‘They call us Nazis’: inside the wealthy German town where the far right is on the rise
Counter rallies in Kaufbeuren show split between supporters of AfD and locals who acknowledge the Bavarian town’s Nazi past
Soaring church spires, the 1,000-year-old town centre unblemished by second world war bombing or graffiti, snow-capped Alps in the middle distance – Kaufbeuren, in Bavaria, can count many blessings.
Unemployment is in the low single digits, the Luftwaffe backed away from plans to move its training school for Eurofighter and Tornado jet technicians elsewhere and crime is at a historic low.
However, as voters prepare to elect a new European parliament next month, deep-seated fears have gripped a significant share of the electorate in one of the most affluent pockets of Europe’s top economy and delivered it to the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD).
The bond between the party and its voters appears unshaken even by a cascade of recent scandals. The AfD’s lead candidate for the election, Maximilian Krah, was forced by his party leadership on Wednesday to resign from its board and stop campaigning after he told Italy’s La Repubblica that the SS, the Nazi paramilitary force which ran the death camps, were not all criminals and could only be judged on the basis of “individual guilt”.
Hey Manuela from paragraph two, you should talk to Manuela from paragraph one.
Also... Manuela. Is that a German name?
Manuela is a very German name, so much so a German rapper actually made a song about it.
But of course its origin isn't Germanic at all. Which I doubt people with such convictions care about.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manuela_(given_name)
Sounds like that German rapper doesn't believe in German purity.
Edit: I posted this before the person above edited their post.
It's as German as Mercedes is!
Well you see consistency is a requirement for my opponents. \s
Yep, I know a Manuela from Germany!
And there's a very well-known TV show and filmmaker from Scotland named Armando Ianucci. I wouldn't say Armando is a Scottish name.
Wikipedia says the root is Hebrew. So…. a European name? Seems pretty popular in Germany.
I don't think you read that link very well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manuela_(given_name)
If it’s popular in Germany, given by a German parent to a German child and based on a Hebrew root word, I’d argue it’s a German name as much as it is Portuguese, Spanish, or Italian.
It’s all semantics though, I assumed your original question was about how common the name was in Germany, not about its linguistic roots. It seems fairly common. If you’re looking for a deep dive on the history of the name I’ll let you do your own research because I honestly don’t give a shit and you’re being kind of rude.
It is, or rather was, quite popular in Germany, hovering around place 20-50 for 20 years is nothing to scoff at. Here's the whole top 250 for the 70s. Right next to Michaela.
Pointing out that this idiocy only works with a massive amount of cognitive dissonance is nothing new...
If it quacks like a Nazi…
... and walks like a Nazi...
You gotta punch it in the nose!
Donald Duck was a Nazi
..................what?
There's literally a WW2 propaganda piece done by Disney. Donald Duck is a Nazi and they make fun of them. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Der_Fuehrer%27s_Face
End result is still, jokingly, saying Donald Duck is a Nazi.
If youre a german citizen and you're far-right , you're as nazi as it gets
Like the recent event in Sylt. You can easily find the Nazi sympathisers wherever the rich gather.
More so in the lower classes. Handymen and the likes.
"they call us nazis" - literal nazis
Isn't Nazi anything super illegal in Germany?
Yes. But the state still has to prove that what you did was a) a Nazi thing and b) that you either knew or should have known it was so.
So if you show the Hitler salute, you'll be arrested and fined. If you give a speech in which you suggest that immigrants need to learn "the liberating power of work" (referencing the Motto of Auschwitz "Arbeit macht Frei" "Work makes Free") that is totally fine.
The German right wingers usually knew to ride the edge, ie not show illegal symbols or do illegal chants while still making it obvious. But they’re getting more cheeky because of all the encouragement from Russia, Trump, Musk, etc.
Saying bad things about israel is super illegal in Germany. Actual antisemitism isn't.
This is not true. All forms of antisemitic speech are prohibited in Germany, and it is enforced.
Yes, German authorities have been silencing pro-Palestine protesters, and falsely imply that they are being antisemitic. It's an assault against free speech and human rights.
