though that
request had already been denied by a higher court. He also asked to end the
session early so he could make another appointment.
When Bernzen
spoke again, he made no effort to conceal his annoyance. “In all my
professional years, I’ve never been interrupted during an indictment,” he said.
“You stepped over my words,” he told Vosgerau. “That is outrageous.”
The AfD is
often portrayed as a bull in the china shop of German democracy, flouting norms
and decorum in an attempt to undermine institutions of state. When, after five
recesses and multiple rejected motions, the hearing finally concluded, it
seemed clear that Höcke’s team were not afraid to be seen in the same light. By
the time I got back to Berlin, headlines across the country were declaring:
“Grotesque appearance in Halle: How Björn Höcke tried to slow down his trial”
and “Höcke in court: Bizarre and disturbing.”
It is in
East Germany that Höcke has built his base. His success comes from his ability
to articulate the frustrations and anxieties widely felt in a region where
faith in institutions has been shaken by the loss of jobs and pensions, the
implosion of an ideological system once portrayed as incontestable, and
perceived discrimination at the hands of an arrogant west. Above all, Höcke has
channelled these resentments towards migrants and asylum seekers, whom he
portrays as free-riders soaking up taxpayer money. But he himself is a child of
west Germany, and he was born, ironically enough, to a family of refugees.
Before the
defeat of the Nazis, Germany’s borders stretched as far east as modern
Lithuania. In the war’s final convulsions, the advancing Red Army expelled
millions of Germans from the country’s eastern provinces, which were soon made
part of Poland. Integrating the Vertriebene, or “expellees”, was among postwar
Germany’s most severe challenges. They struggled to find housing in bombed-out
cities. Food and jobs were always scarce. Their dialects, though intelligible,
fell oddly on west German ears. “They didn’t have a different skin colour and
they didn’t come from a different country, but ultimately they were just as
much refugees,” says Karsten Polke-Majewski, who went to high school with Höcke
and later researched him for the weekly newspaper, Die Zeit.
Höcke’s
grandparents, who had lived in a hamlet in the former province of East Prussia,
were among them. They eventually settled outside Neuwied, a town of about
30,000 people about 60 miles from the border with Belgium. Growing up in West
Germany, Höcke would lie in bed beside his grandparents as they told him
stories from their lost “homeland”. The images left a deep impression. “They
presented it so vividly that I could really feel it,” Höcke said in a 2015
interview. “It certainly nourished a lasting political interest.”
German media
has found evidence Höcke may have been exposed to more radical views. According
to Die Zeit, Höcke’s father’s name appeared on the subscriber list for Die
Bauernschaft, a newspaper published through the 1970s and 80s by Thies
Christophersen, a prominent Holocaust denier. Höcke’s father also signed a
petition in solidarity with a Christian Democrat kicked out of the party for
suspected antisemitism in 2004. Polke-Majewski told me that his interviews with
neighbours, acquaintances and town notables led him to believe the family
remained fairly isolated in Neuwied.
After
studying history and athletics at university, Höcke took a job teaching at the
Martin Buber school in a small town south of Frankfurt. Housed in what Höcke
called an “unsightly 70s-era concrete building”, the school, named after the
Jewish philosopher and theologian, didn’t always have a shining reputation. One
of Höcke’s former students, André Alexander Kiefer, told me that knives and
drugs were common. Many students were from migrant families, and small “gangs”
often formed along ethnic lines. White Germans turned to metal or far-right
rock scenes. “You always had both sides of violent people in that city,” Kiefer
told me.
Höcke
started his job in 2001, when the hard-right was still on the political
margins. At 29, with blond hair and an athletic build, he struck an energetic
contrast to his older colleagues. But students soon discovered a conservative
streak. “The students – many with a migrant background – were not receptive to
my educational concerns, including the transmission of German and European
cultural traditions,” he said in his book, Never Twice in the Same River,
published in the form of an interview with the rightwing journalist Sebastian
Hennig. Though he said he stayed on good terms with most students “regardless
of their social or ethnic background”, he looked sceptically upon colleagues
who “dreamed the dream of a multicultural society and sang the high song of
so-called ‘diversity’”.
