Between elections: zombie apocalypse

Shortly after the election in Saxony-Anhalt and a few days before the elections here in Berlin and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, it feels like “between years”. I mean the twilight state that often sets in between Christmas and New Year: usually a pleasant mixture of cozy warmth, candlelight and letting your soul unwind. But at the moment it's more of a brain fog of horror.

In recent years, like many others, I have lost acquaintances, colleagues and good friends directly to the AfD or at least to its intellectual world. Most are well educated and not particularly disadvantaged socially. Perhaps three stories from this group will help to illustrate my diffuse feeling of mental and emotional fog.

The first break was with Rainer in autumn 2015. Rainer's actual name is different, like the other two. We were one heart and one soul. I wasn't the only Muslim migrant in his circle of friends, on the contrary. Rainer was an articulate cosmopolitan who married a similarly polyglot North African woman; We flew guests from all over the world to the big wedding party in the Atlas Mountains. Two years later they separated.

In the summer of 2015, he described the many refugees as invaders. At the Potsdam meeting on remigration, which was unveiled in January 2024, Rainer was at the table. Every few years he writes me emails about the downfall of Germany - and about his advances to lure me to the AfD.

Shortly before the 2025 federal election, I met Dana online. Dana comes from Munich, moved to Berlin at some point and lived abroad for a time. There was never a meeting. But we discussed in long voice messages why she is voting for the AfD. Nobody should come into the country anymore, not even the Poles from next door.

The gibberish of English and German on Berlin's streets annoys her, as does the loss of musical traditions through too much mixing. She surprisingly easily dissociated the fact that the party she had chosen would reject someone like me as a date with a giggling “Not you”.

And the friendship with Levent just ended. He had already put it on hold two years ago. Now we clashed in a comment column on a reel about AfD voters. We had valued each other for 15 years and were politically close for the most part. Levent is also read in Muslim terms. Occasionally he paints his fingernails brightly. He used to work in a queer bar.

In a subsequent short dispute via text message, he wrote that even left-wing drawers were just drawers and that he had no desire to be put in there. What he specifically meant by that, he kept to himself. He blocked me on Instagram.

Rainer, Dana and Levent are free spirits, they come from the cultural sector and in their creative work have always had an extremely precise view of people and their work. To this day I don't know any understandable reasons for her change of heart. Probably not you either.

This reminds me of the fiction of a zombie apocalypse. The virus is raging, and as if out of nowhere, friends, relatives, your own children or parents suddenly become hostile to you. The comparison may sound drastic and absurd, but so is their ignorance of facts and their rejection of basic rules of interaction and constructive communication.

I will definitely dedicate myself to professional analyzes again soon. But now it was time to give space to your own feelings instead of just the wavering feelings of others.