No, this does not mean that whatever hyperbolic thing you say about Germany in response must be true.
Literal NeoNazi parties are rising up while a doctor from Gaza trying to give a lecture gets an EU wide ban. The double standard is clear as day.
I'm not sure we want someone who said, that if he could he would have crossed the border(slaughtering civilians) is someone you want in Europe.
Can you link where he said that?
I wasn't able to find the same Quote in a more reliable source, but I was able to find about 6 difference Websites quoting Abbu Sitta with this. The Quote also was(if I remember right) why he was denied(unlawfully) Entrance into Germany and France. https://www.plands.org/en/articles-speeches/articles/2024/i-could-have-been-one-of-those-who-broke-through-the-siege-on-october-7
I will try to find a more Serious source and link it then.
Edit: sadly i was only able to find a german Article regarding the palestina conference and why it had been stopped by the police: https://taz.de/Palaestina-Kongress-in-Berlin-aufgeloest/!6004209/
In the Article they say the following:
Translation:
and falsely imply that they are being
No, in the majority of cases this is not a false implication but a documented fact. And even if they are not antisemites themselves those people are always happy to stand side-by-side with antisemites if those amplify their messaging, but out of the completely wrong reasons.
Yeah. Nazi is the wrong word. The AfD people make politics in favor of Russia and China. Traitor is a better word.
The NSDAP had no issues working with Russia, as long as it was in their interest.
That guy taking a selfie definitely is a so called “Russo-German”, ie a Russian person with German ancestors. Germany (unfortunately) allowed many of these people to obtain German citizenship with no real background check. Now it turns out that a majority of them love Putin and look down on Western values. These jokers all vote far-right and even drive around with huge “Z” symbols on their 4th hand Audis.
Yep, in their mind Russia is great and is the future. Meanwhile, countries west of them are decadent and temporary.
...while they enjoy the freedoms and economic opportunities, and in the case of Germany, high-grade social security of those Western countries they hate so much.
There are enough Nazis in Germany without having to blame a minority of Russian born ones tbh
Minority or not, they are a huge problem because Putin is using Russian minorities in other countries as a pretext to invade claiming they're being unfairly treated. That's a separate problem from them being Neonazis, of course, but it adds up. And they are not only Neo-Nazi followers, but agitators, so they are more guilty than your run-of-the-mill AfD NPC.
It's better we have them put under extreme scrutiny, similar to the other Neonazi groups which are being observed by the authorities.
Sorry Fritz, you're a Nazi lol
BJ has entered the chat.
To be fair, not all right-wingers are Nazis and it's not helpful to draw them as equals.
But right-wingers can and do use Nazis when they are useful to their political goals, which is still to rip us off.
Not all right-wingers are Nazis. Doesn't mean they're not evil.
it is germany. name ONE righwinger that isnt a nazi.
Leroy Sané maybe?
touché
enchantée
The longer all the other parties bury their head in the sand about immigration the more the far right gains votes.
It's one of the biggest issues for people in the West but the left like to pretend none of the real negatives exist.
Would be good to see a left leaning party care about immigration.
You know that immigration is a net positive for every western nation right? People coming to a country wanting to make a new life contribute to a its society and economy. They also help populations keep growing as birthrates are falling. It would be nice to see these sorts of arguments made more though, if that's what you mean?
You say that, but have you lived it? I go to anti-AfD protests but I'm still sick of having to walk through neighborhoods where all the women are in headscarves and the teenagers and young men always trying to grope and rob you. There's an ugly side to immigration that the left does not want to address.
That's an intentionally misleading statement and is said in bad faith because you can use some stats to make it look like it is good but the full picture can tell a completely different story. But some people like this narrative and stick with it no matter what.
It depends what you value. If you only care about increasing GDP, keeping business strong by reducing wages, increasing population and increasing rent and land values then yes. Though GDP has been shown to decrease even with record high immigration so that's great.
If you care about GDP per capita, or even better Discretionary income then no. If you care about crime the or tax contribution then governments that have released the data show some countries are much better than others.
