«Don’t be hardened»
On the cultural policy implications of the elections in Thuringia and Saxony
By Thomas Oberender
In September 1997, two children playing on the forecourt of the Jena Theatre discovered a suitcase with a Nazi swastika on it and handed it to the theatre, thinking it was a forgotten prop. When someone opened the case the next day, they were shocked to find a working bomb containing 10 grams of TNT, although the detonator was missing its battery.
This bomb was a warning, planted by the Jena NSU (National Socialist Underground), before the perpetrators went underground a year later and committed a series of murders of people with a migrant background that shook the whole of Germany.
I take this story from the book ‘Volkstheater’ by journalist and author Peter Laudenbach, who meticulously researched around 100 cases of right-wing extremist attacks on festival organisers, directors, cultural bloggers and gallery owners between 2016 and 2021. He analyses the patterns of the right-wing populist culture war that became visible in these cases, as well as the emergence of threatening alliances that, starting with the AfD’s cultural policy statements in state parliaments, led and continue to lead to enemy image markings and intimidation practices by right-wing extremist actors beyond parliament.
This chronicle of a new right-wing cultural struggle makes it clear that the electoral success of the AfD in the new federal states will not only change cultural policy, but has already changed it. The fact that this suitcase bomb was detonated in front of the Jena Theatre also affects me directly, as I grew up in Jena, saw my first theatre performances there and later returned to Jena as a stage technician for guest performances at the Rudolstadt Theatre. I have dedicated a large part of my working life to the world that only needed a single battery to explode.
In 1989, a jolt went through Germany and Eastern Europe, overturning the post-war European order overnight through velvet revolutions. As the years passed, change remained one-sided. In the years after 1989, change became too much the task of others, of those in the East, in Eastern Europe, in the rest of the world. The Federal Republic did well.
Today’s young generation of politicians has grown up with the experience of historical continuity. The old Federal Republic, which they experienced as young people, was founded as a democratic response to fascism and the experiences of the Weimar Republic and, despite various crises, developed into a stable society with liberal values and a strong economy. Its self-confidence and self-image have never been shaken by anything that has happened in the new federal states, for example. My grandmother from Sonneberg lived in four German states, which must seem fantastic to someone born in Hannover in 1980.
For this generation of West German politicians, the only shadows over the continuity of a socio-economic continuum were the sooty clouds of pollution and species extinction. The ‘Greens’ stood for this correction. In this generation, a missionarism that is taken for granted and stems from the experience of the superiority of their model lives on.
Throughout Europe, the party political landscape was changing, while little changed in the democratic people’s parties of the Federal Republic of Germany. When the ‘Greens’ appeared, this was seen as a process that threatened the system. As if the ‘hippies’ wanted to ruin Germany. When ‘Die Linke’ appeared on the political scene, they were derisively greeted as the undead voices of the GDR dictatorship. And when German EU sceptics, economic conservatives and anti-Nato activists founded the AfD, it stood from the outset for the return of Hitler. Jan N. Lorenzen’s documentary ‘We Were in the AfD’ takes a chilling look at this development.
And now this party is winning 32.8 per cent in Thuringia and 30.6 per cent in Saxony. What’s
And now this party is winning 32.8 per cent in Thuringia and 30.6 per cent in Saxony. What’s wrong with the easterners? What makes up the AfD and what has prevailed in this party has its origins in West Germany and also has a West German history, from the ‘recruitment stop’ for guest workers after the 1973 oil crisis to the paranoid ‘Heidelberg Manifesto’ of German professors in 1981 and Thilo Sarrazin’s controversial proposals for a new social and demographic policy in his 2011 book ‘Deutschland schafft sich ab’, two years before the AfD was founded.
Even if the AfD is kept out of state governments in Thuringia and Saxony, it will have a greater influence on the policies of the other parties. It will continue to target unwelcome cultural actors with its parliamentary inquiries and indeed push the ‘boundaries of what can be said’, which it has been deliberately expanding for years, further and further into zones of disrespect and rhetorical and political escalation that profoundly change our standards of what is normal or civilised. It is no longer enough to shake our heads.
Behind Björn Höcke, the leading candidate in Thuringia and the extreme right wing of the AfD, there is a spin doctor. His name is Götz Kubitschek and, as a far-right publicist, he plays roughly the same mastermind role for Björn Höcke that Steve Bannon played as a far-right ideologue and publicist for Donald Trump. The terrible truth of this election day in Thuringia and Saxony is that Björn Höcke’s AfD actually has a plan. Its political opponents in the election campaign define themselves primarily as anti-AfD, but what is their own vision?
