Nazism Not Good, Claim Protesters

We stumbled upon an anti-Nazi demonstration a couple of weeks ago.

We were headed to Dresden’s main train station at the heart of the city to buy me a new public transit month pass, when we noticed a number of law enforcement vans and SWAT teams decked out in body armor searching people. After getting off the tram, we had to pass through a row of police officers, who stopped us and asked if we were there for the rally. Turns out we’d arrived just in time for a major anti-Nazi march, which was convening at, and would shortly be embarking from, the train station.

These happen pretty frequently in Germany. Dresden’s last big anti-Nazi rally was about 8 months ago. They tend to draw out lots of liberal young adults, many of them punks with Kool-Aid hair, most of them dressed in black, a lot of them likely socialists. More or less the same people you’d see at a vegan march or an Iraq War protest. Rally kids.

As a foreigner, I find these anti-Nazi rallies particularly interesting. Considering that people generally rally to bring awareness to issues that the public is split on or undecided over, could there really be a need for a rally informing us that Nazism is bad? Haven’t we all pretty much been in agreement on that since — y’know — 1945?

For an American, sure, it’s that simple. Of course, for an American, Nazis have been considered enemies of the State from Day 1, or darn close to it. In Germany, it’s a little more complicated. For Germans, the Nazis of World War II aren’t simply the sadistic Aryan caricatures that they are to most Americans. For Germans, the connections are often personal, and the reasons are visible. The Nazis were the ones who temporarily brought Germany out of a devastating economic tailspin, creating jobs and slashing Germany’s whopping post-WWI unemployment rate. They’re the ones who built the Autobahn, for crying out loud.

Obviously Germans today are aware of the atrocities the Nazi party wreaked during WWII. They’re painfully aware. It’s a burden every German — whether they were alive during WWII or not — carries. (This fantastic piece from the German news magazine Der Spiegel goes into it more deeply than I could ever attempt to as a non-German — and it’s in English.)

But the point is, Germany’s relationship with Nazism is a complicated one, and nowhere in Germany is this complex relationship more apparent than it is in the former East Germany, particularly here in the state of Saxony. Thanks largely to high unemployment and a general sense of disappointment in Democracy’s promises of prosperity, a rising number of young East Germans are finding a sympathetic ear in thinly-veiled neo-fascism.

Germany’s far right political party, the Nationaldemokratische Partei or NPD, never overtly associates itself with neo-Nazism, but openly touts ideas such as making German citizenship impossible for any “African, Asian or Oriental”. By and large in Germany, the NPD is considered racist and extremist and not taken very seriously since it’s never gained the minimum 5 percent of votes required for the party to be able to send delegates to the German Parliament. But in the 2004 state election in Saxony, the NPD won 9.2 percent of the overall vote. The next state election will be next year, and the NPD is expected to retain its seats. They’re doing it with the help, primarily, of young, single, male, blue collar Saxons who feel the NPD is the only party that will listen to them. (You can read a little more about their history and recruitment methods, which focus on milking public fear and anger at vulnerable moments, here.)

So that’s why the left-wing rally kids feel the need to remind everyone that Nazism is a bad thing.

Though I suspect this fight won't be as simple as saving the sea otters.

JEM