Germany’s Strange New Right Wing Meets Charlie Hebdo
Of all the banners at an anti-immigration, anti-Islam rally in Leipzig on Monday—a day when there were similar marches all across Germany—one that caused a particular stir read “PEGIDA = CHARLIE.” PEGIDA stands for Patriotische Europäer Gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes, or Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West, and its weekly marches, which began in Dresden, in October, have grown larger—some twenty-five thousand people in Dresden, a few thousand in Leipzig. So far, the marchers have tended to be outnumbered by counter-demonstrators who, as the German newsweekly Stern put it, were “particularly outraged” by the group’s attempts to associate itself with Charlie Hebdo, the satirical magazine whose staff was murdered, along with three police officers and four shoppers at a kosher supermarket, by Islamist gunmen in France. Stern called it an act of “mimicry,” one that brought PEGIDA more attention and greater crowds than it had previously attracted. The day before, in France, Marine Le Pen, of the right-wing National Front, had only benefitted when President François Hollande, making similar accusations, had clumsily disinvited her from a national unity march that drew millions. This is a disconcerting time in Europe, with the left and right fighting over who gets to be Charlie Hebdo and what it means to be French, or German, or democratic.
PEGIDA reflects the strangeness of the moment as much as its danger. If the organization existed more than a few months ago, there’s little trace of its presence. Its founding fable is that an ordinary guy named Lutz Bachmann saw supporters of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (P.K.K.) and radical Islamists sympathetic to ISIS fighting openly on the street, decided that something had to be done, and took to Facebook to get what turned out to be a few hundred people together. Bachmann, it emerged, had a substantial criminal record, including convictions for drug dealing and assault, and so other spokespeople stepped forward, including a woman named Kathrin Oertel, who is vague about her professional background but talks passionately about the victimhood of PEGIDA. The leadership is said to consist of about a dozen people; a Spiegelreport found that on closed Facebook pages a number of them had a habit of using derogatory language about minorities (“Developmentally disturbed or half-starved Ramadan Turks”).
This is not the public face that PEGIDA likes to show; it claims that it is the true bearer of German constitutional values, unlike the “red-painted fascists” of the left. Its logo is a stick figure tossing a swastika and the emblems of the P.K.K., ISIS, and the German anti-fascist movement into a garbage can. Its followers overlap with those of the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) and a group with the only-in-Germany name HoGeSa—Hooligans gegen Salafisten (Hooligans against Salafis), a reference to a fundamentalist strain of Islam.* PEGIDA’s leaders profess fondness for nice, fleissig (diligent) immigrants, and Muslims, too. Germany, like other European countries, has had an influx of refugees from Syria, and there are regular calls at PEGIDA and associated rallies not to let “religious or proxy wars” be fought on “German soil.” People in the crowds complain about not hearing German spoken in stores. In Leipzig, PEGIDA is known as LEGIDA; both Leipzig and Dresden are in the former East Germany, as are the homes of ROGIDA (Rostock), BÄRGIDA (Berlin), and SÜGIDA (Suhl). That has led the German press to speak about PEGIDA as a force from the East, and while there is something to that, the picture is complicated by HAGIDA, BAGIDA, BOGIDA, WÜGIDA, KÖGIDA, and KAGIDA (from Hanover, Bavaria, Bonn, Würzberg, Cologne, and Kassel), all in the West.
Just after the New Year, a group of German etymologists pickedLügenpresse—“lying press,” usually uttered in the same tone as “lame-stream media”—as its “anti-word” of the year.
PEGIDA got the credit; Lügenpresseis one of the movement’s favorite terms, along with phrases like “Wir sind das Volk” (“We are the people”), a slogan with a long history in Germany and a strong association with reunification. In her New Year’s address, Chancellor Angela Merkel, without specifically naming PEGIDA, referred to certain unpleasant “demonstrations” and the uses of the Volk slogan, saying, “What they really mean is: you don’t belong to that—because of your skin color or your religion.”