In the book,
Höcke tells the story of how, one summer, students started wearing T-shirts
with the names of countries printed on them. “Turkey”, “Russia”, and “Italy”
shirts were everywhere. Then one morning, a girl showed up in Höcke’s gym class
wearing a “Germany” shirt. “The Turkish and African boys were beside
themselves,” claimed Höcke. “These otherwise divided Turks and Africans
spontaneously agreed in their aggressive rejection of ‘Germanness’.” The next
day, Höcke showed up in his own “Germany” shirt, which, to his delight,
inspired a couple students to do the same.
What Höcke
took from his experience was that “humans need a great deal of trust in our
everyday interactions, and this is only possible if we can rely on a familiar,
safe environment and established customs”. Here was the “great mistake of the
multiculturalists”. They didn’t actually take cultures seriously, and instead
tried to reduce them to “a bit of exotic folklore and varied gastronomy”. Chaos
inevitably followed. “As nice and cosmopolitan as they may seem, at their core,
multicultural entities are societies of pure mistrust,” Höcke said. “They
automatically create countless frictions and conflicts – even without any bad
intentions on the part of the people involved. And that is sold to us as a
sunny future.”
This message
was one he would repeat regularly, with varying degrees of virulence, during
his swift rise from obscurity to the heart of German politics.
In 2008,
when Höcke was 36, he moved to Bornhagen, a town in Thuringia. At the time, he
was teaching at a school a 20-minute drive away, across the old east-west
border, in the central state of Hesse. His commute traversed one of the
sharpest divides in German society: Thuringia had Germany’s second-lowest gross
regional product per capita; Hesse, its third highest. Hesse’s largest city,
Frankfurt, is known as a financial hub, home to Germany’s Bundesbank and the
European Central Bank. Thuringia, by contrast, would soon be known for the
National Socialist Underground, a terrorist group that murdered nine immigrants
and a police officer during the first part of the decade.
In the years
before his move to Thuringia, there is almost no public record of Höcke’s
political views, but in 2018, Die Zeit uncovered compelling evidence that he
was in contact with far-right circles during this period. The newspaper
reported that Höcke was assisted in his move to Bornhagen by Thorsten Heise, an
activist in the neo-Nazi National Democratic party (NDP). Neighbours told the
paper that Heise, who lived nearby, visited Höcke regularly. More damningly, a
video surfaced showing Höcke chanting during a neo-Nazi march in Dresden on the
anniversary of the city’s bombing in 2010. (Braga, the AfD politician, told
German media that Höcke had merely gone to get an “impression” of the event.)
Kemper, the
sociologist, has alleged that Höcke went further, by authoring several articles
in publications run by Heise under the name “Landolf Ladig”. The articles,
published in 2011 and 2012, argued that the world wars were started by foreign
powers jealous of German “industry” and praised NDP economic policies aimed at
“overcoming inhumane global capitalism” and encouraging the births of more
“German children”. Some of the language in these articles was strikingly
similar to phrases that later appeared in Höcke’s speeches, including
particular descriptions of Bornhagen and the recommendation of a book that both
“Ladig” and Höcke referred to by the same wrong name. In 2019, Germany’s
domestic intelligence agency said it was “almost indisputable” that Höcke wrote
the articles. (Höcke has denied this, but has not taken legal action against
Kemper over the claim.)
If there was
once a time when Höcke needed underground outlets to express his views, that
changed in 2013 with the establishment of the AfD. Founded in response to the
eurozone debt crisis, the party took its name from former Chancellor Angela
Merkel’s assertion that there was “no alternative” to bailouts for southern
Europe. Höcke set up the party’s Thuringian branch and won office in state
elections in autumn 2014. In March the following year, he burst into national
consciousness when he co-authored the “Erfurt declaration”, which decried the
AfD’s direction under its co-founder, Bernd Lucke, and laid the foundations for
what would become The Wing.
Höcke’s
activism did not endear him to the more moderate members of the AfD, which was
roughly split between economic liberals and those of a more nationalist bent.
In May 2015, Lucke tried to have Höcke booted from the party after Höcke told
journalists that he didn’t “assume that every single member of the NPD” – the
neo-Nazi party to which Heise belonged – “can be classified as extremist”. At
the party congress in July, however, Lucke was voted out in favour of a new
leader, the hardliner Frauke Petry, and the proceedings against Höcke were soon
dropped. (When I contacted Lucke, he told me he had spoken about Höcke enough
and had “better things to do than constantly repeat himself”.)
