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The last summer day at a small quarry pond in Brandenburg. The water is clear, the small sandy beach not too crowded, poplars rushing in the still balmy wind. It is a paradise. If there was not this weird feeling. As every time in the East.
Because one question does not go out of my mind: Which of the people here chooses AfD? The retiree, who is just telling his towel neighbor, that yesterday he just hung up a prohibition sign, because "you can not put up with anything"? The corpulent mid-thirties with the bald head and the sleek sunglasses, on whose upper arm a broad white bandage covers the view of the skin - sticks a swastika off, so as not to get into trouble with the police? And the guy who just got out of the water looks exactly like Andreas Kalbitz, the Brandenburg AFD boss.
When I, the Wessi, leave Berlin and drive into the countryside, I only see rights. Or people who might be rights. About a quarter of the voters voted in favor of the AFD in the Brandenburg state elections, in Saxony there were even more. And so I see the people there: One, two, three, AfD. In case of doubt, right.
In the weeks leading up to the elections, the East German mood has once again been analyzed extensively: many people vote out of frustration on the right because they feel that they are back. In protest against those up there and to show it the Besserwessis like me really. I have read many analyzes, but I still can not understand it.
In the column Agitation and Propaganda Stefan Kuzmany writes about the current developments in politics and society. Subscribe to the newsletter directly and for free here:
How can you give voice to a party that has no solutions that only seeks guilty parties? Whose program draws a future that exists in the dark past? How can you choose a party where people are in charge, like this Kalbitz, who - by chance, of course - has come near neo-Nazis and swastika flags? Like this Höcke, who apparently would like to recast German history into a universal heroic epic and presumably sings the first verse of the Deutschlandlied before and after each meal? Or this Gauland who lets such party friends, and for whom the Nazi period is no more than a "bird's shit"? With all the frustration: How can you make common cause with racists? It does not want to be in my head.
This lack of understanding has consequences: I do not like going east. And so I remain the ignorant Wessi. But I suspect: Since I miss a lot.
Because, of course, there is no more "the East" than "the Ossi". Thuringia is not Saxony is not Brandenburg. And "Ossi" does not vote right either. In fact, three quarters of the votes cast did not go to the AfD in Brandenburg, for example. And if you add the non-voters to it, you can see: Only just about every seventh voter has elected a party here, whose country chief used to be more or less by mistake so much with real Nazis on the way that you practically could not distinguish them from them, the poor misunderstood.
So I would have to count differently at the lake. The pensioner with the prohibition sign? He probably just wants people to not throw trash into his garden. The bald man with the bandage on his arm? Maybe find a shaved head just handy, especially in summer. And the supposed Kalbitz? Probably through and through a cosmopolitan anti-fascist. Who knows. At least not me, as long as I did not talk to these people.
Yes, there are areas where the right now sets the tone. Villages threatening to become "national liberated zones". But looking at the whole of the East as a brown abyss will not solve these problems, quite the contrary: the repeated warning from the West to finally become democratic at some point will annoy even those who are long gone. Constant fixation on the AfD makes it bigger than it actually is - and obscures the view of the vast majority.
Thirty years after the fall of the wall, there is still no unity. Probably we should get used to the fact that they will never exist - and that's not bad either. There is also no unity of Bavaria and Hamburg. But what we urgently need is mutual interest and perhaps even the attempt to understand.
On Facebook and Twitter, the first of my left-wing Wessi friends vow never to return to Saxony. Should they let it, I think that's wrong. I'll go over there more often. Especially now.