When people long for an alternative,» says philosopher Lea Ypi, «they usually turn to where it appears. At the moment, only the right is formulating a radical critique of the system and promising a different future. The social left has so far failed to do so. In part, it defends the status quo. As if what we have is great for everyone.’
The founding of the ‘Greens’ has made the party programmes of the SPD and CDU greener. The AfD strengthens the discordian tendencies of our time, the dissolution of ‘objective truths’, and in return fuels chaos and fear. Apparently, the party suggests, only strong leaders from its ranks and a homogenised body of people can save us from ruin. Well-known TV reporter Thilo Mischke reached that conclusion in his documentary «Right. German. Radikal’ came very close to this conclusion. The discordant politics of the AfD are the prelude and background music to a nationally oriented cultural revolution, the end of which will be the end of democracy as we know it.
The ‘Germany first’ propaganda unleashed by AfD politics is dangerously close to the current federal government’s ‘turnaround’ policy and its cultural policy consequences, which are hinted at in the latest draft budget. It also clearly emphasises national priorities. The budget of a national ‘flagship’ such as the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation is to be increased by 17 million, while the budget of the Federal Cultural Fund is to be halved and funding for the Association of Independent Production Houses is to be cut altogether.
The Foreign Office’s budget for securing peace and stability is to be cut by almost a billion, the cuts in humanitarian aid and crisis prevention are even more drastic, and the budget for maintaining cultural relations is to be slashed by a good billion, leading to drastic cuts in German intermediary organisations such as the DAAD or the Goethe Institute and already triggering a first wave of institute closures and regional reforms.
The logic of the current government’s ‘turning of the tide’ not only proclaims a geopolitical ‘system rivalry’ between the Western world and China and Russia, but also resonates with a domestic political system challenge in which constitutionally oriented actors are confronted with new cultural nationalists, of which the AfD is the vanguard. In view of the new budget proposals, I can imagine the AfD breathing a ‘bravo’. The threatened cuts in federal cultural funding are hitting precisely those places in our cultural landscape that temporarily enliven, network and challenge our national cultural scene with alternative perspectives in the form of festivals and innovation initiatives, and that oppose the diffuse ‘national culture’ that the AfD wants to promote.
Why are we killing it? Why are we endangering international platforms such as the HAU, the FFT in Düsseldorf or the Moussonturm in Frankfurt, from which the German-speaking theatre scene has received its most innovative impulses in recent decades? Without these venues, the work of Rimini Protokoll, Gob Squad or Florentina Holzinger, to name but a few, would not have been possible and would have had a huge impact on the entire theatre system. In particular, the European Centre for the Arts Dresden, based in Hellerau, Saxony, does incredibly important cultural work in the region and far beyond, and has long been the target of hostility from the AfD.
Has change become too exhausting? Have venues for open, controversial, external discussion such as the Frankfurt Book Fair, the Berlinale or the documenta become too consensus-breaking to continue to enjoy the protective hand of state policy? A budget cut of 600,000 euros, such as in the case of the Moussonturm, where Rainer Werner Fassbinder staged his plays, cannot be compensated for by cost-cutting measures and is a frightening sign for the Fassbinders of today.
What has made these places, so important for cultural transfer and transformation, so unpopular with today’s politicians? And what does this mean for the academy in the near future? In an essay on the question of how it is still possible to talk about the Gaza conflict in Germany today, sociologist Teresa Koloma Beck points to a discursive escalation that, in the field of culture and science, focuses almost exclusively on who is allowed to say what and under what conditions, who is allowed to participate in this discourse at all and who is excluded from it. And the matter itself?
Today, in societies that consider themselves democratic and open, the accusation of anti-Semitism can affect anyone, and so real experiences are pushed out of the common ground. It is replaced by a new pressure to position oneself, and the debate becomes more polarised, directing all energy towards preserving one’s own legitimacy. If you want to understand something of the current cultural shift, it helps to pay attention to this debate and the tendency to leave the social and societal dimension of this political discussion as a minefield to apparent ‘desperados’. What is unmistakably new is that the conflict is taking place not only in the Middle East, but here in our own country.
