Youth center in sight: The enemy image of a red Göttingen

One could just benevolently come to the point: Well, they're just doing their job in the Göttingen tax office. That's just the legal situation. And they simply want a few documents from the self-managed youth center in the city center (Juzi) to show that the non-profit status is in order. Just explain to us tax officials how it fits that, as an association, you do not support “individual political or religious groups” - but you can find “various references to events related to ‘Antifa’” on your homepage.

But benevolence is clearly not appropriate here. After all, it is a pretty bold step that the Göttingen tax office has just now decided to check the non-profit organization that supports the Juzi to see whether it is complying with the regulations when it comes to political commitment in its youth work. The Juzi is now rightly speaking of a “political attack on independent youth work and culture, on anti-fascism and self-organization and on our house”.

Juzi has been operating on the slope of Göttingen's city wall for almost 45 years. In the grubby Wilhelminian style house, which is spray-painted on the outside with tons of graffiti, feminist Antifa groups meet – oh God – where people cook collectively, there are rehearsal rooms and woodworking workshops, and parties and concerts are organized. The fact that Juzi is a center of anti-fascist movements in the left-leaning university town is really nothing new.

The fact that the tax office now has a serious interest in an audit does not only appear to be a coincidence, not only to Juzi. In fact, a fairly consistent picture of the nationwide shift to the right in its many different shades is emerging in Göttingen these months. Because it's not just the Juzi that is under attack, the entire spectrum of left-wing movements is under attack.

At the end of last year, the left-wing solidarity association Rote Hilfe, which has been based in Göttingen since it was founded 51 years ago, had its accounts terminated out of the blue by the GLS Bank and the Sparkasse Göttingen. The savings bank referred to a call for donations from the association to support defendants in the “Antifa East proceedings” and antifascists imprisoned in Hungary. Rote Hilfe was able – for the time being – to successfully defend itself against this in court.

The next attack came in March: Minister of State for Culture Wolfram Weimer excluded “Rote Straße”, one of the oldest left-wing bookstores in the country, from the bookstore price. Weimer found that there was “information relevant to the protection of the constitution” against the bookstore – tax money should not be used for political extremists.

In June, a 23-year-old antifa activist almost died after a right-wing extremist, who was still a minor, stabbed him with a knife. The 17-year-old was part of a “young right-wing crew,” as one scene insider put it, who had previously tried for months to shake the left-wing hegemony in Göttingen: they daubed memorial plaques, sprayed house walls with right-wing graffiti or – and here we come full circle – bombarded the Juzi with New Year’s Eve rockets.

It is not yet known what those responsible at the Göttingen tax office were thinking when they made the decision to review Juzi. The fact that they end up joining side by side with young Nazis in a fight that is directed against the enemy image of a red Göttingen should be something to think about.