The Work I Did
Page 13
In his tightly scripted victory speech Trump said that he had led a ‘movement’ on the way to the presidency. By saying this, he was suggesting subliminally that he essentially refused to acknowledge the democratic institutions. The reference to a movement among the people has been a concept often used by authoritarian leaders to escape the control of democratic authorities. ‘Only incorrigible inhabitants of cloud-cuckoo-land can seriously believe that now, in possession of such great power, he will allow those powers who were unable to prevent him from marching all the way to the White House to put the thumb-screws on him,’ Richard Herzinger warned in Die Welt.8 Even if, because of the system of checks and balances in the American constitution, Trump presents himself in a more moderate light than he said he would, he has contaminated the political climate in his country for years if not decades. The losers of the American dream were in search of a scapegoat, and Donald Trump has given them that scapegoat. In his view, Muslims, Latin Americans and the Chinese – in fact migrants in general – are responsible for leaving the white middle class behind, and taking their jobs. Next in line for condemnation is globalisation. America has for the first time a president whose declaration of war on the democratic establishment has an extraordinary effect on right-wing populists in Europe, because they sense a chance to do the same, and eventually to introduce a return to nationalism.
The political scientist Albrecht von Lucke has summed up Trump’s notions of democracy. Trump’s friend–enemy ideology, his emphasis on internal politics and rejection of the international stage has led him to the most serious problem that also explains the jubilation on the part of European populists. ‘Trump might only become the spearhead of a new form of democracy that no longer sees itself in a pluralist and diverse sense, but ethnically homogeneous. Victor Orbán has also gauged the actual dimension of the election in his own terms, when he invented a victory of “true democracy”. What appears here is a different form of democracy, without a constitutional state and without an opposition.’9 Von Lucke fears that in these democracies the will of the people is being realised by a charismatic leader, entirely in the spirit of the old Nazi motto: ‘One people, one Reich, one Führer.’
In Europe this development has fallen on fertile ground. The current campaign by right-wing populists in the Western world is successful because they can fight for and win over the socially ‘left-behind’, while the bourgeois middle class slumbers like Sleeping Beauty, unable to interpret the dangers of a fragmented society that has lost its solidarity. Anxiety and ignorance seem to be responsible for the fact that the number of drowned refugees leaves us cold and makes us close borders and watch as the hatred of the right takes effect. These events appear to herald a rerun of the darkest period in humanity’s history.
The political indifference that Brunhilde Pomsel describes in the milieu that shaped her in the smart district of Berlin-Südende can also be found today among the predominantly helpful Germans. They reacted without particular protest to the demonstrations of the PEGIDA movement, which, at the peak of its popularity, as in a rally in Dresden, the Turkish-German speaker Akif Pirinçci stirred up the population in a spirit of hatred and the human dignity of Moslems was publicly insulted.
It was perhaps only when Brunhilde Pomsel missed her Jewish neighbour Rosa Lehmann Oppenheimer’s soap that she became aware of what was going on around her. When her Jewish friend Eva Löwenthal disappeared in 1943, Brunhilde Pomsel could have known that Jews weren’t simply being resettled in the east and that concentration camps were not merely being used to ‘re-educate’ people who were critical of the regime, as propaganda wanted to make people believe according to her account. But she didn’t know. Pomsel should interest us because she draws our attention to something: ourselves, our anxieties, our arrogance and our disdain for a freedom that has been fought for in a difficult and bloody struggle – and a misunderstanding of how unity breaks down and brutalisation occurs in times of globalisation.
Until Hitler’s seizure of power no one in the Pomsel family was prejudiced against the Jews. Pomsel describes her circle of friends at the age of twenty-two as an apolitical ‘clique’ of spoilt boys. One has an image in front of one’s eyes: the boys in white shirts, with braces or in jackets, in heavy leather shoes, their hair combed neatly to the side, gathering with the girls in their fashionable dresses. All a bit more elegant than the average Berliner. A motorbike was a sensation; the beer shared in the pub was a compensation and escape in a time of economic decline and political upheaval. Only very few people had a telephone, only adults read the newspapers, radio and television were still in the developmental stage, the modern age was still only just beginning, and politics was completely uninteresting to the ‘clique’. There were no Jews in their circle of friends; her close friend Eva Löwenthal was an exception.
