Is German history repeating itself?
Last May, Reinhard Schramm celebrated his 80th birthday. The leader of the small Jewish community of the German federal state of Thuringia was born almost a year before the end of World War II as a son of a Jewish mother and a Christian father, who remained faithful to his wife despite the heavy pressures of the Nazi regime.
Reinhard and his mother spent the last months of the war in hiding and survived the Holocaust. But all his Jewish family members were murdered.
Schramm, an engineer by profession, remained after the war in East Germany throughout the Communist regime. His son was imprisoned by the authorities for his opposition to the regime shortly before the collapse of Communism.
Schramm has been heading the Thuringian Jewish community for the last 12 years. Some 800 Jews, many of whom emigrated from the former Soviet Union, live in this federal state, which was part of East Germany. Most of them live in the regional capital, Erfurt, which has a long Jewish history that dates back to the 12th century. The oldest preserved synagogue in Europe is situated in Erfurt and was acknowledged last year as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Schramm is extremely worried. On September 1, while the world will commemorate 85 years since the start of World War II, Thuringia will elect a new parliament. The polls are predicting a historic victory for the Alternative for Germany (AfD) Party, whose branch in Thuringia, along with its leader Björn Höcke and youth organization, is considered by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution as extreme right. It would be the first time since the end of World War II that a party defined by the authorities as belonging to the extreme Right would win an election in Germany. The polls give the AfD in Thuringia around 30% of the votes, well ahead of the conservative Christian Democrats. The radical left party, Die Linke, of regional Prime Minister Bodo Ramelow, is expected to lose power, as coalition partners have deserted them. However, a new radical left party, Alliance Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW), named after its leader, who split from Die Linke, is expected to become the leading force of the Left in Thuringia, as in other states of the former communist East Germany.
On September 1, another regional election will occur in Saxony, where the AfD is expected to come in second. In the state of Brandenburg, where regional elections will be held on September 22, the AfD is also expected to win. Both Saxony and Brandenburg were parts of East Germany. The Office for the Protection of the Constitution regards the AfD’s branch in Saxony as extreme right, whereas the branch in Brandenburg is only suspected to be so. Eleven years after its foundation, the AfD can no longer be considered a marginal, passing political phenomenon. Moreover, labeling parts of the AfD as the extreme Right doesn’t seem to affect its popular support, especially in the former parts of East Germany – quite the contrary.
“For me, the AfD was, from its very beginning, a frightening threat,” Schramm told The Jerusalem Post. “Not only for Jews but for all democrats. What concerned us Jews was the relativization of National Socialism and its crimes in, for example, demanding a 180-degree turn in the German memory culture, criticizing the Memorial for the Holocaust in Berlin, or other expressions of trivializing fascism. All of that was enough to make us understand that this party strengthens neo-Nazism. I saw the threat in it, and I still do. The tone of the official expressions might have softened and changed, but this is not a normal party.
“I spoke with members of the AfD, and I told them that my duty as chairman of the Jewish community is to make sure that the AfD loses in the elections. On the other hand, I know that 70% of the people in Thuringia are against the AfD, so we shouldn’t panic.”
Schramm sees in the probable victory of the AfD in Thuringia a certain repetition of history.
“It has already happened in the past,” he said. “The Nazis took power in Thuringia in 1932, a year before it took power all over Germany. Therefore, I do make historical comparisons, trying to make others think and understand how dangerous the situation is for democracy and for Europe and not only for the few Jews that live here.”
Schramm, however, doesn’t see the AfD as a specifically German phenomenon.
“I feel ashamed of the AfD in Germany”, he stressed. “But in comparison with [Marine] Le Pen in France, or with nationalists in Austria and in Scandinavia, the AfD is more reserved in its positions.
“The danger is that through the growth of right-wing populism and new nationalism, the AfD will get stronger. That’s what I am mostly afraid of: the different nationalistic parties, that also trivialize fascism, will strengthen nationalist thought and positions in Germany in such a way that the AfD will profit from it. These parties are supporting each other, at the disadvantage of the democrats, who work against them.”
As in other parts of Germany, 2023 saw a sharp rise in antisemitic incidents, including an explosion of anti-Israel antisemitism, in Thuringia. Some 297 such incidents were registered last year by the local office of the Center of Research and Information on Antisemitism. The number of anti-Israel incidents sharply increased from three in 2022 to 101, mainly following October 7. Most of these incidents are connected to activists of the radical Left and members of Muslim immigrant communities.
