This article is the second piece in the series Neo-Nazis and Anti-Fascism in Germany since the 1990s. The rest of the series can be found here.

TLB: Let’s start with who you are and a bit of background about yourself.

I grew up in the 1990s in Brandenburg, which was a relevant time for things related to Nazis and antifascism. Those were the so-called Baseballschlägerjahre [baseball bat years], which are known because there were so many organised Nazis. They were extremely present, and there were many attacks. I was politicised through this because I had issues with them already when I was quite young—also because I came from a left-wing family.

There was always the feeling that they were much stronger and bigger than us; they had bull necks and did martial arts, while we were thin, small punks. But I had luck in my school. I know people who were the only left-wing person in their schools. Their whole school was full of Nazis.

TLB: Why were there so many Nazis in the East?

I always find it important to look at the complexity. For one, there was always this narrative that the DDR was an antifascist state. We were created it as a state to prevent fascism, but most of the people in the DDR were still Nazis, even if the state had de-nazified better than the West. In the DDR, the leadership was all gone, but the smaller people were left. Many of them had right-wing positions, but simply couldn’t say them out loud.

There were already Nazi groups at the end of the DDR, but the state decided not to make it public because, officially, we had no Nazis. So they decided to hide it. Likewise, actual Antifas were not supported by the state, even if there was an antifascist self-understanding. But after the Wende [German reunification], there was a lot of unemployment and fear because so much had changed. Then it really came out. It really exploded. It was like a valve that opened up.

TLB: So people were already right-wing but hidden, and then were able to be openly right-wing?

But also right-wingers from the West who went to the DDR explicitly to mobilise; that was really present in the 90s. There were different structural issues that allowed Nazis to so effectively organise and militarise. There were also a lot of different militant groups who would do trainings in the forests. So when you went to pick mushrooms, you could accidentally wander into a paramilitary training.

There were also a lot of small right-wing parties that were created, such as REPs (Die Republikaner) and DVU (Deutsche Volksunion), who tried to get voters in the East. These were mainly West German parties that went into the East thinking it was a good moment because all the workers had lost their jobs. Christian Worch from Hamburg, for example, came up with the plan in the 90s and 2000s to take over youth clubs and make them into places for young nationalists. In the small city where I grew up, there were [Rudolf] Hess posters in the youth clubs. They really recruited people there and politicised them.

At the same time, everything that was left-wing seemed to be behind us somehow. It had not worked out, and because of that could not work. That made things for us on the left really difficult. You couldn’t get far with socialism because, at the time, people said they had tried that already and it hadn’t worked. They didn’t want to have it again.

TLB: Is that why you moved to Berlin?

Many moved away at the time who were left-wing, also generally out of East Germany. I have my own theory that all the cool people went away, and those who stayed were either Nazis themselves or those that had no problem with them or protected them.

And there were also many people who said the Neo-Nazi was perfectly nice: ‘He’s the son of my friend and they’re all good kids. And sometimes when they drink too much, sure, then they say dumb stuff. But they’re not monsters.’ And we always heard things like, ‘It’s your own fault, when you’re running around with green hair like a punk’ or ‘Exactly, that’s what you get when you run your mouth’. But it was these kids who murdered people.

TLB: Is this what you were referring to earlier as the Baseballschlägerjahre?

Nazis were on the move with baseball bats. There were actually a lot of attacks, and many murders. This was exactly the time of my youth, when I grew up. I myself had a lot of experiences of Nazi violence, and so entered antifascist formations pretty quickly because it was necessary for survival. 

Many of these murders were also only recognised as political many years later. There was the question of whether it was enough to be a political murder when it was Nazis who murdered someone who was homeless. Did they have to have said something which made it clear that it was right-wing extremism?

And when you look at the sentences that these people got, it was always super minimal because they were so young. Many of them were minors—17 or something—and they killed people who didn’t fit into their world view.

TLB: What happened to all of these people? Where are they today?