You can say all these XXXjobs are filled because we don't have enough at home. But the issue is we don't hire enough, there aren't enough places to fill the jobs so we are forced to get foreigners in from our own policies. Wouldn't we we better educating and investing in our own people, rather than giving the job they want and can do to another person? If you value culture immigration can be bad.
It's such a varied topic but the left has a mantra:
"Immigration is good from any country in the world and if you have any reservations what so ever you're racist".
Nothing else matters. The conversation is so horrifically closed down by the left that anyone that thinks lowering immigration is good for the country has to look at the fair right.
Recognising mass-immigrantion as non-ideal can be valid if coming from a place of compassion. But with this perspective, mass-immigration is seen as a symptom of wider socioeconomic problems (or non-societal factors such as natural disasters), not as a problem in itself that needs to be "fixed" by sending immigrants "back home".
Furthermore, seeing immigration as a cause for socioeconomic problems only comes from a place of racism, ascribing negative expectations to people according to their country of origin / culture / ethnicity. It is clear that you stand with this camp from how you phrased what you think "the left" thinks:
It implies that a person's country of origin plays a factor in whether or not they can be considered a "good" immigrant. That's racist.
So you're telling me it's as easy to integrate your average Syrian into a labour market with dearth of opportunities for people with low educational attainment as it is to integrate your average Nigerian. One's an illiterate refugee (that is, can't even read Arabic, knows no second language), the other, in my experience, has a master's degree and couldn't find a job back home as the state of Nigeria's education system is quite a bit better than the rest of their infrastructure as well as economy.
And, sure, there's educated Syrians. There's uneducated Nigerians. More so in their home countries than when looking at the people who arrive here, and seen at the population level yes we can integrate way more Nigerians than Syrians on account of the former taking up way less integration capacity.
No, not everybody is the same. Not every source country is the same, either. Material conditions are not subject to universalism. It's called "material conditions", after all, not "ideal conditions".
Second thing to note is that the countries that are still growing population-wise will stop doing that within the next decades, and with that their economy and emigration pattern will shift: We can't keep relying on immigrants to plug our pension funds, it's not sustainable. Or do you suppose we should make sure there's always enough war abroad to generate enough refugees.
So... are we gonna pretend that colonialism played no part, and continues to play no part (via capitalism), in today's "material conditions"?
You mean while Syria spent 400 years under Ottoman rule Nigeria was busy raiding for slaves and selling them? The socio-political conditions in the countries are almost flipped in comparison to the past, Nigeria has some vaguely but not terribly authoritarian socdem-thirdway thing, while Syria is straight-up fascist: Modern-day Syrians are practically slaves, Nigerians aren't.
Or did you just want to use the c-words as a thought-terminating cliches? Is any of those forces stopping the Syrian government from increasing literacy? Are those forces in the room here with us? Maybe if the Syrian government spent money on throwing books at people instead of poison gas canisters the situation would look different. But it doesn't. Syria is a hellhole. Modulo Rojava, of course, but that's not where the refugees are from that's where refugees go.
What do you suppose we do with Syria? Invade and rule it for a while to teach them our superior ways? I'd say that'd be quite colonial. I certainly wouldn't mind the US stopping to implicitly back Turkey in its anti-Kurdish stance as well as Russia going so bankrupt they can't prop up Assad any longer.
Look, I'm always down for learning more about history, but who's "Nigeria"? To who was "Nigeria" selling slaves to? Modern states are never representative of specific / homogeneous cultures, let alone individual peoples, let alone societies from before the state was even formed. After skimming a few wiki articles, it's clear that the region has had its own fair share of struggles against authorities, slavery, and racism, even before European colonisation, some of which continue currently.
Still, none of this reached the scale of european colonisation / "the scramble for Africa", and the continued political and economic influence and control that 'the West' continues to hold and wield (neocolonialism / recolonisation). I know nowhere near enough about critical theory, but I'm sure these processes can be understood as a form of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation (I wasn't able to find a freely available copy, but this article seems like it could be a relevant, interesting read: Deterritorialization and Reterritorialization of the Orisha Religion in Africa and the New World (Nigeria, Cuba and the United States).)