While the regional government of Ramelow expressed full solidarity with Israel, the left-wing Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW) Party, founded in January this year, is radically anti-Israel, demanding an embargo on German weapons exports to Israel and accusing Israel of violating international law and committing war crimes.
The Central Committee of Jews in Germany assesses that the BSW is spreading Israel hate with its populistic and simplistic ideas.
“The reason that antisemitism in Germany is so dangerous is that we are facing a new form of it – left antisemitism,” warned Schramm. “I don’t forget who built the gas chambers in which my grandmother and uncle were murdered. They were not built by Muslims or left-wingers. But there are three forms of antisemitism, which also strengthen each other. They have a common thread, which is anti-Israelism that creates a different form of antisemitism. The right-wingers are supporting each other, the antisemites support each other. That creates in my eyes a real menace.”
IN FRONT of the Thuringian regional parliament, the Israeli flag waves next to those of Germany and of the federal state as a solidarity gesture. The Post asked Stefan Möller, the cochairman of Thuringia’s AfD and second on its list for the coming election, how he feels about that.
“It depends on the circumstances,” he answered in a rare interview with Israeli media. “I don’t accept the so-called virtue signaling, in which one tries to set a sign but no more than that. Some think it’s enough. I think it’s unsatisfying. What does it mean for German politics to express solidarity with Israel’s fight against external threats? Waving flags?
“I can imagine that many Israelis also feel somewhat taken for fools when they see what is really done here by the political system and how it reacts to internal threats to Jews in Germany. Handling Islamist violence is a hot topic in Germany, too, as it affects us and Jews, not only in Berlin but all over the country. It’s not enough to wave a flag.
“The state gave itself rules that, if respected, then coexistence between people having whatever religious beliefs, sexual orientations, or political convictions could function very well,” added Möller, a 49-year-old lawyer and deputy of the Landtag. “Our constitution clearly states that no one should be discriminated against. The law is there to apply it, but the will to do it is missing.
“We can see in Germany a political tendency of appeasement toward Muslim immigrants, who do not acknowledge the rules of the state of law.
“My contacts with the Jewish community are very limited. I don’t know how serious the threat level [to Jews] is right now, but I would generally say that the security situation will get much better if we govern Thuringia, because we will react to violations of rules in a much more consequential way.”
The Thuringian AfD’s other cochairman, Björn Höcke, a former history teacher born in West Germany, didn’t make himself available for an interview with the Post.
Höcke was condemned and fined last May by a German court for using a Nazi slogan, saying in a public speech three years ago, “all for Germany” – an expression that the SA paramilitary group of the Nazis used. Höcke defended himself by saying that he was innocent.
Nazi scandal surrounding AfD in Thuringia
A new Nazi scandal around the AfD Thuringia erupted recently, as the party chose to open its electoral program for the coming elections with a quote from a poem written by Nazi-sympathizer writer and poet Franz Langheinrich. Using such loaded historical references or expressions while pretending it has no connection to Germany’s Nazi past is one of the reasons the AfD in Thuringia is considered as extreme right.
Schramm said he is not afraid of Höcke or Möller, but of the influence the content of their speeches can have on their public.
“Everything that made Germany before went down the drain with it,” Möller answered, when asked what the Third Reich symbolizes for him personally. “All the chances that this nation had at the beginning of the 20th century were gone afterward because of what happened. It was a terrible time. The Holocaust, the wars of aggression. I am not a historian, so I can’t classify it historically, but I acknowledge what it was. I don’t want these times to be back, as others claim. It was a catastrophe for Germany and for large parts of Europe.”
Möller rejected the accusation that the AfD is a threat to democracy and accused his party’s political rivals of being antidemocratic:
“Democracy is defined by the right to participate and by the rule of law.
“Let’s look at the right to participate: Who wants to forbid other parties? Not us. Who puts obstacles in front of equal chances in politics? Not us.
“The German political establishment likes to criticize the situation in Hungary, in Poland, even the judicial reform in Israel. However, they fail to see that their own constitutional judges are political nominations. Only the established political system decides who sits in the high courts. Parties and groups that represent 20%-30% of the voters can’t be part of those bodies and others, despite the fact that it’s their right by the law.
“It’s very easy, then, to see who functions in an authoritarian way. I would say that we are acting in a much more democratic way than the other parties.”
