In a speech in a beer hall in Dresden
Let’s hear from some more Nazis. They’re speaking up. Philip Oltermann in Berlin reports in the Guardian:
A politician from the rightwing populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party has broken with the country’s postwar political consensus by calling for a “180-degree turn” from the tradition of remembering and atoning for the Nazi era.
In a speech in a beer hall in Dresden, Björn Höcke, who leads the party in the eastern state of Thuringia, railed against Germany’s decade-long tradition of acknowledging the crimes of the National Socialist era, describing the Holocaust memorial in Berlin as a “monument of shame”.
“They wanted to cut off our roots and with the re-education that began in 1945, they nearly managed,” Höcke said. “Until now, our mental state continues to be that of a totally defeated people. We Germans are the only people in the world that have planted a monument of shame in the heart of their capital.”
So Germans should be taking pride in the Holocaust?
The Central Council of Jews in Germany condemned the speech. Its president, Josef Schuster, said: “With these antisemitic and highly misanthropic comments, the AfD is showing its true face. I would have never dared to imagine that it would be possible for a politician to say such things 70 years after the Shoah.”
The German vice chancellor, Sigmar Gabriel, said: “Björn Höcke despises the Germany I am proud of. Never, never ever must we allow the demagogy of a Björn Höcke to go unchallenged. Not as Germans, and
especially not as Social Democrats.”
Jewish groups have reacted with anger and shock after a local leader of the right-wing populist party Alternative for Germany (AfD) attacked Germany’s national Holocaust memorial and the country’s devotion to teaching its citizens about Nazi genocide.
“It is deeply outrageous and completely unacceptable to describe the Berlin Holocaust Memorial as Björn Höcke did as a ‘monument of shame,'” the president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Josef Schuster, said in a statement. “With these anti-Semitic and extremely misanthropic remarks, the AfD is showing its true face. I would not have believed that it was possible for a politician in Germany to say such things 70 years after the Shoah.”
Höcke is pretending that’s not what he said.
In a statement on Wednesday, Höcke said that he was merely criticizing the weight given to the shame of the Holocaust in Germany’s approach to its own history – and threatened to sue anyone misquoting him. But within the context of the speech, which can be viewed on YouTube, there is little doubt that Höcke was depicting the Holocaust monument and culture of remembrance negatively.
I think this is the YouTube:
The deputy chairman of the Social Democrats, Ralf Stegner, blasted Höcke on Twitter, writing: “Remembering the millions of Nazi victims isn’t weakness – weakness is stirring up hatred against helpless people as a way of elevating oneself.”
Green party co-chairwoman Simone Peter called for the AfD to “unambiguously distance” itself from Höcke. Green party MP and chairman of the German-Israeli parliamentary committee, Volker Beck, said that state authorities should more closely monitor the right wing of the AfD for neo-Nazi content.
“The strategy of carefully targeted violations of taboos continues,” Beck said in a statement. “Höcke is making the AfD into the parliamentary representatives of the NPD (Germany’s far-right party). It’s high time that his wing of the AfD is kept under observation by domestic intelligence agencies. The most recent statement by the chairman of the AfD in Thuringia show what sort of racist and anti-Semitic views are maintained by the AfD and its functionaries.”
“This is not just a run-of-the-mill provocation – this about our identity as Germans,” wrote Social Democratic Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel on Facebook. “Höcke’s speech particularly horrified me personally because my father was an unapologetic Nazi until the day he died.”
“Höcke speaks the language of the Nazi party,” concurred SPD secretary general Katarina Barley. Left Party member of parliament Diether Dehm and Left Party co-chairpersons Sahra Wagenknecht and Dietmar Bartsch officially reported Höcke to the police for “incitement of the people” – which is a crime in Germany.
They’re rising everywhere.
Well, it’s not in the heart of our capital, at least that I know of, but here in the US we do have Trail of Tears monuments and markers, which would be the same sort of “marker of shame” that he’s talking about. And there may be something like that in our capital; I haven’t researched that. There certainly are where I come from (Oklahoma).
Of course it is a monument of shame, it recalls a shameful period in German history. When it causes people like Höcke to feel shame, we know it is doing its job.
And just one more thug from the right, threatening to sue anyone who dares point out the weakness of his argument. Just one more facist who wants to “Machen Sie Deutschland groß wieder” .
Collective and selective amnesia has been very successfully employed by the Japanese, so it might work for the Germans as well.
iknklast: I’m sure the Trumpets would be happy to rip down the Trail of Tears monuments as being ‘too negative’. (And that was precisely where my mind went, mainly because America is still a bit reluctant to properly address slavery, though the new National Museum of African-American History in D.C. is a solid step forward, if long overdue.
Freemage, I know there have been moves in several states, like Texas and Oklahoma, to rewrite the history books to be more positive about our relationships with Native Americans, erase Japanese internment camps, and the like. I’m not aware of anyone trying to tear them down yet, but I suspect that – or simply turning them over to private interests who will then dismantle them and build casinos.
