Fa & Antifa in the Fatherland
On the eve of Germany’s parliamentary elections anti-immigrant fever burns bright and the nation is undergoing a politically explosive identity crisis.
The Nation October 5, 1998
by Leonard Zeskind
When the state parliament of Saxony-Anhalt in what used to be East Germany officially convened in May, the oldest member, Rudi Wiechmann, opened the session saying, "I would like to paraphrase Rosa Luxemburg: Freedom is always the freedom of the different-thinking individual."
Luxemburg is still an icon to many in eastern Germany, and almost eighty years after she was murdered, her aphorism continues to be invoked by socialists as an assertion of liberty and moral responsibility. Wiechmann is no socialist, however, and his was a calculated attempt to turn Luxemburg on her head.
Wiechmann was elected on a platform of "German Jobs for Germans" and "Foreign Bandits Out." He is one of sixteen German People’s Union (Deutsche Volksunion DVU) representatives, which garnered 13% of the vote in state elections in Saxony-Anhalt this past April. On September 27 the DVU will be one of three far right parties competing in federal elections.
At first blush, the far-right seems merely a sideshow in the elections, more a nuisance than anything else. The focus will be on Chancellor Helmut Kohl's conservative Christian Democratic Union and his attempt to extend a sixteen-year reign. Fear about the future of the welfare state may propel Kurt Schroder's Clintonesque Social Democratic Party to victory, although he may ultimately need an alliance with the Green Party—or even a “grand alliance” with the Christian Democrats—to form a government. But however determinedly the two main parties guard the border of the postwar political consensus, memory of Rosa Luxemburg is not the only thing upside down in the new Germany.
Eight years after unification, Germany's political culture is still split east and west. In the west, voting patterns and party affiliations are strongly rooted; in the east they are fluid and transitory, a legacy of the Socialist Unity Party's four decade monopoly. But on both sides of the Elbe, Germans stand at the confluence of two major European discontents.
First, anti-immigrant fever burns bright, as it does across Western Europe. Second, like many countries of the former Eastern Bloc, Germany suffers from a national identity crisis. The Volk, East and West ask: Who is a German? Are newly arrived German ethnics, whose ancestors lived in Volga Russia for three centuries, more worthy of citizenship than Turkish ethnics born, like their parents, in Bonn or Hamburg? And what is Germany? What do borders mean, and is there a future for economic nationalism in the era of globalization.
On these elemental questions the left's nostrums on the welfare state and environmental protection are ineffective. By law, Germany defines citizenship according to blood lines rather than birthplace. Third-generation guest workers, recent immigrants and refugees are all “foreigners.” Meanwhile, significant sectors of the working classes are reflexively "nationalist" in response to higher levels of "internationalism" by capital, most prominently represented by the European Union. As the debate roils over replacing the deutschmark with the euro, the left's voice is indistinct. Similarly, when the Bundestag debated breaking the postwar ban on using German troops abroad (and committing the army, or Bundeswehr, to the Balkans), even the once firmly antimilitarist Green Party was divided.
The Green's antiracism is also splotchy. Some Turkish ethnics have chosen the party to represent their interests. Changing the status of tens of thousands of "foreigners" whose families may have lived in Germany for three generations is the essential first step of any antiracist program. But among the Greens there are those who argue that winning automatic citizenship rights for all those born in Germany is less important than finding the ecologically correct price for gasoline.
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To the far right, on the other hand, the answers are straightforward. Dark-skinned "foreigners" pollute the nation and steal jobs from “real Germans.” Continual calls for contrition over the Holocaust only make Germans feel guilty and forestall the "normalization" of German nationalism. If Jews were killed, it was just one part of a very nasty war—look what the Allies did to Dresden. Moreover, Germany should be reestablished at its 1937 borders.
From this nationalist core, the far right’s molten social program flows—economic autarchy and opposition to U.S. imperialism. And on this axis spins a movement that cannot be completely measured by counting votes for fringe parties such as the DVU. More telling is the way the themes of this “vanguard” have driven mainstream public debate and social policy.
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