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Something that people (particularly, but not exclusively in the US) don’t seem to recognize with respect to the dangers of that German reactionaries pose today is that they have a recent memory of living in a state that actually collapsed, and I think that we who live in big, rich, predominantly anglophone countries just don’t have any similar lived experience. The actual existence of the UK was never threatened by the Troubles, and Scottish independence hasn’t even won an electoral majority (yet?). The last time the US was threatened with a real, fundamental systemic collapse was over 150 years ago. January 6 was very serious, and yet it still came nowhere close to actually undoing the transfer of power. I think most Americans still can’t actually envision what a collapse would look like. (I admittedly don’t know much about the impact of the Quebec separatist movement, but from south of 54°40’, I have never perceived that Canada was really on the brink of falling apart.)

In Germany, not only are there lots of living people who remember the collapse of the East German state, but it’s also not so long since there were a handful of people around who had lived in 1. the Kaiserreich, 2. the Weimar republic, 3. the Nazi state, 4. the GDR, and 5. the reunified Germany of today. That’s five very different kinds of states that some people experienced in recent history without ever going anywhere. So people have a much clearer sense that, yes, whole states do, in fact, come and go. I think that’s something we have a much harder time envisioning in the US, the UK, Canada, Australia, etc.

Starting from that kind of shared understanding – that a state that exists today need not exist tomorrow – is a really useful rhetorical framework for helping people feel empowered to take (sometimes drastic) action, or at least envision something to work toward. When Björn Höcke calls the Federal Republic of Germany a “failed state,” as he has done since at least 2015, citing what his supporters believe is a failed border regime, he’s also telling them “you know what comes next…”.

The right has also adopted a number of slogans and tactics from the iconic protests during the last days before the Berlin Wall fell. In 1989, “Wir sind das Volk!“ (“We are the people!”) was a slogan directed against the East German government’s pretense of representing “the masses” in an old-school Marxist way, and it was a demand for actual popular decision-making power. Today, it also echoes the ethno-nationalist language of the 19th/20th century “völkisch” movement and the Nazi regime. In other words, when today’s reactionaries use that slogan, they’re a) invoking language that was deployed under three different German states that don’t exist anymore, and b) engaging in obviously extremely racist sloganeering that they can easily pass off simply as a demand for more liberty, in the tradition of non-violent East German protest – a movement largely regarded as unassailable today.

Another example: at the height of the pandemic, big groups of reactionary dumbfucks would go on “walks” through cities without masks, which was prohibited at times. They knew that arresting/fining them all would be both logistically impossible and a very bad look that would prop up their rhetoric that they’re living under a dictatorship. Moreover, those “walks” were also deliberately meant to evoke the peaceful demonstrations in the late GDR just before it collapsed.

At the same time, the Reichsbürger (“citizens of the Reich”) movement is still picking up speed and plotting, sometimes in great detail, ways to actually induce the collapse of the German republic. They’re a lot like certain elements of the militia movement in the US, but in a much smaller country and, again, with a real recollection of states falling, as well as a serious interest in making that happen again.

I don’t mean to sound alarmist here. There’s not going to be an overnight revolution in Germany, but I do think that, despite having had generally more or less centrist governments and seemingly a fairly liberal policy toward refugees at the national level, the danger from the far right is at least as great there as it is anywhere in the West, if not greater.

#Germany, #AfD, #reactionaries, #GDR, #DDR, #FailedState