The
experience did not push Höcke to soften his tone. In November 2015, he appeared
at an event hosted by a thinktank run by Götz Kubitschek, a prominent rightwing
publisher and intellectual. In his speech, Höcke outlined what he called the
different “reproductive strategies” of Africans and Europeans. While Africans
“aimed at achieving the highest possible growth rate” and migrating to other
regions, Europeans did pretty much the opposite, having fewer babies and making
“optimal use” of their environment. The collision of these two “strategies”
necessitated “a fundamental reassessment of the direction of Germany’s asylum
and immigration policy”. A little over a year later, in Dresden’s historic
Watzke ballroom, he delivered what would become his most infamous speech.
Dismissing Germany’s policy of Holocaust remembrance as a “stupid coping
mechanism”, he claimed Germans possessed “the mentality of a totally vanquished
people”. He called for a “180-degree turn in the politics of remembrance”, in
favour of an approach that “brings us into contact with the great achievements
of those who came before us”.
The Dresden
speech prompted a second attempt to boot Höcke out of the AfD, this time led by
his erstwhile ally, Frauke Petry, who called him a “burden on the party”. The
party’s federal board declared that he had an “excessive proximity to National
Socialism”. Despite the heavier guns brought to bear, Höcke was spared
expulsion once again. In May 2018, after more than a year of internal party
wrangling, the arbitration board of the AfD’s Thuringia branch rejected the
federal party’s request to start the process of removing Höcke. By then, Petry,
like Lucke before her, had left the AfD.
The episode
bolstered Höcke’s growing reputation as the real power behind Thuringia’s AfD.
Madeleine Henfling, a Green politician and vice-president of Thuringia’s
parliament, told me that Höcke appeared to exert tight control over the local
branch of his party. “Dissenters either quickly resign or are made to leave,”
she told me. She pointed to a recent dispute between Höcke and a local AfD
lawmaker, Karlheinz Frosch, over a candidate list for district elections.
Displeased with Frosch, Höcke drew up a separate list, called the Alternative
for the District, to run against him. Frosch left the AfD soon after,
complaining that: “For the rightwing extremist part of the party, Höcke is like
a Godfather.” (When I met Braga, the AfD politician close to Höcke, he
dismissed these characterisations as way off the mark. “A boss, a chairman, is
sometimes someone who might hit the table and say, ‘No, we’re going to do it
the way I think it’s right and the discussion is over.’ Mr Höcke is not such a
leader. He leads by moderating and connecting,” he told me.)
In March
2020, a few months after the AfD’s strong performance in Thuringia’s state
elections, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency said it was placing The Wing
under surveillance. The decision, unprecedented in the country’s modern
history, was justified in a 436-page report, which referred to Höcke more than
600 times. In another setback for the AfD, the Covid-19 pandemic initially led
Germans to rally around Chancellor Merkel. In the general election of 2021, the
AfD lost 11 seats. Olaf Scholz, a Social Democrat, led a centre-left coalition
with the Greens and market-liberal Free Democrats into power.
But this ebb
in the AfD’s fortunes proved temporary. As the pandemic wore on, more Germans
became receptive to conspiratorial views. (Höcke suggested the pandemic had
been “staged” to prepare the way for “a new surveillance state”.) Scholz’s
coalition fell into infighting and plummeting approval over policies from
installations of climate-friendly heat pumps to its handling of inflation and
the war in Ukraine. In September 2023, Thuringia was back in the headlines when
the local CDU voted in tandem with the AfD, this time to lower property taxes.
This was not the first time that the centre-right had broken the “firewall” –
the principle that no mainstream party would ever lend legitimacy to the far
right by co-operating with them. But this time, the backlash was relatively
muted. “The ‘firewall’ is history – and Thuringia is just the beginning,”
Weidel, the AfD’s national chief, wrote on X after the vote.
By the time
of Höcke’s trial in May 2024, with four months to go before state elections,
the AfD’s polling lead in Thuringia appeared unassailable. The CDU, perhaps
mindful that they had been criticised for helping the far-right exercise power,
decided to stage a televised debate between their state leader, Mario Voigt,
and Höcke. Though heavily publicised, and featuring several sharp attacks on
Höcke – who, at one point, professed not to remember a passage from his own
book – the confrontation did not change the AfD’s popularity at state level.