Before the recent European elections in June, even Le Pen cut all relations with the AfD, after the party’s former head of list declared that not all SS members were criminals. More and more politicians in Germany refer to the AfD as an “abnormal party.”
What makes the AfD such a radical and dangerous party, even for other European far-right parties?
“It all depends from whose point of view one looks at this question,” said Möller. “We are not what people say about us. The claim that if the AfD gets to power, the Third Reich will be revived is total nonsense.
“When we organize public gatherings like those of our electoral campaign, you will always have a very small number of participants that are not to our taste and to whom we want no connection,” Möller stated, amid accusations of contacts between his party and neo-Nazis. “They do things that we don’t accept. But, the majority of the participants in our events are normal people.
“Nowadays, the terms ‘Nazi’ and ‘fascist Nazi’ are used in such an inflationary way that they have been degraded, and we need a much harsher terminology. Most of the people who used the terms ‘Nazi’ or ‘fascist’ can’t even define them. These terms have lost their impact and function.”
Möller admitted that being born in East Germany has shaped him. He sees the old division between East and West Germany as an important factor in the AfD’s success in Thuringia.
“In the West, we have a strong party system, with regular voters and families that have been voting for the same parties for decades,” he explained. “Such a thing does not exist in the east. Or, rather, rarely. Added to this is the fact that the economic and social problems in the east are much bigger, and that the people here have a much stronger feeling of being overpowered.
“That is the main reason why the AfD can score more here than in the West. Many left-wing voters in the east are very conservative in their life concepts. That favors us because this conservatism can’t be found anymore within the established political scene.”
Conservative and national?
“One can call it national,” agreed Möller. “Others would call it a connection to the homeland (Heimat). One knows what one stands for, what one is. One defends his identity and wants to decide alone about this identity. One is clear about what he wants and mostly what he does not want. This is a feeling that powerfully shapes people in the east.
“Many [in the former West] still don’t like to define themselves as Germans. They see themselves as cosmopolitans, Europeans. Many describe themselves through their beliefs or political views.
“The situation here is different, and that’s most probably the reason why we can have political cooperation with other parties, mainly on a communal level, since what is decisive for the people is the identity, the values, and not the politics.”
Distrust of the existing political establishment is also one cause of the new BSW Party’s mounting popularity.
“We see the influence of the BSW in polls on us,” admitted Möller. “From the heights of last year, we have lost 6%-7%. But the BSW has a horrendous effect on the party of the current prime minister. It has to do with what I mentioned before: basically, many Die Linke voters are conservatives and they feel more represented by Sahra Wagenknecht. For us, the BSW is a challenge but also a chance. The dynamics of the political system in Thuringia will become greater. Where there is a dynamic, there are new chances.”
But doesn’t Sahra Wagenknecht represent the old regime of the east?
“I wouldn’t say so,” said Möller. “She has certain ideological convictions that are coming from the zone of Communism. But do they meet reality today? She is very smart. However, I can’t say too much about her, as I haven’t dealt much with her.”
While the other parties plan a common “firewall” to stop the AfD from forming a coalition after the elections, the BSW is not boycotted by them. Möller doesn’t see a possible future coalition between AfD and BSW: “It’s true that we share most overlapping points with Sahra Wagenknecht and with the Christian Democrats. But both parties said very clearly that they don’t want to build a coalition with us. We have to consider that reality.”
MEANWHILE, SCHRAMM calls for a united emergency front after the elections to stop the AfD.
“In my eyes, the current situation is a state of emergency. Therefore we might need an emergency government, in which all democratic parties will sit together. We should explain to those who intend to vote and those who plan to stay at home: the AfD wants to scrap democracy. It presents itself as democratic so that it will get more votes. It exploits the situation so that people would become fans of their simple visions out of fear.
“For me, as a Jew, it’s very painful. I thought that World War II, foremost the Holocaust, had a more lasting impact on the German population.
“It’s not an issue of east Germany. Very often, it is presented in Israel and elsewhere as such. Saying so is offending toward us east Germans, and it’s simply a lie: Thirty-five years since the reunification of Germany were enough time to solve the specific problems of east Germany and end the existing, partially legitimate and largely ignored, dissatisfaction. The federal state has failed. Thirty-five years are a lot of time to change things. Therefore, one should be careful not to present the AfD as an east German problem.
“I am very unhappy about Wagenknecht. The antisemitic tones that one hears coming from her direction make me very pensive. We don’t need it. But it would be much worse if the AfD would come to power. It will behave totally differently than it does now.”