Now they’re grown up and have their own kids. This is the generation that makes the AfD so strong. Many of the AfD people in Brandenburg have backgrounds in militant Nazi groups, such as Andreas Kalbitz. Really wild militant Nazi connections, including groups that were banned. 

TLB: And they’re using the fact that the East is more racist? 

In Brandenburg and East Germany, everyday racism is stronger. Especially since the AfD has pushed it, which allows people to be more aggressive. So this daily context, where people will literally be spat on in supermarkets or public transit, or get a pig’s head in front of their door, has reached a wild level of aggression. It’s no longer hidden and has only gotten stronger in the last years.

There’s always this projection that the East is so much whiter than the West, and because people are white working class, you can use racism, especially when people have so little contact with different perspectives from different countries.

But I would say that all white people profit from racism, whether from the West or the East. There is a specific racism in East Germany, which is influenced by the DDR and its upheaval. But there’s also a specific racism in West Germany, which functions through denied belonging and access to resources, and it is not less bad, I would say.

TLB: So when you moved, did you see a difference between the people you grew up with and the antifa scene in Berlin?

For a long time there was a joke we would say about the West Germans: that they were Antifas, but they never had to fight with Nazis. And from an East German perspective, that’s so funny, because every day we would have to deal with that on multiple levels, in a really extreme survival street-fighting mode. So we made fun of it, as East German Antifas at the time. We had problems all the time. The housing project where I lived was regularly attacked. Today, it’s the same again. In Cottbus, for example, there have been multiple arson attacks on a housing project there, also on so-called asylum applicants housing. Es geht jetzt wieder los [It’s starting up again].

TLB: What difference did that make when working with people?

In Berlin there was always this Brandenburg thing, that Berliners would come out for a demo or so. That’s still true today—for example with CSDs [Pride celebrations]. We get a ton of Berliners for a demo, and then it really goes off in a small city, and then they all go back to the city and all the lefties or queer people are left alone and get it extra in the face from Nazis for the next months.

And the punks in Brandenburg were so happy that people had come and supported them. But at the same time, they had very different lived realities, and that can sometimes backfire. For example, when people aren’t asked what they actually need, or when people just do their own thing with the idea of helping the poor people there instead of really seeing them.

Even until today, I have this feeling that I abandoned people in Brandenburg because in Berlin there’s always this feeling that it doesn’t matter if I’m here or not. There are so many politically engaged people here, and then in Brandenburg every single person really matters. And what is also really different here compared to small cities, is how much you can live in a political bubble. You can speak only with people who have the exact same opinion as you. In so many other contexts, if someone isn’t right-wing and happens to be in the same place, then you have to organise together. I find these are actually cool skills, and I often miss this in Berlin.

TLB: What kind of work did you do back then in Brandenburg?

I did political education work, which always felt meaningful. We went to schools and talked about things like the elimination of the right to asylum. People had absurd ideas of what people who came here received: free nice cars and thousands of Marks. We would come and say no actually people have to do this and that process, and in the end don’t even get their own room. They end up sharing a room and only having nine square meters. But in schools they had no idea what the actual situation was. And this was incredibly important because if they didn’t get this information from us, who knows where they got it from.

When the AfD comes and they’re the only ones who talk to them, then they get their information from the AfD. This is what is absurd about the party: they make it out as if they’re helping people, but really they’re just making hate. But that doesn’t matter when they’re the only ones who go there and listen to people. I think if the left did this, it would also work. We saw something similar with Sahra Wagenknecht.

TLB: So it sounds like you think there’s hope to change this situation.

That’s why I was totally ready to do this interview because I find it so important to pass knowledge on. Also to explain what is unique to this history, and for people with international perspectives to better understand how Nazi structures are organised there, and what strategies work against them and which don’t. This process needs the voices of the people from there, and it’s also so important to work with the people there.

TLB: Are there things that do or don’t work?

What I mentioned earlier: these skills of working with people, talking with them in a language they understand. I would say I also have a working-class background and come from Brandenburg. When I talk with these people they still consider me a Berliner, but I can often still create a bond with them.

