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Is Germany slipping to the right? Does society split into hostile camps, do the differences between East and West grow? The "theses on the rift" address these questions - they are revised excerpts from the book "The Journey to the Rift", which discusses social change on the basis of reports from all corners of the republic.
Amon Göth was a terrible person, one who stands out among the many mass murderers of the National Socialist tyranny in Europe. The name of the SS official has been known worldwide since 1993, when Steven Spielberg's film "Schindler's List" was released. It also includes Goth, who commanded the German concentration camp Plaszow in the 1940s near Krakow.
One of the reasons he went down in history as the "Butcher of Plaszow" was that he shot KZ prisoners with a rifle every morning from the balcony of his villa.
That's what I remembered when I received an email after publishing an article on right-wing extremism. Sender: "Amon Göth". He wrote: "After the seizure of power, we meet again, I can be recognized by a smart black uniform with lovingly trimmed skulls, and then we count." For your left-wing drow, there can only be work to the death! "
"Schmfinken", "Puppets", "Regimetölpel"
The e-mail would probably have stunned me, such news did not reach me regularly. Threats of violence are included, but especially recurrent insults such as "media whore" or "Systemfotze". Now, readers' letters to individual journalists are unlikely to serve as a basis for a sound analysis of the state of a society. But the increase in such letters made it clear to me early that a frightening brutalization was underway.
This brutalization has steadily strengthened itself over the years. Politicians are reviled as "Merkel puppets", journalists as "smearers", scientists as "regime gnomes". I do not think these insults, the Internet is full of it.
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Of course, not only the digital world is affected - this is proven by cases such as the excess of violence between immigrants and natives in Wurzen, the racist discrimination in the Essen table last year, and the deadly shots of a "Reichsbürger" on a policeman in the Franconian town of Georgensgmünd just to name a few examples.
Evidently, more and more people are dealing with each other more ruthlessly. Does the hatred continue to spread unchecked? Does he even threaten liberal democracy as a whole?
There is some evidence that Western-style democracy is indeed at risk. Evaluations of parliamentary elections show, for example, that the turnout since the seventies despite a number of fluctuation has fallen sharply overall, while the proportion of votes cast for right-wing parties has never been so high as in the second decade of our century.
It looks even gloomier to look at developments outside Germany: the election of the populist Donald Trump as US President, the Brexit vote by the British or the electoral victories of right-wing parties in EU countries such as Hungary, Italy and Poland were early signs a global crisis of democracy.
But that does not mean that liberal ideas are on the decline. For example, the World Values Survey, a scientific mammoth project that has been regularly asking people around the world for their religious, sociocultural, and political attitudes for decades, has come to a different conclusion. According to these data, the proportion of conservative people in societies has been over the decades declined. Worldwide.
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Peter Maxwill
The Journey to the Rift: Reports from a Split Land
Publishing company:
Ullstein Paperback
Pages:
272
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EUR 11,00
E-book: EUR 9.99
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Therefore, a fundamental "right-wing" of Western societies can not be assumed. On the contrary, for years they have become more liberal and pluralistic.
In the Federal Republic, for example, in 2005 a woman was elected chancellor for the first time. Blacks have been members of German national teams for several years. Homosexuality is now legal, since 2017 same-sex couples can even officially marry. And again and again, hundreds of thousands of people are joining forces for liberal ideas - be it online at hashtags like 'outcry' or on the streets at pro-Europe rallies and solidarity actions for maritime rescuers in the Mediterranean.
Perhaps this is how it is: German society is becoming more cosmopolitan, which triggers resistance and brings with it enormous tensions. Frustration. Anger. Hate. Studies show that this conflict has evidently created a polarization: those who advocate social diversity and openness are doing this more decisively than a few years ago - and their opponents are rejecting it even more vehemently.
Thus, there is a shift to the right, but only on the very edge: while the liberal camp recognizes injustices and its own responsibility for the planet as well as fellow human beings, it rejects the other side to question the environment, minorities or women's own privileges.
At the same time, the boundaries between the camps of conservative hedonists, who fear for their standard of living and the cherished world view, and the camp of misanthropic right-wing extremists are becoming increasingly blurred.
The tone becomes rude
This is another reason why aggressive concepts such as "gender mania" and "change" have reached the center of society, where the tone of conversation has become rougher overall. The linguistic jargon "linguist", "good-humourist", "traitor to the public", "alternative facts", "anti-deportation industry", was all borrowed from linguists between 2014 and 2018.
One of the problems of this linguistic radicalization is that it does not seem to stick with it: at the end of 2015, the National Arms Register held 285,911 small-license holders, three years later 610,937. That's an increase of more than 113 percent. All of these people are allowed to legally carry alarm, irritant and signal weapons with them. Of course, a connection between these numbers and the overall social hysteria can not be proven, but it is actually urging itself on.
All this fits, unfortunately, to the unsightly events in places like Wurzen, Essen or Georgensgmünd, which have caused a sensation in the recent past nationwide: There are a staggering number of people who instead of dialogue more and more often rely on discrimination or even violence.
Or hate-filled emails from fake accounts with the names of humanity criminals.