Regarding Syria, "my approach" would be simply to support more movements / projects like Rojava (which is clearly not something that 'western' political powers are interested in doing). As an anarchist I don't think liberation from state authority can be achieved through state authority.
The broad geographical area, inhibited by neighbouring tribes. Nigeria stayed Nigeria in that sense same as Europe stayed Europe.
Regarding the sheer size of the unit -- most of Nigeria was unified by Cameroon (same approximate geographical thing) jihading the Hausas. Hausas have always been a single polity in the same sense that Greeks already were a polity when they were separate city states, the concept of nation didn't suddenly spring up with the age of the national state. Similar things apply to the other groups.
You don't want to open the can of worms that is "Should there be Yorubaland, Igboland, and Hausaland". Not to be too geographically determinist but creating a land-locked state in is a rather courageous idea. Also see Ethiopia. And that's before all the other trouble that it'd cause for the 300+ other ethnicities.
So... Orisha, a Yoruba religion, is spreading to the Americas. That has anything to do with governance in Nigeria vs. Syria... how? Syria isn't poor as such. They have the same if not more resources to pour into their own development as Nigeria, as can be seen in Rojava, they're making rapid progress. Syria before the civil war had 5x of Nigeria's current gdp/capita. Their education system still sucked, social mobility, completely absent you're either in the right clan or aren't. And no, Europeans didn't come up with the Arab clan system. I guess an argument can be made that Russia propping up the Assad regime over the port in Tartus is colonialism, but Syria's problem didn't start there, Russia didn't cause them as-such they're merely exploiting.
Ah, fuck, I usually at the very least skim things before I share but this time I just assumed from the title... my bad, the article has nothing to do with this topic.
Still, my general point is that European colonialism in Africa can't be considered a "solved" issue, because of capitalism's (and 'western' capitalists') roles in continuing to exploit its natural resources and perpetuating systemic wealth inequalities. I think that profling populations by nation/culture is a fundamentally flawed way of approaching the difficulties of (mass) immigration, plus it's an even more dangerous road to go down. Whatever the qualities of cultures and hegemonies that persist in whichever regions, populations aren't homogenous, and states fail to represent their peoples.
Of course, there are many factors and actors involved in the many social instabillties / conflicts plaguing the world, and anything I might value as an anarchist (e.g. open borders and mutual / humanitarian aid) would be nonsensical to apply as government policies. I don't have a 'counter' solution to propose.
lf all this is "thought terminating" in the sense that I'm unwlling to go down the path of 'pragmatism' in which peoples' worth is profiled and measured and weighed, then so be it. As I see it, that kind of thinking as part of problem, not the solution.
I mostly counter-steered here because of another pragmatism: The corrupt domestic powers that be in plenty of African states love to blame everything on colonialism, skirting responsibility for their own role in their country's abject poverty. They're the ones commanding the armies letting Wagner run around exploiting mineral resources and massacring people. And that isn't even capitalism as such it's plain ole feudalism.
The Ukrainian thing is not by culture or anything, it's by "has a Ukrainian passport". Which means you have a good educational standard because the basically one thing that the Soviets got right was education, and Ukraine kept that intact and even built on it.
I'm quite sure if those Ukrainian refugees were South Africans they'd get the same treatment, 95% literacy are nothing to scoff at.
Oh I don't doubt that those in power are complicit in the exploitation (I disagree with calling it feudalism, however). Ridding themselves of responsibility by blaming colonialism sounds akin to Israel deflecting criticism by claiming anti-semitism.
The statist perspective is unable to properly address these inequalities and injustices because it cannot reject the hierarchical power structures that caused them in the first place. Foreign intervention is just colonialism 2.0, but the more "reactive" alternative is just leading to a situation where measuring immigrants by their worth as 'skilled workers' and 'ease of integration' is pragmatic. I'm not gonna deny that there's a kind of sense to this, because that's exactly what makes it so worrying. At least with the old racist pseudoscience we can point and laugh at how nonsensical it was.
