19. February

This past weekend, Dresden was again thrown into turmoil. Whereas last weekend a large peaceful demonstration and a small, unwelcomed Funeral march by far-right extremists merely caused some traffic delays, on the first Saturday after the anniversary of the bombing of Dresden, the center of the city came to a standstill.

While I was correct in my previous post that the NSDAP (Nazi Party) is illegal in Germany, there has been since the 1960s a National Demokratische Partei (NDP), which is widely seen as a Neo-Nazi political group, since its party materials use anti-Semitic and xenophobic language, claim Germany is larger than its current political borders, etc. It is also well-known that the NPD has a three-pronged approach to increasing its influence in the public sphere: winning over the governments, the streets, and Köpfe (“heads,” or minds). Center and left Germans have complained that the group often hides its identity when sharing information about such seemingly neutral topics as employment, and that this has allowed its representatives to win elected office on several levels of government, including the Saxon State parliament since several years ago. Critics blame this government influence for the fact that far-right groups are allowed to demonstrate in Dresden.

For a while it was in fact an open question whether the Saturday-after-February-13th rallies would happen at all, considering the large number of police required to keep some semblence of peace (nevermind the question of politics). Three groups applied for permits for different parts of the city, presumably in order to increase their presence. Dresden countered with a single large permit, the Neo-Nazis sued the city for hindering their constitutional right to assemble, and they won—including one procession permit. Meanwhile, various center and left groups were organizing with the express intent to stop the march. However, the state declared that any such attempts were illegal, confiscated advertising materials, and tried to shut down a least one website. This opened a, well, fire-storm of protest: is it permissible to suppress one group’s right to express itself, if the statement it wants to make is to prevent another group from exercising its freedom to make anti-democratic statements?

While I readily participated in the Menschenkette last Sunday, I hesitated to dedicate myself to civil disobedience in a foreign country. Plus, it was my off week for laundry, so as soon as I got the grocery shopping done, I was looking forward to a productive Saturday in the library before coming home to watch a movie with my roommate and some of her friends. Well, I should have known better. I had come home Friday night to see this sign hanging on the building across the Platz from us, and Saturday morning already there were signs of organizing. There was a heavy police presence when I walked to the grocery store, and by the time I got back, I had to ask permission to cross the police barricade before walking through a small but growing crowd of counter-protestors. The street where the trams run was blocked off in both directions, but I still made one futile attempt to get to the library. The public transit person at the main tram stop for my part of the city told me that not only were there no buses or trams running through there, but the university quarter was expected to be a major demonstration site.

Instead, my roommate and I stayed home, she painting furniture and I editing a manuscript. We listened to a local leftist radio station, which periodically interrupted its alternative music program with near-real-time reporting of the situation from participants calling in on their cell phones or using Twitter. From what I understood, the police had set up water canons, counter-protestors were occupying various intersections, and many of the expected, black-clothed demonstrators spent most of the day on their buses, not wanting to be inspected by the police. Nevertheless, there was violence, mostly by far-left extremists using the apparent provocations of the police—there to protect both sets of demonstrators from each other—to “stick it to the man.” I don’t if this was before or after the police stormed the offices of a left liberal group accused of organizing violence; the people who were arrested there got out of jail Monday morning. It strikes me that in the United States, the far-left is so small in numbers that it is not feared, but here it is a force to be reckoned with. More than 80 police were wounded. At the end of the day, there was no march in Dresden, and an attempted impromptu rally by Neo-Nazis who took the train from Dresden to Leipzig was prevented.

Obviously, I am glad I stayed home on Saturday. Sunday I head a German-Jewish community leader from München talk about life as a Jew in Germany as part of the well-respected Dresden Speaker Series. She briefly mentioned her doubts about not immigrating immediately after World War II—she survived forced labor—but went on to talk much more about the kind of politics that makes her feel like Germany really is home: namely, an open democracy in which violence of any kind of abhorred. Only since the reunification has she really been convinced that staying was the right choice. Today, German Jewry is the fastest growing diaspora population; they are finally training their own rabbis again; and still many synagoges and community centers have to make do with itinerant rabbis. She absolutely believes in the right of the state of Israel to exist, but as a German she exercises a certain amount of scrutiny, too. And she reminded the audience that if there is a “war” with Islam, it is really a war between pre- and post-modern Islam. Just as she, as an individual Jew, should not be held responsible for the actions of the Israeli state, so should peaceful Muslims not be held responsible for the violence of mis-guided Islamacist extremists. Unfortunately, since the reunification, far-right extremists in Germany have increasingly put aside their xenophobia just enough to team up with the anti-semitism of local Islamacists of Arabic origin. So the acceptance of Jews in Germany is still not assured, although now as before the Holocaust, their numbers have never amounted to more than 1% of the population.

I’ll close with an encouraging ad that has been playing on the street cars for the last week or so: a skinhead joins a group of people seeking shelter from a downpour under an overhang. He pushes the young black man next to him out into the rain to make more room. As the young man resigns himself to getting soaked, he looks up, only to see the umbrella a little old lady is holding over his head. Then all the other people from the overhang come out and put their umbrellas over and around him, too. They make sure he gets on the bus first, but the doors close just as the skinhead tries to get on too. This PSA is probably more wish than reality, but at least it’s an open step in the right direction.


[Editor's note: how did I get the name of this post wrong?? The events described happened in February, not September!]