February Issue
Lou Hildebrandt
February
Whilst Germany appears to have—once again—chosen the path towards fascism, protestors against this trend seem to notice only the tip of the iceberg. The anti-Muslim racism they, themselves, re-produce is a part of the larger framework. Germany’s anti-Muslim racism is not per se surprising and manifests, for instance, in its seemingly unconditional support of Israel’s genocidal war on Palestinians in Gaza. However, the above-described dynamics endanger not only Muslims in the Middle East but those living within Germany too. Simultaneously, the fascist “Alternative for Germany” (AfD) glooms jarringly over the horizon, but already under the former government’s parties, Greens, Socialdemocrats, and libertarians (the so-called “traffic light-coalition”), a spiral of brutal police assails on Arab protestors, plans for and executed deportations, as well as increasingly racist rhetoric in public media become the new German mainstream. Now that the CDU-CSU (conservatives) won the elections, this trend is likely going to continue, and even worsen.
Very recently, Friedrich Merz, the chief of the German conservative party CDU, along with his parliamentary fraction, passed an anti-immigration bill–a project that could only be realized because of the votes cast for the fascist party AfD. For Germans, this marked a turning point, since the democratic parties had agreed on a categorical rejection of political collaboration with the fascists. This was called the Brandmauer (Engl., approx. “wall against the fire”), a metaphor for the collective effort to stand strong and unshakeable against the rising right-wing-extremist mobilization. As a result of the fall of that “wall,” people everywhere in Germany protested fascism. Only a short time later, something happened that left the Palestinian and Arab community in Berlin breathless: The police banned the Arabic language at demonstrations and, after that, arrested people for chanting in Arabic. Obviously, this has nothing to do with “security” and is another instrument for criminalizing Arab identity in Germany. How come there is such an outcry over the fall of a symbolic wall, but not over the fact that minorities see their rights disappear? Since attacks on the rights of minorities mark a step towards authoritarianism, it seems inconsequential to protest fascism and simultaneously ignore the anti-Muslim policy that characterizes Germany’s political landscape.
The silence emerging from those kinds of antifascist demonstrations feels familiar because a similar series of events occurred less than one year ago. Fascists had gathered for a meeting in a villa in Potsdam, Brandenburg, to plan deportation schemes not for hundreds or thousands but millions of migrants and migranticized people in Germany. The AfD was part of it, of course, but high-ranking CDU politicians and other civil society figures also attended this conspiratorial meeting. The investigative journalist magazine Correctiv shed light on this secret meeting with a report and, after the fall of the wall against the fire, there were anti-fascist protests as a reaction that mobilized hundreds of thousands in Munich, Hamburg and Berlin, as well as in the countryside.
One could interpret it as a good thing that fascist ideology is not tolerated in Germany and established parties together with civil society stand united against the far-right. However, this symbolic commitment, just like a symbolic wall against the fire, pales in comparison to the real racism that exists at these demonstrations as well as in Germany ruled by the establishment parties. Similarly, protests erupt seemingly overnight when the AfD or CDU say or do discriminating things, but the actual right-wing anti-immigration policies by the traffic light parties are hardly met with public outrage.
One year ago: protests of symbolism
As the protests mobilized millions of people, all with diverse backgrounds, which is why it is difficult to write about “the protesters” as a uniform unit. There were certainly protestors who were aware of the dangers posed by the AfD and also the increasingly right-wing traffic light policy. At the same time, the slogans and chants of these demonstrations were problematic. Even if demonstration signs are often deliberately polemical, it is questionable whether political contexts were addressed at all with slogans such as “Hatred makes you ugly,” which was also recommended as a demonstration slogan by the supposedly left-wing journal taz. Those sorts of slogans reflect the larger liberal context that fails to acknowledge or differentiate how fascism is not merely about “hatred,” but rather about how the ruling class, neoliberal political agendas and the rising securitization of migration work hand in hand. Racism and fascism run deeper, to the core of society itself, instead of being senseless hatred. However, there were also slogans that more obviously lacked anti-racist sensitivity and thus reproduced racism, such as “AfD ban because I like kebabs.” While such a slogan is essentializing, it also implies that migrant people should not be deported from Germany because they add value to white people. This is a severe dehumanization.
Nevertheless, racism has not only manifested itself through insensitive slogans or chants, but also through physical violence against Arabs and migranticized people-on-the-move. At such demonstrations, there are always different blocs of activists, such as climate activists or Antifa blocs. At an anti-AfD demonstration organized in Berlin, however, a bloc consisting mainly of Arab and Palestinian activists was explicitly excluded by the organizing crew and pushed away, encircled and harassed by the police. Where insensitive slogans and chants show us a racist cognitive dissonance of a white society that ironically perceives itself as anti-fascist, the actions described are tangible acts of racist physical violence. The fact that supposed anti-fascism demonstrations allowed violence against minorities to happen mirrors Germany’s historical continuity of racism and white supremacy.
A year full of violence against Muslims
The AfD's secret deportation plans in Potsdam deserve rejection and protest. However, the specific policies of the traffic light government would have deserved the same rejection and protest. Both before and after the anti-AfD demonstrations in January and February 2024, the coalition government has deported dozens of people, strengthened Germany’s borders, expanded the military apparatus, sent weapons that kill Palestinian lives in the Gaza Strip to Israel, and increased funding of the police—who have been using unprecedented violence against Palestinian and Arab protesters since October 2023. The same Olaf Scholz, who, probably for PR purposes, stages himself as an anti-fascist at the anti-AfD demonstrations, had himself been featured on the cover of the Tagesspiegel, the major newspaper of Berlin, in October 2023, just three months before the meeting in Potsdam, with a serious face followed by the lingering headline: “We must finally deport people on a grand scale.”
The violence against Arabs in Gaza and Germany's complicity sparked protests, but not nearly on the scale that the AfD's secret meeting accomplished. The protesters were overwhelmingly Arab or even Palestinian themselves (Berlin has the largest Palestinian diaspora outside of the Arab world), and the white German pseudo-antifascist mainstream was nowhere to be seen here. These protests have experienced extraordinarily severe police violence. Not only pro-Palestine protests have experienced this police brutality; even when Syrians were celebrating in the streets of Berlin after the fall of the Assad regime, the police were also present and ready to use violence. The far-right in Germany not only hates Arab anger and despair, but it also wants to crush Arab joy.
One year later, a fictitious wall falls
Nationwide protests across Germany only resumed when Friedrich Merz passed an anti-immigration law with the AfD in January shortly before the new elections, resulting in him bringing down the fictitious Brandmauer. Once again, there were anti-AfD demonstrations and hashtags such as “we are the wall” and “we are more” went viral. Many politicians of the Social Democrats and the Greens also use those hashtags, marketing themselves as “antifascists” in times of political campaigning. Demonstrating those bills when passed by fascist AfD and far-right CDU, but not when passed by the former centrist government is politically inconsistent.
Shortly after the imaginary wall came down, the Berlin Senate issued a ban on the Arabic language at demonstrations. The white majority society remains silent about this political disciplining, although it is such policies of the bourgeois-right alliance that are the driving force of the authoritarian re-structuring of Germany. It is these policies, which criminalize and attack the identities of ethnic and Arab minorities, that provide the breeding ground for the AfD.
Photo credits: conceptphoto.info, 2023