In Madeleine
Henfling’s view, the effort was misguided from the start. “I always say that
talking to the AfD is like playing chess with a pigeon. At some point they will
shit on your chessboard and knock over all the pieces,” she told me. “People
always believe that fascists, that Nazis, are stupid. That’s total bullshit, of
course. They have an ideology and they know exactly how to get their ideology
into society. They have strategies for it.”
On the
trial’s second day, the purpose of the history books Höcke had brought became
clear. Höcke’s defence rested on the argument that he had not known “Everything
for Germany” was a Nazi slogan. In his debate with Voigt, he claimed he’d been
riffing on Donald Trump’s “America First”, which he’d combined with the title
of the local AfD branch’s election manifesto – “Everything for our homeland” –
to achieve an “ascending rhetorical cascade”. The books, which he’d used as a
history teacher, showed why it was silly to think he should have known better:
not one mentioned the slogan. “The history teacher is not a polymath,” Höcke
said. He could not know every single thing that had occurred in the past. “You
are a criminal lawyer,” he said, addressing the prosecutor. “What knowledge do
you have of patent law?”
Höcke’s
defence evoked a quandary at the heart of Germany’s militant approach to
defending its postwar liberal order: where to draw the line? Many phrases, such
as “Heil Hitler”, obviously fall under the scope of Paragraph 86a. Others, such
as “Führer”, a common term applied to bus drivers and tour guides, and
“Lebensraum”, which is widely used in ecology, do not. (One of the stranger
aspects of learning German as an adult can be undoing your old associations
with these terms.) Playing in the ambiguous space between these two extremes is
something of a pastime for Germany’s far-right. The numbers “18” and “88” –
corresponding to the letters of the alphabet, with 18 meaning “AH”, for “Adolf
Hitler”, and 88 meaning “HH”, for “Heil Hitler” – are often used in neo-Nazi
circles, and have been upheld by courts as legal, for instance. I’ve reported
on neo-Nazi concerts where attenders wore shirts with phrases such as “12
Golden Years”, without specifying which years, and “Adolf and Eva”, without
surnames attached.
In a 2019
essay, Götz Kubitschek, the rightwing publisher and intellectual, argued that
rightwing movements should “provocatively push forward into the border areas of
what is just about sayable and doable” to create linguistic “bridgeheads”. They
could then pursue a tactic of “interlocking”, whereby one would “advance,
capture a few positions, and create an unclear situation” to prevent “enemy
artillery” from firing. Linguistically, this meant “quoting and referring to
speakers from the establishment who have said the same thing before, or at
least something similar”. The final step was Selbstverharmlosung – a term
meaning “self-trivialisation” – to “tear down the ‘emotional barrier’” built
and “lovingly maintained” by the old elites against political alternatives.
(Kubitschek did not answer my emails seeking comment.)
It is easy
to suspect that Höcke, a longtime friend of Kubitschek, is playing precisely
this game. Yet proving it is almost impossible. The prosecution in Halle took a
swing at it all the same. Under cross-examination, Höcke was asked about some
of his past statements. His use of words such as “Volksverderber” and
“Tat-Elite” suggested he had “quite detailed historical knowledge of the
vocabulary in the Third Reich”, did it not? Höcke responded that the terms were
also used in the 19th century, for whose “flowery language” he had a soft spot.
Be that as it may, could he really have missed the case of Ulrich Oehme, an AfD
member in Saxony who had been investigated for using “Everything for Germany”
on a campaign poster in 2017? Höcke said he hadn’t learned of the case until
later. Part of the reason might have been that he had consciously avoided
“established media” out of a need for “psychological self-protection”. After
all, his every utterance was picked apart by “hundreds of antifascists”, who
had made an industry of “discrediting and hounding” him. He had, he said, been
made “the devil of the nation”.
During a May
Day address in Hamm, a town in the old industrial heart of Germany’s Ruhr
valley, Höcke took this argument directly to his supporters. He invoked the
spectre of witch trials and the Inquisition, and compared his case to those of
Socrates, Jesus Christ and Julian Assange. “The club of justice is always used
to beat the head of the dissident, the head of the opposition – and now it’s
being used to beat mine.” Near the speech’s conclusion, Höcke said: “Times are
changing, and people are realising that the signs point to a storm.”