Before 1933 nobody thought about the Jews anyway; it was all invented by the Nazis later on. It was only National Socialism that made us aware that they were different people. Later that was all part of the planned programme for the extermination of the Jews. We had nothing against Jews. On the contrary: my father was very glad to have some Jewish customers, because they had the most money and always paid well. We played with the children of the Jews. There was one girl, Hilde – she was nice. And next door I remember a Jewish child my age, and I played with him sometimes, and then there was our Rosa Lehmann Oppenheimer; I remember her too. So it never occurred to us that there was anything wrong with them. When we were growing up, nothing at all. And when National Socialism came closer and closer, we still didn’t understand what might come. And we waved at our beloved Führer. And why not? First people wanted work and money. We had lost everything in the war, and the Versailles Treaty defrauded us, we were later taught.
None of us had any idea what was coming our way with Hitler.
If Brunhilde Pomsel claims not to have understood in advance what Adolf Hitler’s seizure of power would mean, today, in the age of the mass media and the internet, that is no longer possible – or barely – in any Western society. Every negative spin, almost every speech, every new bit of taboo-busting by the right-wing populists goes globally ‘viral’ on the internet, is passed on unquestioningly on social networks and is permanently stored. It has been proven for a long time that Facebook and other platforms have become the central medium for radicalisation and mobilisation. Even so, Facebook denies any responsibility for the distribution of hate posts and propaganda. Independent of any truth content, the Facebook algorithm provides everything the radical heart could crave, reinforcing prejudices and confirming the user’s existing worldview. The internet is becoming a medium for spewing out hatred, since the elements of discontent can come together more easily than before.
Right-wing populists understand that they can reach a big public on the internet without journalists, using an old strategy like the one used by the National Socialists, namely defaming the press as ‘the lying press’ – a concept that Joseph Goebbels used to denounce his critics. Conversely, right-wing populists in the present day are aiming for a de-rationalisation of reality. ‘Post-truth’, the word of the year in 2016, is a term for the strategy of right-wing populists to gain support by spreading lies and whipping up hysteria.
Donald Trump’s election campaign would have been much less successful without the defamation of the press and the distribution of the supposed truth via social media, whose networks provide a refuge in which users can uninhibitedly exchange thoughts and information with like-minded people.10 The right-wing populists know how to make unrestrained use of mistrust for the purposes of agitation. The conspiracy theories surrounding the consequences of the financial crisis as well as the fear of globalisation and growing numbers of refugees are employed to seduce people who feel that their situation is precarious. Young people tend not to use conventional sources for information: a study of 90,000 Austrians reached the shattering conclusion that 85 per cent of those aged between eighteen and thirty-five distrust the traditional media.11 No less im
pressive is a study carried out for the Trust Barometer: between 2015 and 2016 the global PR agency Edelman questioned over 30,000 people from a total of twenty-eight countries around the world about their trust in elites, and in more than half of countries in Europe the general public’s trust in politics, the economy and not least the media has fallen to a level below 50 per cent.12
In Europe a justified concern is growing that the spread of fake reports and lies on the internet could massively influence elections, a topic much discussed after the election of the 45th US president. Quite rightly too, because Trump’s advocates, including the online magazine Breitbart News Network, which has been described as racist, have spread fake reports over the internet that stir up feelings against Muslims and other minorities. Breitbart also reported all kinds of rumours about presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, presenting them as facts. Clinton was not only attacked because of the email scandal and was described as a money-grubbing puppet of Wall Street but, in spite of accusations that were refuted long ago, she was also held responsible for the attack on the American consulate in Benghazi in Libya on 11 September 2012. In addition, there were rumours of a new sex scandal involving her husband, Bill Clinton, even though no proof was provided.