But going there for a demo, using concepts that we all know and are correct and important, but absolutely no one there knows and which are totally irrelevant for their lives… People need to do other things. What people from Berlin are doing is not working—just going there to ‘help people’.

I think something like the Haustürgesprächen [door knocking] Die Linke does would be more effective. We need left-wing ideas and structures there, and to do public politics a little differently. Die Linke is doing cool things on a local level, but people are still voting for AfD. It’s totally absurd, and is only half related to how much people can really do.

TLB: What would you say to the people who want to, or are going to do this work in the East?

It’s difficult to say. It’s important to know that there are privileges from West Germans, ways in which the West German perspective is privileged even in things like the women’s movement. The East is often forgotten in these narratives.

There’s also very little analysis from East Germans themselves, partially because there’s such an extreme class gap in relation to knowledge production. Even in East Germany itself, I think about 2% or so of professors are East German; the rest are mostly West German. There is still very little research on East Germany from East Germans themselves. 

TLB: And I have to ask you, what is up with the anti-Deutsch? What’s going on there?

I also had a lot of contact with anti-Deutsch ideas. For a time I also identified myself with them. It had a lot of legitimacy in Germany, I would say. It came out of the context of the Wende, when German flags were flying everywhere. 

There’s the Möllemann story for example; he was an FDP politician who made antisemitic statements about how we should stop paying these reparations for [Jewish] forced labourers. Then, he went on to criticise Israel. At the same time there was huge growth in German nationalism, including the football world cup where there were so many German flags; also through the fall of the wall. All these flags were really a shock for the anti-fascist left, including how the world cup really broke the dam, allowing for this master narrative that now Germany is finally reunited. Now, we can be proud of our own nation and forget our own past and celebrate Germany again. This is the context that the anti-Deutsch movement came out of.

In the East, the break with the socialist narrative and the fall of all the anti-imperialist and Eastern Bloc states also forced a break with a certain idea of being left. Anti-Deutsch then provided a new identification for many people against nationalism and antisemitism. And then there was the Israel thing, where I think a lot of people simply had no idea about it. A lot was placed under the antisemitism label, including critique of Israel. At the same time, people were publishing whole books about the topic. While most Antifas had no or little contact with Jews, many of the perspectives that did exist were zionist.

For me it was also true, that I had someone very close to me who is Jewish and anti-zionist, and we had long debates about why anti-zionism is not antisemitic. I knew nothing about the history of groups like the Jewish Bund, or the long Jewish anti-zionist tradition, and these things were not discussed at all in left-wing contexts.

But by now I find it to be a really untenable position. After several years of genocide, it’s not serious to say that Israel can’t be criticised or deserves full solidarity. That Gaza has been bombed to rubble with German support has made that impossible; no one can seriously say it was only self-defense. I find it creepy that left people are still doing this—and it’s primarily white Germans. But most people I know who were anti-Deutsch have developed beyond that. There’s also been critiques of the racism—especially anti-Muslim racism—that was fostered under this label.

TLB: And have you tried to talk to the other people who haven’t changed their views?

I’ve had the impression that people would rather draw back and cut contact than discuss it. But I’ve also had long conversations about it with some people, including some friends who partially changed their views. There’s such a strong defensiveness, and I would say it’s a white defensiveness. White dominance and German defensiveness are very much tied together into a paternalistic spirit for the left. The idea that we know better and won’t listen to those who are most affected, for me, is not so much anti-Deutsch but rather incredibly German.

TLB: Do you have any wishes for how things should go in the future, for the leftist movement in general?

An emancipatory view of society is important to develop. Capitalism is dying, and we need left movements which can properly respond to these important changes. This includes creating the knowledge, so that the same mistakes aren’t made again. But at the same time, with the rise of authoritarianism, we are seeing so much mutual aid work and different care-networks. We also see with the anti-ICE protests, how much solidarity is growing every day.

And this is really the only way that we can survive these crises, including the climate crisis, etc. For me then it’s important that we all think about how we can destroy these violent systems, the dominance and repression that comes from society. We don’t need these anymore, like a snake that is shedding its own skin.