Nobody wants to hear it, but the AfD has already arrived in terms of cultural policy. It has submitted the first draft of an anti-BDS resolution to the Bundestag. Nothing protects the new right more effectively than its proclaimed loyalty to Israel. So let us not ask at this point what these elections in Thuringia and Saxony mean for future cultural policy, but rather what its discordian instinct has already done wrong.
Why is a ‘Germany first’ cultural policy already emerging, as the current draft budget suggests? The AfD is not yet in power, but it is already powerful because of the pressure for national and identity-oriented cultural policy decisions.
The GDR perished because of ‘business as usual’. Is that what threatens us today? As ‘business as usual’ against the AfD, which makes any further question of what for and where to go beyond the AfD superfluous? The only real reform policy after Willy Brand and Gerhard Schröder was combined in 2022 with the Green concept of initiating a sustainable reorganisation of our economic system within the traffic light coalition. The sordid leaked text messages of publisher Matthias Döpfner make it clear what opposition this idea met with.
Germany has long been rich enough for nothing to change and for every crisis to be solved with money. But the money is gone. The BRICS countries are rolling up their sleeves and Asia is smiling. The money with which the old Federal Republic could simply ‘carry on as before’, hoping to transform the East for the better with food and economic cures, is becoming scarcer in times of war.
The houses in Jena and Weimar are pretty, and the new motorways have quieter asphalt. The fact that the houses in the town centres from Bautzen to Kühlungsborn now belong mainly to West Germans is hardly mentioned. The countryside is blossoming, especially where the exodus of 2 million people after reunification has left the region drastically depopulated. In Saxony, the AfD has made its biggest gains in the former mining regions, the sparsely populated areas and the border regions with Poland. The right-wing populist party is flourishing where the countryside is suffering.
We need new courage to accept this unspeakable, this different view of the course of history in the reality of our country as it is. It is a tragedy that the AfD of all parties and the Sahra Wagenknecht alliance are claiming it for themselves. Business as usual will not help. The undeclared ‘united front’ against the AfD has made it stronger in a bizarre way, as long as this united front does not develop an alternative idea.
Preserving the common house must not mean weakening the places for pluralistic views in the draft budget, because they are often troublemakers too. Democracy thrives on dissent. The fear of fierce controversies, which is inherent in every drama, must not become an argument for cultural politicians to retreat. Because theatres are places where conflicts are played out in an exemplary way, without diminishing their perspectives and motives, they are places where the NSU placed the explosive suitcases with the Nazi swastika. Because the identitarian activists want to blow up the idea that our society as a whole is based on the open negotiation of conflicts.
Yes, the money that could be used to moderate anger is getting scarcer. The leaked text messages of Matthias Döpfner at the beginning of the current reform government anticipated what will drive the old Federal Republic from 2021 onwards. Resistance to real change, to a real change in policy, and the hope that an elected reform government can first be split by its reform-averse partner, then blown up, and the despised old East somehow kept under water as a nasty burden. We must dream of a different future, in the East and in the West.
And finally, when I ask what impact the current elections might have on future cultural policy, I think first of all of the recent calls for a boycott of the Federal Republic of Germany, such as ‘Strike Germany’ or ‘Ravers for Palestine’, which are unprecedented in our country’s history. The Federal Republic was internationally popular, and suddenly for many intellectuals and artists it is a cultural no-go area. Suddenly, the readers of the New York Times are shaking their heads at domestic developments. Now we are the problem country. And this at a time when we have a Green Foreign Secretary and a Green Secretary of State for Culture and the Media.
In recent years, I have signed petitions on behalf of cultural workers abroad who have been threatened by right-wing nationalist politicians. In Hungary, Poland, the Netherlands, and now in Slovakia and Northern Macedonia, we have seen exactly what happens when right-wing populists take over ministries and courts, replace managers in cultural organisations and state media, dismantle funding structures for independent cultural producers, and establish a new identity policy based on origin, language, nation and religion.
In Peter Laudenbach’s book you can read in detail how this has been happening for more than a decade, but there is also the movement of the ‘many’ that resists. The ‘united front’ of the many against the participation of the AfD in the state parliaments is still holding, and in Thuringia minority governments have been formed instead of tearing down the firewall to the Höcke faction. But the stones of this wall are getting warmer and warmer. We need to do more to counter the AfD’s determined culture war than the brave cheerfulness of remaining colourful. Don’t let yourself be hardened in these hard times,’ sang the system blaster Wolf Biermann. The majority in Thuringia and Saxony voted for democratic parties.