In Germany too, media outlets such as Compact magazine very successfully spread crude conspiracy theories, which are in every respect a match for Trump’s. Compact speaks of the deliberate Umvolkung – ethnic cleansing – of the German people by migrants; democratically legitimate parties are defamed as ‘traitors to the people’; or unexamined news items are put out about rapes that are supposed to have been committed by refugees – these are later revealed as lies, but can still spread their power like wildfire. Nothing is sacred to right-wing populists, and as in the United States the strategy of rabble-rousing and fake reports can bear fruit because what Joseph Goebbels could ‘only’ circulate via radio and film can acquire much greater power on the internet.
Brunhilde Pomsel remembers in her own way the beginning of escalating rabble-rousing, which would later lead to the mass murder of the Jews.
But how, what, why? We didn’t know. Until that terrible business in November 1938 – the night of the Reich pogrom.
We were all shocked that such a thing could happen. That they should have beaten up Jewish people, people of any kind, and that they had broken the windows of Jewish shops and taken things out. In all parts of the city. Well yes, that’s where it really began. We were shaken awake. And then somebody, a friend or relative, said that somewhere neighbours had been taken away by people in uniform. They collected them and drove them away in trucks. Where to? No one knew. Of course that was shocking for everyone who had never paid much attention to politics, and that included us… terrible.
Is our present-day passive horror enough to resist the creeping radicalisation of parts of the population against minorities? The terrible events described by Brunhilde Pomsel, which were impossible to resist in those days because the dictatorship was in complete control of everything, had been preceded by a slow process of agitation. The Nazis also started with defamation and propaganda against the Jews, before anti-Jewish laws were introduced after the seizure of power, and in the end there was open persecution after the state-ordained Reich pogrom night, which encountered no resistance from the German population.
In 2016 Donald Trump’s populist rhetoric actually revives memories of the darkest times, because the mechanisms and effects of stirred-up hatred are the same as during the rise of the Nazi dictatorship. If the number of attacks on Muslims rose briefly at first after the assault on the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001, the authorities were able to identify a subsequent fall-off in such incidents. Even before Donald Trump’s election victory it was feared that the number of crimes committed against minorities and particularly against Muslims would rise again. In fact the number of hate crimes in the United States leapt after election day, 8 November 2016. The Southern Poverty Law Center recorded over 900 reports of harassment and possible hate crimes immediately after Trump’s election.13
A mixture of fear, passivity and ignorance about right-wing populists also left the people of Britain shocked once they became aware of the consequences of Brexit, and the number of criminal attacks on foreigners multiplied the day after the referendum. Only a few days after the British voted to leave the European Union, the Metropolitan Police provided figures that demonstrate a direct correlation with pre-Brexit propaganda, primarily directed against eastern European immigrants. In London alone, between the vote on 23 June and the end of July 2016, there were over 2,000 racially motivated attacks.14 While Polish citizens in the UK were themselves affected by racism, on 11 November 2015 far-right organisations had demonstrated in Poland against Warsaw’s proposal to take in refugees, chanting ‘Poland for the Poles!’ Participants in the march were not only typical nationalists, but also people who had been assumed to belong to the political centre.15
In Germany a wave of xenophobia assumed dramatic form as long ago as the 1990s, with fatal attacks on asylum-seekers’ refuges. These included the sieges of hostels in Hoyerswerda in 1991 and Rostock-Lichtenhagen in 1992, as well as the deadly attacks on families of Turkish origin in Mölln in 1993 and Solingen in 1996, in which a total of eight people lost their lives. Since the refugee crisis the mood in Germany has worsened. The Amadeu Antonio Foundation and PRO ASYL, in a chronicle that covered only the year 2015, registered 1,072 attacks on refugee hostels, including 136 arson attacks. A total of 267 people were injured. The rise in these incidents is particularly concerning against the background of the rise of the AfD, which with its xenophobic slogans and a direct connection with the PEGIDA movement helped right-wing acts of violence achieve record levels. The figure for these attacks in 2016 was more than 44 per cent higher than the previous year. These are exclusively attacks in which people are harmed or could have lost their lives when stones and firebombs are thrown at their hostels, or they are attacked with pistols and explosives. But in comparison to the 1990s, there are very few counter-protests against these attacks.
