The Autonomen
Onto this complex terrain enter the antifa. “Antifascism” is a term that has little currency in America, but it is used without reservation in Europe. In Germany there are several antifa tendencies. One is associated with the Party of Democratic Socialism. To date, it has emphasized preserving anti-fascist monuments and place names inherited from the German Democratic Republic. A second thread winds out of leftish political parties rooted in the West. Its antifascist strategy is often secondary to its quest for votes in each election cycle. Both strands have mainstream constituencies but are hobbled by their inability to address issues like unemployment and currency union.
A third antifa strand is the Autonomen, a movement of young militants best known for meeting their opponents toe-to-toe in the streets. Almost imprisoned by their own marginality, their anti-fascism is more a moral responsibility than a political project. But recently they have taken on a political role weightier than their membership or organization would warrant, since the importance of youth for the right puts the Autonomen in direct competition for the same constituency. Unlike other antifascist tendencies, the Autonomen exist in a symbiotic relationship to the Kameraden. Wherever the latter plan to rally, the young militants plan to confront them. Thus, antifascism is often reduced to whether one is personally willing to fight in the streets.
If the Aryan tide is eventually turned back, it will ultimately be done by a movement that combines moral conviction, tactical aggressiveness and strategic acumen.
The Autonomen developed as a radical left alternative to Marxism-Leninism in West Germany. More countercultural than ideological, they lacked an explicit Weltanschauung. Their worldview was buried in their lifestyle. "We wanted to make politics that changed our lives immediately," one Autonomen veteran from Schleswig-Holstein explained to me. "We were young people who wanted to see how we could live differently today, not tomorrow." German Autonome intellectuals borrowed freely from counterparts in Italy. But the first mass actions arose in the early eighties in the squatters' flats in West Berlin's Kreuzberg district, then a haven for runaways, draft resistors, immigrants and leftists. (Once an undesirable property abutting the Wall, Kreuzberg is now prime real estate in the center of unified Germany.) The Autonomen maintained a vibrant youth culture that included drop-in centers and punk bands. Their edge sharpened as they fought off police actions against their squats. That militance was subsequently directed at neo-Nazis.
By the end of the eighties, just as unification neared and ultra-nationalism intensified, the Autonomen began to decline as a movement. According to veterans, the commercialization of alternative life-styles, the left's lost links to social groups such as trade unions, and the squatters’ inability to relate to anybody outside their own ranks combined to rob them of their vitality. Increasingly cut off from the larger youth culture, the Autonomen began to be defined solely by militant opposition to neo-Nazis.
When they failed to stem the escalating anti-“foreigner” violence the Autonomen reached a crisis point. It was 1992 in Rostock, a working class Baltic port in eastern Germany. For five days and nights neo-Nazis laid siege to immigrant housing. Government authorities had prior knowledge of plans for violence but did nothing to prevent it. Worse, as Molotov cocktails exploded inside large tenement flats, the police and fire departments withdrew. Thousands of ordinary Germans sang “Deutschland Uber Alles,” as they watched the action and cheered. The pogrom caused the more reflective street fighters to doubt their own strategy.
"I was in Rostock the second night of those attacks," one militant told me. "We had more than 250 people . . . but those 250 people decided not to go [to the site of the violence] because it was too risky. At that point the neo-Nazis only had 100 people doing the torching. In this moment, where nothing happened, the credibility of our movement went up like that," he said, snapping his fingers.
The Rostock events magnified the militants’ fundamental strategic weaknesses: Success meant physically beating the Kameraden in the street. "For ten years we had said we would not tolerate fascist violence and fought small groups of neo-Nazis," he continued. "But the first moment when there was real fascist violence—not just small groups, but mass violence—nothing happened."
Soon after, the government restricted Germany's asylum laws. The neo-Nazis had forced a change in public policy. It was a "big defeat," according to the editors of the Berlin-based quarterly Antifaschistes INFO-Blatt. The investigative journal grew out of the early Autonomen movement, but soon realized its limits. INFO-Blatt correctly noted the lack of antiracist consensus among political and social actors outside their antifa subculture. "Our assessment was that a large part of the population could not be mobilized in support of asylum," one editor remembered.
Stuck between the Autonomen’s weakness and their fellow German’s disinterest, INFO-Blatt and a network of regional investigative magazines settled for exposing neo-Nazis in the leadership of right-wing organizations. It succeeded in "winning some time," INFO-Blatt's editors agree, but it "wasn't enough to stop the right-wing drift…Now there is a search for more successful strategies."
That search already encompasses younger activists from the Party of Democratic Socialism, the Greens and the Social Democrats, as well as a growing number who recognize that street battles go only so far. According to INFO-Blatt, some of the best new hope lies in the economically stressed states. "Lots of local groups in the east that we have worked with over the years started out bashing Nazis in the street; but now they have changed and are working in local coalitions. They may still look like punks, they may still live in squats, but they have changed their strategies too."
Street protests have not been abandoned as a tactic in this pre-election season. When the NPD tried to repeat its Leipzig rally in the center of Berlin on June 20, the antifa called on its own forces to occupy the Alexanderplatz. Authorities moved a diminished NPD rally to the Berlin suburbs. NPD plans in Anklam and Straslund similarly met strong resistance. On September 19, one week before the federal election, the showdown will be in Rostock—so rich in symbolism for fa and antifa alike. This time the militants are working in a broad antifascist alliance. Perhaps moral conviction, tactical aggressiveness and strategic acumen will begin to set things on their feet again in Germany.
Research assistance by Graeme Atkinson and Michael Hahn.
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