Other far-right factions have gone further to rebrand themselves. Generation Identity – a part-hippie, part-hipster, anti-Islam group – hosted its Europa Nostra summer fete in Dresden, as well as a traditional Christmas market in Halle (complete with flaxen-haired angels, ginger-scented mulled wine and choristers singing of their dream of a white Christmas). With even less subtlety, its activists stormed a migrant integration class at Klagenfurt University, sprayed fake blood on actors in a Vienna theatre (the performance was Nobel Prize-winning author Elfriede Jelinek’s reworking of Aeschylus’s refugee tragedy The Suppliants) and hung banners on both the Brandenburg Gate (‘Secure borders – Secure future’) and Westminster Bridge (‘Defend London – Stop Islamisation’).
In its most elaborate media stunt to date, Generation Identity chartered an ocean-going ship to disrupt humanitarian rescue missions in the Mediterranean.
‘Every week, every day, every hour, ships packed with illegal immigrants are flooding into European waters,’ asserted its Defend Europe website, conjuring up a sense of existential crisis. ‘This massive immigration is changing the face of our continent. We are losing our safety and our way of life and there is a danger we Europeans will become a minority in our own European homelands. Our future is under attack.’
Their ship – crowdfunded by high-profile US white supremacists and a former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan[21] among others – set to sea intent on sinking refugee boats and turning over would-be migrants to the Libyan coastguard. But on its maiden voyage, the ship – festooned with a banner ‘No Way – You Will Not Make Europe Home’ – broke down and was denied entry to both Malta and Tunisia, local fishermen blockading the harbours with small boats and waving signs: ‘No racists’. When it did finally reach a European port, most of the Sri Lankan crewmen were found to be travelling on false documents and so were deported.
Yet despite such occasional farcical failures, fringe political groups – along with online communities such as Reconquista Germanica and its Discord channel – have become influential, radicalising ‘the normies’, promoting non-violence while enabling racist attacks and waging Infokrieg to advance the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). Their avowed goal is to rout liberalism and rid the continent of non-Europeans.
I didn’t linger in Leinefelde. I didn’t share a beer with the hohes Tier at the Deutsches Haus or natter with bigots in biking leathers about their claim that all refugees are soldiers of Islam. Instead I backtracked to Chemnitz, to stand beneath the head.
Karl Marx’s head – the so-called ‘Nischel’ or skull – is the second-largest bust in the world. In 1971 the massive forty-ton bronze was cast at the Monument Skulptura foundry in Leningrad and transported in ninety-five pieces to the city, to mark its (short-lived) renaming as Karl-Marx-Stadt. On its plinth on Brückenstrasse, the towering thirteen-metre work glares down at the individual, so stern, so überdimensional that it stuns most passers-by into silence.
But not everyone. In the early hours of a late summer morning in 2018, a fight broke out in the shadow of the Nischel. A 35-year-old German carpenter was stabbed, dying later of his injuries. Two Kurdish immigrants – one Syrian and one Iraqi who escaped from the scene – were charged with manslaughter.
Within an hour mourners were on the street, their candles flickering on the paving stones. At first there were only a couple of hundred of them, but by the middle of the afternoon there were thousands, standing together, chanting ‘Germany for Germans’ and ‘Wir sind das Volk’. Their anger swelled with the news that the Iraqi had previous convictions, that he should have been deported months earlier.
Beneath a sky cut with wispy clouds, protesters carried placard portraits of the dead man as well as of ‘other [Caucasian] casualties of Germany’s indiscriminate hospitality’. Banners read ‘Ausländer raus!’ and ‘Multikulti tötet!’ Multiculturalism kills. Radicals from the far-right Junge Alternative, National Socialist Underground and Kaotik Chemnitz slid in from the fringes, as had hooligans on the Warsaw march. One of them held aloft a crass caricature of a thick-lipped African. NS Boys – some with itchy fists – began to stalk their prey.
Police water cannons rolled in from Leipzig and Dresden in an attempt to maintain order, and to protect a smaller counter-protest across the square. Masked demonstrators from both sides then began to throw flares and fireworks at each other over the police lines. When a television journalist claimed that the marchers had made the Hitler salute, he was taunted as ‘the lying press’. Lügenpresse.
‘We don’t want Chemnitz to become an Islamic city in twenty years,’ protesters shouted into microphones. ‘How about integrating us first?’[22]
Wir sind das Volk, the mob had chanted in Leinefelde and Chemnitz. Wir sind das Volk they cried while surrounding a refugee bus in Clausnitz. Wir sind das Volk yelled the thugs as they chased two dozen dark-skinned teenagers through the streets of Bautzen. Thirty years ago Wir sind das Volk – We are the people – was a cry for democracy, for freedom, for inclusion. Now the far right has co-opted the slogan, repeating it over and over, exploiting it to exclude those who think differently, who are different.
Saxony has a history of neo-Nazi protests. In the last election one in four Chemnitz voters cast their ballot for the anti-immigrant AfD. Dresden is the home of the nationalist movement, Pegida, the so-called Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West. Leinefelde – population 19,617 – is one of hundreds of small eastern towns where far-right groups hold annual festivals, preaching a hate-filled, pro-white gospel. Berlin, only a few hundred miles distant, is another world.
But Berlin is not Germany just as London is not England, as New York and LA are not the United States. Berlin – for the moment at least – is different, a refuge for a reconstituted liberal order.
I returned to it by train, the journey taking a couple of hours, and changed onto the U-Bahn. On a bench, on the platform, a young mother waited in silence with her two young sons. She wore a headscarf and voluminous black abaya. The boys sported new Germany football shirts and back-turned caps. All had heavy shadows under their eyes. I guessed that they were newcomers.
As a U-Bahn train glided into the station, they seemed to lean back as if in awe. A twenty-something man – the boys’ father – stood apart from them, close to the platform edge. When the train doors opened he nodded and his boys leapt to their feet to dart into a carriage, laughing with sudden excitement. To ride the underground was so much more fun than being driven out of Damascus or Aleppo by Russian bombs, than travelling across the continent in the back of trucks. Their mother – who I imagine had wept throughout the journey in fear for her children – followed them onto the train, taking a seat and gathering her sons around her skirts like a mother hen.
But the younger boy, who was not much older than a toddler, was too excited to sit down. As the doors closed and the train jerked forward, he rocked back and forth on his feet, shouting to his father who sat across from the small, tight family. The child was thrilled by the noise of the wheels, by the strobing lights, by the novelty of the smiling faces of the Berlin commuters. His parents and older brother tried to quieten him, hushing him in Arabic. But he would not be restrained and stuck out his short, pink tongue at them.
21
In the twentieth century, Europe’s two great allies – the UK and US – ‘had saved [Europe] twice from suicide’, wrote Ian McEwan, Milan Kundera, Adam Michnik, Orhan Pamuk, Salman Rushdie and twenty-five other leading writers, historians and Nobel laureates in their 2019 open letter on the rise of populism. But now Europe has been ‘abandoned from across the Channel and from across the Atlantic’ with some Brits and Americans even helping to finance the ‘explosions of xenophobia and anti-Semitism’. ‘Three-quarters of a century after the defeat of fascism and thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a new battle for civilisation is under way,’ stated the manifesto’s signatories.
22
At the time no more than 3,000 Syrian refugees lived in Chemnitz, and barely 1,000 Afghans. Yet for over a year, weekly far-right protests have continued in the city, local people venting their anger at being ‘left behind’.