Under the Nazi dictatorship, Brunhilde Pomsel’s only possible response to the developments was to take horrified note of them. But what about us now? In the 1990s, after the attacks in Mölln and Solingen, for weeks at a time concerts and candlelit demonstrations showed a country that refused to accept this form of prejudice. In Frankfurt alone, in December 1992, 150,000 people took part in a concert with the motto ‘Heute die! Morgen du!’ (Them today, you tomorrow). In Munich on 6 December 1992 more than 400,000 people took to the streets and formed a candlelit procession against xenophobia and the far right.16
And today? Is the cosy lethargy of the moderate bourgeoisie not partly responsible for the fact that in 2016 the German Federal Criminal Office anxiously expects further serious right-wing acts of violence? In regard to the new bogeyman of the ‘refugee’, the otherwise very divided far-right movement seems to have reached a far greater consensus than that achieved by what we may still assume to be the overwhelming majority of people attached to the democratic structure. Can a society with democratic principles afford to allow opponents of a new home for asylum seekers in Clausnitz in Central Saxony to block the provision of accommodation for refugees? The pictures have been seen on the internet, all over the world: about 100 demonstrators blocking a bus full of refugees as it attempted to reach a hostel and chanting ‘We are the people!’ They prevented the passengers from leaving the bus, so that the frightened refugees from war zones could only be brought to safety with the help of the police. Can we afford to wait until, like Joseph Goebbels’s secretary, we only watch the terrible events in silent horror before getting on with the business of the day?
If we think about Hitler and the Third Reich, the Holocaust is presumably still the greatest act of barbarism of all time. But the history of National Socialism began long before that. The first attempted putsch was in 1923, and the Nazi façade and ideology were built up step by step. Even if, in her saf
e little world, Brunhilde Pomsel showed no interest in the political development of her country, it was still insidiously taking place. Anyone who dares to make comparisons with the present day is not relativising Nazism. It is not a comparison in the sense of a one-to-one match, it is a matter of recognising signs of the danger of new radical trends in the present – and those signs, taken all together, are grave enough. Right-wing populists are once again awakening the lowest instincts in the population, by portraying particular groups of people as inferiors. In the end, people hate other people as a way of feeling better about themselves, in the absence of any sense of self-worth. Contempt and hatred become collective self-empowerment. The willingness of populists to resort quite openly to racist rhetoric, or to threaten their political opponents with their removal, can be shown with reference to their inflammatory speeches.
In December 2015, Donald Trump, to thunderous applause from his supporters, advocated a travel ban for Muslims and, a short time later, racial profiling: that is, action by the police against people who are held to be suspicious on the basis of their skin colour, religion, nationality or ethnic origin, and the possibility of arrest on those grounds.17
In October 2016, the parliamentary party leader of the AfD, Björn Höcke, called for the removal of ‘elites’: ‘We have a completely exhausted old elite, as I call it. We don’t just have old parties, we have old media, we have an old elite. Some things will need to be cleared away in this country, and this old elite is so exhausted that it has to go. We will have to dispose of that old elite.’18 His exhortation fatally recalls a speech given by Joseph Goebbels in July 1932, a good six months before the Nazi seizure of power, in a radio broadcast: ‘We do not need to negotiate with parties and systems hostile to us except in so far as we want to remove them.’19 Less than a year later the National Socialists came to power and began removing their political opponents.