Germany’s social order is falling apart

I’ve been in and out of Germany a lot in recent months and it’s hard not to gain the impression that its society is falling apart at the seams. Wherever you go, there seem to be angry political rallies and street protests. The news is full of violent attacks on politicians and activists. The fear is of a resurgence of far-right sentiments nearly eight decades after the fall of the Nazi regime. The concept of irrational German angst has become a bit of a cliché over the years but this time the threats to social cohesion feel very real. 

The sheer brutality of the attack is enough to appall people but it follows a wave of aggression against politicians and activists

The latest incident to shock the country happened on Friday when an activist was stabbed in the face in broad daylight. Michael Stürzenberger of the anti-Islam group Citizens’ Movement Pax Europa was about to speak at the market square of the southwestern city of Mannheim when he was attacked. Bystanders and police intervened, and the knife-wielding man turned his attention on them, killing a police officer and injuring five others. 

The sheer brutality of the attack in the middle of a German city is enough to appall people but it follows a wave of aggression against politicians and activists. Last year alone there were 3,691 offenses against officials and party representatives, eighty of which were violent. This year, the issue caused a huge debate when the Social Democrat Matthias Ecke was attacked by four men in Dresden in early May, receiving facial injuries that required surgery. A few days later, Berlin’s senator for economic affairs Franziska Giffey was injured when she was attacked from behind and hit in the head and neck with a “bag filled with hard contents,” according to police.

This series of assaults on politicians and activists fuel wider fears around the state of Germany’s post-war order. It wasn’t such a long time ago when the country had a reputation for being one of the most stable democracies in the world. West Germany bounced back from Nazism with low crime rates, an “economic miracle” starting in the 1950s and two major parties seemingly able to cover most voters’ needs. Despite proportional representation, the Social Democrats and the Christian Democrats shared over 70 percent of the vote from 1953 to 2005. Now polls suggest they are now heading for a record low of 46 percent and the right-wing Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is the second most popular party in many surveys.

The rise in political violence combined with a rapidly shifting party landscape in which a right-wing force is emerging as a major player reminds many Germans of the 1920-30s. AfD politicians and voters have long been called “Nazis” by their opponents, but now a new spate of scandals has sparked fears that far-right sentiments may be more embedded than political polling suggests. 

Over recent months, videos have appeared of people singing Nazis slogans to the 1999 party tune L’amour Toujours by the Italian DJ Gigi D’Agostino. In October last year, young people sang “Germany for the Germans, foreigners out” (Deutschland den Deutschen, Ausländer raus) when the song was played at a harvest festival in the northeastern state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. Recordings were posted on social media and it became a trend with further cases being reported to the police across the country.

It then made the headlines when a group of revelers at an exclusive bar on the island of Sylt filmed themselves singing the “foreigners out” version. One man was seen doing a Hitler salute and mimicking the dictator’s moustache with two fingers. The footage went viral, and the German press, politicians and public figures condemned the group as “champagne Nazis.” In another incident, students of the private school of Louisenlund in northern Germany were caught doing the same thing at a school party. Such blatant disregard for the country’s post-war taboos by members of the wealthy elite cast unsettling doubts over the idea that this only about the great unwashed. 

How much unease there is over the stability of the post-war consensus was evident when the German constitution celebrated its seventy-fifth birthday last week. Politicians and public figures tried to drum up a celebratory mood given the freedoms the constitution guaranteed West Germans from 1949 and now all Germans following reunification in 1990. But there was more doubt in the air than optimism. The political magazine Der Spiegel even featured a cover in which the German flag was draped over a swastika under the headline “Have we learnt nothing?”

The feverish moral panic has triggered a range of knee-jerk reactions. Details of the Sylt partygoers were published online, leading to some losing their jobs and attacks on their families. Gigi D’Agostino’s song will be banned from the Oktoberfest as well as a number of similar events around the country. Prominent politicians are pushing for a ban of the entire AfD. The political violence is to be combated with harsher punishments specifically for attacks on politicians. 

This verboten culture is unlikely to do anything but provoke a backlash. L’amour Toujours has already shot up the download charts, reaching number one on iTunes last Sunday. Many voters who have turned to the AfD because they feel marginalized by the political mainstream will feel confirmed in this should the party be banned. Violent attackers, like the man who stabbed the anti-Islam activist on Friday, aren’t going to be deterred by harsher sentencing.

Just banning things won’t stop this social erosion. Germany has undergone drastic social change over the last few years with mass immigration, Covid and economic uncertainty chipping away at its fragile sense of stability and cohesion. Instead of attempting to ban the symptoms of this shattering of certainties, politicians should be thinking about their causes. What Germany needs right now isn’t moral outrage but level-headed pragmatism. 

This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.