Björn Höcke: The politician I got afraid of

In the past few years, I have become a painful habit, in those German places in which I am currently to blog the local election results to compensate for them with my quarterly knowledge and dull, from the respective area in me. It’s always a sad bet with myself.

This week, for example, on Rügen, between Bodden, Meer and Zicker, where it can hardly be prettier and more valuable, I immediately looked into my phone, and the latest coordination data corresponded to the reasonable assumption. The Insel-AfD had reached more than 40 percent in the federal election. So what. Gelsenkirchen can pack.

I took note of the number as well as I take note of the increasingly depressing war news from Gaza and Ukraine. Or Donald Trump’s next attack on the US constitution. Or the Russian drones over Poland. Or the implosion of what I know how many government in Paris.

Fortunately, the beach between Thiessow and Göhren looked completely unsccondles from the furrings of this world. The waves rustle, the seagulls screamed and in the tang I found just five, ten, 15 or 20 years only jellyfish and no amber stones. The only new thing was that I had to be careful on the bike path behind the dune in order not to be re -changed by electric charming seniors. I looked after them and sanned when I would be part of it.

One of the promises of the civilization construct is that people in this way not only escape their gainful employment, but also the mental excessive demands that this life now represent, can escape for a little while. However, this includes the first vacation rule: don’t look into the phone!

As soon as I was swimming through the cloudy Baltic Sea water for the first time, I read in various apps that the announced book has now been published by the man that I had to think and write a lot about professionally.

Since I know Frederik Schindler, the author of the book, as a “world” colleague from political appointments, and since he asked me a few thuringological questions during his research, I light him and asked if he could email me the pressure flag. A little later I had the PDF – and my nice vacation was gone. Not because the work is not worth reading, on the contrary. But because it disabled my relaxation.

Because the topic of the book is Germany’s best -known right -wing extremist. For the first time I saw Björn Höcke in the Bundestag election campaign in summer 2013. The AfD had set up a stage in the Erfurt Anger. He stood a bit awkward on the stage and gave a speech that I only remembered that she consisted of sentences that seemed strangely and pathetic to me at the time.

Until then, I had only spoken a few times with Höcke, in his function as head of the Chaotian mini association of around 100 members. There were two other co-chair in addition to him. But Höcke seemed to me to be the only one who had something like a plan.

I didn’t know exactly which plan. I didn’t yet know the texts that he had probably published in right -wing extremist leaves under the pseudonym “Landolf Ladig”. I had no idea that he was marched in with neo -Nazis in Dresden in 2010. And I certainly had no idea that the national socialism of the 21st century had appeared to me in the form of a history and sports teacher immigrant from Hesse.

What I immediately noticed: Höcke was different. I found him strangely out of place in the small Thuringian political company, with his mannered language and his ideas formulated. He looked like someone who had made a mistake around a century.

But it wasn’t like that. Höcke obviously saw himself chosen to stop the downfall of the so -called West. The new party with which he went into the dirty lowlands of politics should only serve as the means he despised by him. When he called that the AfD was the “last evolutionary chance” of Germany, he always meant himself.

Little by little I understood that Höcke is the type of idealist who scares me. Höcke thinks he is completely ironious as the savior of the Germans, half Barbarossa, half Bismarck. As a grandson of warfare, he does not simply want to copy the German Reich or Hitler. He wants to historically overcome the fracture of civilization and thus undo. This is the remembrance-political 180-degree turn that he speaks of.

Höcke pushes back into a future that has never existed or will give to a national romantic fairytale country with castles and Wilhelminian style houses in lovely landscapes, in which loyal women are elegant women, of course and well -advised by Prussian virtues, of course. He sees himself as a royal kaiser Chancellor, advised by a parliamentary parliament. Parties, including the AfD, are no longer needed.

It is tempting to find Höcke’s narcissistic self -surge. The philosophically foamed ideology, which he transfigures into a national mission. The person cult that he pairs with a lamoyant sacrificial narrative. The kitsch-virile pathos with which he tries to criticize xenophobia and homophobia. The petition of what he declares as East German.

Sometimes all of this seems really strange. But I don’t feel like laughing anymore. When the AfD moved into the Thuringian state parliament in 2014 and I saw how Höcke let the extreme demagogues out of himself for the first time, in order to perform it later, in the so -called refugee autumn, in the Erfurt places: I got afraid.

Since then, this fear has strengthened and reproduced several times. Höcke never had a function in the federal party or had a greater influence in the Bundestag. But he didn’t have to. He also shaped the AfD, with party congress applications, with personal intrigue, with extensive networks such as the “wing”. In this way, he also made the party to what it is mostly: right -wing extremists.

All of this and more can be read in great density in the book by Frederik Schindler. If you want to know how Höcke became, what he is, how his thinking and his propaganda works and how he managed to get the AfD from behind, you should read this book. Although I have been dealing with Höcke for more than a decade, I not only reminded a lot, but also learned a lot.

It is quite possible that the time over Björn Uwe Höcke will pass. If it does not work with the Erfurt State Chancellery in four years, it will probably finally degenerate into a traveler of his own extreme brand.

For the party, which was supposed to be his vehicle vehicle, he would have done his debt. But the fear that she will stay.