AfD fans in their own environment: Your Germany is not my Germany

I know two people, quite well in fact, who identified themselves to me as AfD voters. Both are part of my immediate and wider personal environment. Many shared experiences, highs and lows, connect me with them, and for the sake of simplicity I will now call them the AfD boys.

The AfD boys are two adult men of West German origin, both blessed with a largely carefree middle-class existence and living away from any big city sleaze, in impressively “clean” and “safe” small towns.

One person's turn to the AfD didn't really surprise me, as bitter as that sounds (I'm otherwise quite fond of that person). I assume that he never read the 96-page AfD basic program in its entirety. Catchy formulas like “remigration” or “everything for the homeland” are completely sufficient for him, it seems to me.

A long time ago he danced around for a while at the outskirts of a world-famous psycho cult. He has always been more responsive to what I call “irrationalities” than most of the other people I voluntarily surround myself with – hence my only moderate surprise when he first told me how much the AfD turned him on. That was about ten years ago now.

In the second case, the AfD commitment shocked me more. It actually blew me away because that boy and I once shared (or: just seemed to share?) a lot of tastes and opinions. At first I thought his, well, political confession was a teasing provocation, a little test of how I would react to it. But: No – no test, no joke. “Germany for the Germans”: He asked me what was so wrong with this idea. There is no other country in the universe whose population despises itself as much as the Germans, said the boy.

At first I tried to think of it as tragic. A song by the band Die Sternen flashed into my head and then I couldn't get it out of my head for a few weeks: "Where did it start? What happened? What ruined you so much?"

However, I soon had to realize that this AfD boy is by no means a pitiful lost person (ergo: perhaps he can still be saved somehow), nor is he a protest voter, but rather a person with strong convictions. He is academically educated and is also very familiar with the intellectual backroom landscape of the AfD, “Schnellroda”, the “Black-Red-Gold Academy” and so on. So he knows only too well what he has gotten himself into.

With both AfD boys, I made a sincere effort to understand their points of view and convey mine to them. I wanted to understand in order to sharpen my arguments, which I would then use to attack in the next step. Without any nagging, of course. Civilized, smart, rational.

“Talking to Rights” was the name of a much-discussed non-fiction book that was published in 2017, shortly after Boy One had confided in me his admiration for the AfD. I didn't read the book in question; I found the title problematic. And yet I tried exactly that: not to “turn away” in an affected, arrogant, know-it-all, hyper-morally inflated way, but to really find out how it was that the AfD boys and I, who all come from the same socio-economic and everyday cultural soup, the West German petty bourgeoisie, could come to such different conclusions.

Once I visited AfD boy one in his small town idyll. We walked through the shiny pedestrian zone, the sun was shining, but the corners of the boy's mouth hung down to his chin. “Pizza here, kebab there, a Thai there – and now a Syrian grill,” he whined. “Be happy,” I said, “Imagine if all these shops were empty, like in so many other places.” To which the AfD boy just huffed angrily. “Nobody forbids Germans from opening their own bars,” or something like that, I said. That's pretty much how our Germany talks started.

The second AfD boy claimed that he, I, “all of us” were trapped in a “dictatorship of opinions”. To which I mentioned the magazine Compact, which is classified as right-wing extremist. "Exactly! Nancy Faeser forbade it!" shouted the boy. “Exactly,” I called back, “and the Federal Administrative Court overturned the ban, which is why you can buy the paper anywhere without hindrance, while Nancy Faeser is no longer Federal Minister of the Interior.”

The AfD boy looked at me with his sky-blue eyes incomprehensibly. “Legislative, executive, judicial – checks and balances – and a free press on top,” I said, “that’s just how it works in liberal democracy, which your party friends would like to abolish,” I said.

“Don’t take it against me, but for me the conversation is over here,” said the AfD boy.

All of our political discussions over the past few years ultimately ended in one way or another – in any case unsatisfactory.

I had to painfully realize that the AfD boys are not interested in exchanging factual arguments. For them it almost always boiled down to vague, tumultuous feelings. That's exactly how they both confirmed it to me, each in their own way. What matters most to them is "being German", and that is in fact above all a "feeling": that's roughly how they both put it.

And even at this strangely mushy point, I still wanted to continue the exchange seriously and objectively. I brought up Habermas's constitutional patriotism as a counter-proposal to the ethnic concept of the nation - but at this point at the latest the AfD boys not only turned away, they also crossed their arms. “You just have your opinion, I have mine.” In the end there was nothing more than this shockingly hollow non-statement, not even from the academically educated AfD boy.

This text first appeared in wochentaz, our weekly newspaper from the left!

Every week, wochentaz is about the world as it is – and as it could be. A left-wing weekly newspaper with a voice, attitude and the special taz view of the world. New every Saturday at the kiosk and of course by subscription.

I now suspect that there may not be anything else to find out.

The political scientist Johannes Hillje confirms this impression. The success of the New Right is based on “emotional capital” instead of “political and normative ideas,” writes Hilje in his book “Dare to have more emotions. How we don’t leave fear, hope and anger to populism.” Authoritarian nationalism serves its followers as a “source of love, hope, pride and self-efficacy.”

After not only many smart people, but practically half of the Republic have tried for a long time to somehow understand and respond to the feelings of the AfD boys and their spiritual brothers and sisters ("They probably don't feel seen?"), and after many other people have long since stated the same thing as me, namely that "the criticism is fizzling out and all the many non-fiction books in which the AfD is thoroughly analyzed with all the sociological and political science tools are of no use". I'm now out of the Germany talks with the AfD boys once and for all.

Am I a psychotherapist? Social worker? No more empathy. No more stoic objectivity. For a change, I would like to declare my German feeling as the center of the world. My Germany has written the following sentence at the top of its constitution: "Human dignity is inviolable. Respecting and protecting it is the obligation of all state power."

My Germany allows me to say, read, hear, see, write and post anything that does not violate the first sentence of the Constitution or other legal rules.

My Germany has never made me feel stupid because no German child has slipped out of my German belly and if someone did complain, I politely said “Get well soon!” said, that was it.

My Germany is one of “loosening up, of becoming European,” a country that “wants Europe beyond Germany – and a Europe governed by reason, not imperialist,” as Klaus Mann wrote in 1930.

My Germany is shaped by the following people and places: my kindergarten friend – Hungarian parents. My elementary school friend – daughter of a German-Peruvian couple. My first pop music buddy – Canadian passport. My first love – “guest worker” son with a Sicilian background. My first "apartment" of my own - a room sublet from two Nigerian women in London, where I felt more German than ever before, which was also because, as a German, I was always heard saying "Heil Hitler!" when dancing, flirting, or going out. was welcomed (that's British humor). And finally: my current home – the cosmopolitan city of Wedding, whose population comes from around 150 different countries.

Let the AfD boys gulp down their rancid hometown stew in whatever national community. I'm a left-liberal globalist with cultural Bolshevik interests and a high level of feminist contamination, I don't have time to blab along.