Last year in Hamburg I saw these (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stolperstein). It was very sobering to realise just how many there were and to translate that into effects on a community, not to mention the individuals. When a Nation has committed a crime on that scale a monument or two provides an ongoing sense of humility. The new nazis will be hating such monuments simply because they provide opportunity for a pause for thought (see also Brian Aldiss ‘The Pause Button’).
Saxony has had neo-nazis officially in their regional parliament for a long time. I lived in the former East for a short time. Even though I couldn’t understand all nuances of the political placards, you could always tell the neo-nazi party posters as they had to mount them about 4m high on the lampposts. Any lower and they’d get torn to shreds by the locals. The other thing they had was scare quotes around terms like “foreign workers”, just so you knew who they were referring to. I loved Dresden but some of the locals used to trash talk the Czechs and Poles as if they were still crossing the border to steal horses like in the 18th century. The area was considered pretty isolated post-war as they couldn’t get West TV in the Elbe valley. They were called something like ‘the valley of the uninformed’.
Come to think of it, my first evening in Dresden there was a neo-nazi on the tram, hassling a couple of Sri Lankan men (I was left alone as England ‘has neo-nazis too’)… and the local yobs would wear Lonsdale branded shirts under their partly unzipped bomber jackets, so that the letters ‘NSDA’ were visible (something to do with the the Nazi party)… Different coloured shoelaces to show whether you were pro or anti nazi… and the football hooligans assaulting an Italian family stopped in traffic after Germany got kicked out of a soccer tournament… and the local civil servants telling me a should have pushed to the front on the line in the local labour registry as I was and EU citizen and not a ‘foreigner’… There was always plenty of nasty racist behaviour bubbling away.
The city, and it’s large university, was pretty good and hosting counter protests but there were always annual neo-nazi rallies. The towns and villages further to the east were said to have kept quite a Nazi movement even during the DDR years. One of the most memorable things to happen there during my spell there was a big anniversary of the Dresden bombings. There was an anti war rally, a neo-nazi rally, and a pro-bombing rally called “No Tears for Krauts” simultaneously, who were celebrating the destruction of the city. You couldn’t make it up.
Everyone I met was quite polarised in their political standpoint. Lots of well educated, unemployed ‘victims of the wall’ from the DDR electronics industry that had been out of work since reunification, wishing for utopian Socialism to come back and the occasional racist who had probably never met a real life black person (strangely, all of the casual racism I heard was against blacks and eastern europeans, rather than jews. There was also a large amount of bigotry between east and west Germans). Most of the former eastern cities had 50% unemployment, people working €1/hr jobs to stay on benefits and populations shrinking to the point that the ‘platenbau’ concrete housing blocks were being reduced in height to cope with the fall in housing demand.
There was also a large population of vietnamese workers who had been given working permits during the DDR years. Their children were German citizens but they had no legal status in reunified Germany. They couldn’t travel anywhere as they would be deported from the EU. I met a few vietnamese locals in language school had been working in Dresden for 30 years and hadn’t been encouraged to learn German at all.
Like England, Germany definitely has an issue with nationalism / flag waving outside of sporting events / what their ‘national identity’ should be (if at all) and the like. I never really understood everything that was going on in Saxony at the time (this is excluding all the recent mass migration), but I could see plenty of factors feeding right wing popular nationalism.
There were lots of very progressive things left over from the DDR years: women in professional positions in industry and academia, strong environmental protection, weak church powers etc. I’d love to go back there, but I don’t know how much I would like to see the changes over recent years.
As mentioned previously, the National Museum of African-American History isn’t viewed as a monument to triumph and virtue in some circles. But my mind went to the Vietnam Memorial (the somber black wall of names) as our likeliest example in D.C. I recall Ross Perot, for instance, had a beef with it on those grounds.
So, that strain of German exceptionalism is a bit forced, when we can give plausible counter-examples without having to consider more than TWO countries. It’d be hard for a nation to have much history without having things profoundly, painfully to regret, and a nation that refuses to remember them publicly and prominently just earns itself one more thing it ought to be regretting. That may not call for monuments in the capital – but it very well may, and it certainly calls for truth and candor in its history and politics.
People still talk about the Dresden bombing having more victims than Hiroshima. But the source for that factoid is…David Irving.
At Deborah Lipstadt’s libel trial, it was revealed that Irving had ADDED A ZERO to the highest estimate he could find. 10% of Hiroshima is still too many. But the example of the persistence of deliberate lies is chilling.
@ ^
Seriously. Who give a fuck? Either one still had at least ten times the death toll of “9/11”. You know, “when the world changed”? In other words, when Americans, for the first time, had a tiny taste of the devastation they routinely wreak on other nations?
Silentbob,
If the intention of 9/11 was to teach the Americans a lesson, it was a failure wasn’t it? Or was it? The result was the devastation of the Near East which suited some people’s strategic interests.
John the Drunkard,
Actually the fire bombing of Tokyo killed more people directly than either Hiroshima or Nagasaki. As with Dresden, the tactic was to create a firestorm which killed by suffocation.