No. This is the bit that you all make out is what is going on and it isn't. It's an outright lie of what people think the issue is.
Good and bad individual immigrants can come from anywhere that much is obvious, no one is ever saying otherwise.
Not as a view as hard data. Governments have collected information on groups of people. They can group people by country so they absolutely have said immigrants from country A as a whole contribute more in taxes than they take out and commit less crime than locals. They also say immigrants from country B take more in taxes than they contribute and commit more crimes than locals.
You can't deny that.
And this is where people think everyone on the left or fair left is mental for wanting such high levels of immigration from countries that have been shown in unbiased data that they make the country worse (as a whole obviously). It isn't racist to want more from country A than B.
This says nothing of immigration causing wage suppression and housing price inflation. Of course that's going to happen its basic supply and demand.
So if you read the article you would know that some don’t want Muslim immigrants from Muslim countries.
I’m not saying you think that, but I’ve seen plenty (like the person in the article), specifically state they don’t want certain races/ethnicities/religions in their country.
This is a tactic I’ve seen with right wing people. They defend something obviously wrong but pretending that the stance has always been sane. Basically presenting a crowd full of people thinking A is actually a crowd of people thinking B with a few As.
Indeed. And you shouldn't be led astray by that tactic in your own analysis, it should still be purely material.
You can then argue "we need to counter that narrative" and that's also true, however, countering a narrative in a way that doesn't make sense to people is also not a good idea, to wit, people having the impression of "the left doesn't care about the small people". Don't allow the right to push you into that trap. That, precisely, would be falling for their tactic.
Like, I've seen people on here, mostly from .ml domains, calling Germany's policy of automatically handing Ukrainian refugees work permits racist because other refugee groups are treated differently. But the reason is simple: Ukrainians don't exert pressure on the low-wage sector, meaning they're not taking away jobs from people having trouble getting a job. Individual people from other countries also don't exert that pressure and also get work permits, on an individual basis. Ukrainians not needing individual work permits is a recognition of the fact that their education system is en-par with that of Greece, far far above other conflict-torn source countries.
The US (which I assume many of those posters are from) does that filtering before people even arrive, try getting a work visa in the US without being sponsored by an employer. Not an option if there's no ocean between you and whatever country the yanks are destabilising today.
"Say John from Texas is dying of hunger. He asks me for food, but I refuse. If John dies, is it my fault? Arguably, I merely allowed him to die, which while not exactly benevolent, isn’t exactly murder either. Now imagine that John doesn’t ask for food, but goes off to the market, where he’ll find plenty of people willing to exchange their goods for work that he can do in return. This time though, I hire a couple of heavily armed baddies to block his way. John dies of starvation a few days later. Can I still claim innocence?"
And that is why you do not use things like calling someone a Nazi inflationary. It has the exact opposite effect.
if being incorrectly called a nazi makes you be a nazi, you weren't incorrectly called a nazi.
How is that what I said?
Calling people that want X but do not see themselves (and are not) anywhere near far right Nazis means that the word loses all meaning. "I am a Nazi? I guess all the other people they call Nazis are/were not that bad then"
AFD is trying to make Germany only of pure Aryan bloodline. They literally have a plan to deport anyone not of German ancestry. How are they not Nazi's?
How many racisms does one have to do before they can be considered "far right" enough to be called a nazi?
Nazi is the most extreme far right possible. Everything else is less crazy. Mildly right people are not Nazis. They can be racist, close minded, whatever.
Absolutely true. However, the lines between proper Nazis and AfD/its sub-organizations is very blurry. Even courts and the secret service for the interior have said so recently. Still, calling people Nazis who support and vote for Nazis and their allies is not quite correct.
wer mit nazis zu tisch geht ist staatsveräter
Sure, but it doesn’t make them nazis
-> ist nazi versteher -> fast so schlimm wie ein nazi sollte eig gleich behandelt werden
Yes, everything is blurry, no question. By blanket calling all of them Nazi the word loses it's meaning. Those that previously would be like "Nazis are bad" find themselves called just that. That is all I am saying. It does not help.