AfD (Alternative für Deutschland, Alternative for Germany) is the only Islam-critical and anti-EU party in Germany whose members have been elected at the state level (the federal level is coming later this year). Björn Höcke is one of AfD’s most popular leaders, and his charismatic speaking style is evident even to those of us who don’t understand German.

In case you’ve been wondering why Mr. Höcke dropped out of sight last year, the following annotated compilation by JLH will throw a little light on what happened.

Down the Rabbit Hole With the AfD

by JLH

I am going to tell you a story. It’s a little long, and a little complicated, but I will try to make as few mistakes as possible. It is also more than a little sad, and in one way reminds me of an uncle of mine who knew — as he grew older — that there were certain foods he should no longer eat, because they gave him indigestion, discomfort, burps. Still, sometimes he couldn’t resist, and when he suffered the consequences, he would say that those foods were “repeating” on him. One of the sad things about history is that it, too, “repeats” on us at times, and that will happen in this story too.

It all begins, in a way, on May 8, 1985, when the president of the German Federal Republic, Richard von Weizsäcker, was tasked with commemorating the fortieth anniversary of victory over the Nazi regime. This, in itself, is unusual, when you think about it. The French do not celebrate Waterloo; Rome did not have a festival to commemorate the destruction of three legions by Arminius in the Teutoburg Forest. But unlike the French and Romans in those situations, there was some argument that the Germans, too, had been liberated from the Nazi regime.

President von Weizsäcker — a distinguished member of the CDU (Christian Democrats) and a historian — withdrew for a time to consider and craft his speech. He took as a reference point the biblical axiom that forty years represents the duration of the memory of a generation, and spoke of the necessity for Germans not to allow the greatest crimes of the Nazi regime to fade from their memories. His speech addressed the great harm done to the Jewish people, and the great harm done to the psyche of the German people. One American son of Holocaust survivors I know of — who was in Germany at the time and heard the speech as it was given in, and broadcast from, the Bundestag — was deeply affected by it. It became a touchstone in the struggle of German intellectuals to deal with the heritage of Nazism and the Holocaust.

Four years later, in 1989, the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet empire began to crumble. It appeared that the other great tyranny of the 20th century was in its death throes. In 1990 — against a background of mixed approval and apprehension, both foreign and domestic — East Germany was essentially absorbed into the Federal Republic of Germany, and two new words were added to the German lexicon: “Wessi” and “Ossi” for the theoretically equal citizens from the old “West” and “East” Germany.

While these external political and geopolitical events were taking place, the focus of international Marxism had shifted. Some years before, encouragement of the anticipated up-from-the-bottom “workers’ revolution” had been replaced by the strategy of a “march through the institutions” which would instead create a top-down cultural transformation, guided by the academic, intellectual and political upper echelons. For every person who received Weizsäcker’s speech as a re-commitment to civilized values, there was another who saw it as one of many weapons to attack any deviation from the new norms.

Whether it was because of public-spirited citizens like Weizsäcker or devious disciples of the Frankfurt School, the guilt has not disappeared. It is still useful to pull out the “Nazi club” as a final, unanswerable argument.

A full 65 years after the end of the Nazi regime — at the beginning of what would become an uncontrolled torrent of officially sanctioned immigration — a CDU member of the Berlin legislature named René Stadtkewitz, fighting a losing battle against the establishment of a mosque in his district (his home was burned out once while he and his family were on a trip), found that his superior in the party would not sanction a planned public seminar to discuss Islam. Only when he threatened to resign from the party did he get permission. But he was alien in that environment, and soon did leave the party.

In 2010, Stadtkewitz with his CDU colleague Marc Doll and Aaron Koenig, who was serving as a member of the steering committee of the Pirate Party, formed a new, Islam-critical party, Die Freiheit (Freedom), named in imitation of Geert Wilders’ Party For Freedom in the Netherlands. The party expanded swiftly to areas beyond Berlin, but almost immediately encountered resistance — especially from the leftist, so-called Antifa — in the form of personal intimidation, rioting protesters and tactics such as boycotts to prevent their access to venues for meetings and conventions. In the 2011 election they failed to make it into the Berlin Landtag. Shortly thereafter, a disagreement over the party’s direction led to the departure of many “moderates” who disapproved of what they saw as a sharp turn to the (Islam-critical) right and, by 2012, it had ceased to exist as a viable national party. A remnant of the party was maintained in Munich by Michael Stürzenberger until this year. Because of his determined resistance to the mega-mosque in Munich, he was personally targeted by both Islamists and Antifa leftists, to such an extent that even his own Stammlokal was closed to him. He has just recently been exonerated in a lengthy trial for Islam-critical “hate-speech.”

And this brings us to AfD — Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany). Founded in 2013 by the economist Bernd Lucke, whose central concern was the abolition of the euro, the party attracted proportionally more votes in the “new states” (i.e., the states of the former GDR). When a young and charismatic Thuringian member of the party named Björn Höcke proposed bluntly that the party — founded as an anti-euro party — should become much more Islam-critical, he was instantly rebuked by an older Wessi member of the party, whose stern lecture was not too far from “Children should be seen and not heard.” The spark was struck, but Lucke was an economist, not a political infighter, so he procrastinated, hoped to make peace, but eventually — in 2015 — he left the party with a number of followers, mostly Wessis, to form a new and truly insignificant party of his own.

One of those standing behind Lucke when he founded AfD was Frauke Petry, who eventually became his major opponent in the power struggle that changed the party. Frauke Petry — labeled by some the most popular politician in Germany — is an attractive woman in her early forties, the mother of four children by her first husband, pastor Sven Petry. She recently announced her divorce, and then her marriage to Marcus Pretzell — father of her expected child. No doubt by virtue of her previous standing in the party and her leadership of the revolt against Lucke, she is one of two co-leaders, with Jörg Meuthen, an economist on leave from his position as professor of finance and economics. Interestingly, the AfD has just voted not to have a one-person leadership — something that Petry clearly wanted.

What about Björn Höcke? What has become of him since he instigated the split that set AfD on its new path? “Well,” as the suspect says when being interviewed by the authorities halfway through the TV detective show, “it’s complicated.” This is what you might call the evidentiary phase, which works out pretty well as a play in three parts.

You might think that Höcke has not been a wallflower, and you would be right. He is given to stem-winding, barn-burning speeches, with popular appeal. And that is where the play begins. Freely adapted from Aristotle’s consideration of Greek tragedy.

Act I, scene 1: Hamartia — The hero commits a tragic error, possibly transgressing against some sacred law.

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