The last
phrase, Kemper, the sociologist, was quick to point out, was a headline run by
a prominent Berlin newspaper the day Hitler was named chancellor.
The final
session opened on a bright, cloudless morning in May. The prosecution began by
reiterating their case, calling for a six-month prison sentence, “to make an
impression on the accused and uphold the rule of law”. Then Höcke’s lawyers had
their turn. Over more than two hours, all three spoke. References to
Shakespeare and US supreme court Justice Benjamin Cardozo were made, as were
promises to appeal against any conviction at the European Commission of Human
Rights.
Vosgerau
delivered a point-by-point refutation of the prosecution, which built to a
theoretical crescendo: “The difference between a liberal, constitutional state
and a totalitarian state is not that there are very, very, very strict laws in
a totalitarian state and in a free, constitutional state very lenient laws. The
difference is that, in a totalitarian state, nobody knows exactly what is
punishable. But everyone knows, from experience, that the state can declare
pretty much anything you do to be a criminal offence if it wants to.”
For all
their verve, these were mere opening acts. Given his turn to speak, Höcke shot
up from his chair. The idea that he had used the Nazi slogan deliberately was
“one of those assumptions that is impossible, completely impossible to prove”,
he said. Comparing himself to Joseph K, the protagonist of Franz Kafka’s The
Trial, he said he could have never imagined he would be held to account “for
such a banality, for such a triviality”. His parliamentary immunity had been
removed eight times – not for bribery or corruption or breach of trust, but for
expressing his opinion. “Am I not a human being? In the media, I’m treated as
if I’m not.”
About 10
minutes in, Judge Stengel interrupted. “Mr Höcke,” he said. “Get to the point.
No campaign speeches.”
Höcke
nodded, but he would not be kept from a few more flourishes. “The Nazis also
said ‘Guten Tag’,” Höcke said. “Do you want to ban the German language because
the Nazis also spoke German? At some point, this has to end.”
It was an
argument Höcke and his supporters often deployed – that an unhealthy obsession
with the past had caused the AfD’s critics to see Nazis everywhere. But over
the months I spent reporting this piece, when I pressed Höcke’s critics on
whether they might be overstating their case, they rarely relented. “He’s
playing with things that mean, if he came to power as a chancellor in Germany,
he would have to do very radical things to fulfil his promises to the people,”
Matthias Quent, an expert on far-right extremism, told me.
I was often
reminded that the recent trial was not the first time that Höcke’s own words
were used against him in a legal context. In 2019, a court in Thuringia was
asked to rule on whether it would be libellous to call Höcke a “fascist”. The
court said that it was not, because the view was “not pulled from thin air”,
but stood on a “verifiable, factual basis”.
As evidence,
the judges had cited a passage in Never Twice in the Same River, which comes at
the end of a chapter, apparently signalling that readers are meant to dwell on
its full implications. In it, Höcke forecasts that Germans – “at least those
who still want to be” – may someday need to “return to our rural retreats like
the brave and cheerful Gauls of old”. These might serve as a “fallback position
from which a reconquest will start”. He goes on to say that “our primary
political goal is, of course, to prevent all of these scenarios”, but “the
longer a patient refuses urgent surgery, the harder the necessary cuts will
inevitably be”. A “large-scale remigration project”, built on a “policy of
‘well-tempered cruelty’”, will probably be needed. “This means that human
hardship and unpleasant scenes cannot always be avoided.” He concludes that
“existential crises require extraordinary action”.
In Halle,
the court fell silent as Höcke finished his speech. A final recess was called.
When, an hour later, the court reassembled, Judge Stengel began quickly, almost
anticlimactically, to read out the verdict.
“The court
has to listen to almost everything, but it doesn’t have to believe everything,”
he said. For all their discursions into historical and philosophical nuance,
the defence’s case had stumbled on one salient point: it was “unrealistic” that
Höcke had not known about the other AfD members running into trouble over the
same phrase. Even so, a prison sentence would be “completely excessive”. Höcke
would receive a fine of €13,000. (Höcke’s team would later appeal the sentence,
which a federal court is deliberating.)
Addressing
Höcke, Stengel said: “You are an eloquent, intelligent man, who knows what he
is saying.”
As the
sentence was read, Höcke looked deflated. The hearing was over. There was no
rebuttal allowed.
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