The choice of Monday for the weekly marches is a deliberate echo of the Montagsdemonstrationen that helped bring down the East German regime, in 1989—Merkel, who lived in Leipzig at the time, took part in them, as George Packer recounts in his Profile of her. (Merkel is regularly mocked at PEGIDA rallies, where posters refer to her as “Mutti Multi-Kulti”—“Mommy Multicultural.”) A new PEGIDA video of this week’s march—more professionally produced than previous ones, with shots of a man in a Chicago Bulls cap and of a sign saying “Freedom of Opinion Instead of Salafist Terror”—focusses on a sign that refers to the twenty-fifth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, a few weeks after the first PEGIDA march:
1989: Wir sind das Volk!
2014: Wir sind noch d. Volk
2039: Wir waren das Volk
(Which translates to “We are the people; we’re still the people; we were the people.”)
LEGIDA, according to German press reports, is PEGIDA’s rougher sibling, bothering less to hide its intentions. At the rally in Leipzig, after a speaker shouted at the crowd, “Wir sind das Volk” (there is a video on the group’s Facebook page), he continued, “This cry can be heard as far as France. To be a people means to have a history. … Do you have a history? Do you have an inheritance? Do you have a culture? We are the West!” (Germany most certainly has a history.) Press reports note that there are markedly fewer women at the Leipzig rallies, which is striking given how male the crowds in Dresden were. (A survey of the Dresden crowd, published this week, suggested that the typical participant was a local man with a decent education and a slightly above-average income.) When PEGIDA, in its main talking points, asks for a tightening of Germany’s asylum and immigration laws, it makes a point of saying that all it’s asking for are the same rules that are in effect in Switzerland and Canada. LEGIDA’s manifesto, though, according to Die Zeit, also calls for the end of Germany’s Kriegsschuldkultes—“cult of war guilt.” PEGIDA sometimes brings “foreigners” onstage; “Ed from Utrecht,” a Dutch PEGIDA supporter, is a fixture at rallies. In Leipzig, Ed spoke for several minutes about his love of things German, and then handed the microphone over to Tatjana Festerling, who had long been member of Alternative for Germany. While she spoke, he politely held her sign for her. It was double-sided: the slogan “PEGIDA makes [you] happy” reversed to “Nenn mich Nazi, nenn mich Klobürste. Mir doch egal!”—“Call me Nazi, call me toilet brush. All the same to me!”
PEGIDA is small. The counter-demonstrations, again, have been bigger, and they have been passionate. But there are endless traps here. West Germans might use this as another moment to condescend to the East, as if the movement is only the East’s problem; it is not, and rhetoric like that only contributes to Easterners’ alienation. Spiegel pointed out that Dresden tends to attract neo-Nazis and right-wing nationalists in February, for the anniversary of the 1945 Allied firebombing, and wondered how their presence might play into the PEGIDA moment. The answer, likely, is not helpfully. And yet it is also inadequate to suppose that there is nothing new in Germany—that everything ugly is simply Hitler resurrected, as if from dust in a science-fiction show. Worries about whether Islamophobia is camouflage for German revanchism and anti-Semitism can’t shunt aside the question of what it might mean for a young Muslim German to watch the members of PEGIDA march through the streets. An older woman at the edge of the crowd in Leipzig told a Stern reporter that her sympathies were with LEGIDA,because “Turks insult me, call me a Nazi.” A debate that simply involves one side shouting “Nazi” and the other “ISIS” is not going to end well for Germany, or Europe. A scene in which self-proclaimed hooligans who think that Germany has apologized too often for the Holocaust are drumming up populist rage regarding terrorists who took hostages in a kosher supermarket demands more reflection, and hard thought, than that. There is a free-floating, heat-seeking sort of hate afloat in Europe. It is still polymorphic; the question is what form it will take next..
Comments