The anti-Semitism of West Germans or unity in their minds

It was the turn of the millennium and I was newly employed at a former SED district newspaper. The east of the republic, to which my small federal state of Thuringia was once rolled in Yalta, had had a rather eventful decade, with a chaotic juxtaposition of construction and dismantling, mass unemployment and career advancement, deindustrialization and real estate boom. The sociologists euphemistically called it transformation.

Society divided into winners and losers, and the exodus to the West continued. The mood was unpleasant, often aggressive; the former GDR state party, now called PDS, was favored by a fifth of voters. At the same time, foreigners were chased through the suburbs by neo-Nazis and refugee homes burned.

The decision-makers in the brand-new federal capital Berlin, who were predominantly socialized in the West, seemed perplexed and a bit confused. Hadn’t billions upon billions of the beautiful D-Mark been dropped on the East? How could this ingratitude be explained?

On April 20, 2000, two incendiary devices hit the back of the Erfurt synagogue, where the chairman of the Jewish regional community and a rabbi lived. One of the two Molotov cocktails narrowly missed a window.

The police found a note at the crime scene: “This attack is based on a purely anti-Semitic level! We salute the Gotha Office for the Protection of the Constitution. Heil Hitler. The apex bearers.”

The excitement was maximum. There were vigils and demonstrations, while Prime Minister Bernhard Vogel, who was imported from Rhineland-Palatinate, commissioned a study from the University of Jena, from a very competent professor who had graded my master’s thesis just a few years before, and how could it be otherwise , nor did it come from the so-called accession area.

The results were shocking. Almost two thirds of the representative respondents fully or partially agreed with the statement that Germany is “dangerously infested with foreigners.” Around 20 percent were of the opinion that it was right to “use force to restrain foreigners”, with 60 percent saying that they had no contact with foreigners – which was unsurprising given that the proportion of migrants was 1.5 percent.

The Thuringia Monitor became the first East German long-term study. The sociologists and political scientists mixed nationalism, xenophobia, social Darwinism, anti-Semitism and dictatorship affinity to create a right-wing extremist “attitude syndrome”. A quarter of respondents fell into this category.

There was nothing to apologize for in the results, especially since they matched what I experienced in everyday life. And it didn’t get any better. More and more questions produced more and more data that reinforced the image of a latent extremist East.

The NSU was later discovered. While I was watching my fellow Jensenser Beate Zschäpe being put on trial in Munich, Pegida was founded in Dresden and the AfD first got into several East German parliaments just a year after its founding.

I don’t know how many lyrics I wrote about all of this. There must have been hundreds who joined the thousands upon thousands others wrote. But what hardly anyone problematized were the deficits of West German society. Yes, they were occasionally measured, but hardly reported.

I thought of that when I last read the new Leipzig authoritarianism study. She found that only 42.3 percent of Germans are satisfied with the way the Federal Republic’s democracy works – and that this minority in the East is only a surprise 30 percent.

But then there was also this paragraph: “For three of the six dimensions (support for dictatorship, social Darwinism and trivialization of Nazism) the approval ratings in both parts of the country are at a similar level and there are no significant differences.” The interpretable term “parts of the country” meant East and West Germany.

It continued: “With regard to the dimension of anti-Semitism, it can be seen that the proportion of manifest anti-Semitic attitudes is significantly higher in West Germany than in the East.” Conversely, xenophobia is much more pronounced in the East.

Now I’m already hearing those who say that there are more Muslims living in the West and that anti-Semitism is therefore more likely to have immigrated. But that too would only be a protective argument, and one with unpleasant connotations at that.

Around 3,000 people were surveyed who, as the researchers put it in the title of their paper, seemed “united in resentment.” A “closed right-wing extremist worldview” is held by 4.5 percent of West Germans and East Germans.

In the “Zeit” Jana Hensel recently rightly pointed out that the common narrative about the backward East and the enlightened West has never been true. The same applies to the assumption that attributes the particular success of the AfD or BSW in the East German states largely or even entirely to extreme and authoritarian attitudes.

There is nothing to put into perspective. Nothing about the authoritarian, ethnic and xenophobic attitudes of a large minority of East Germans. Nothing about the NSU and self-proclaimed “Saxon separatists” – and nothing about the popularity of a right-wing extremist like Björn Höcke who has arrived.

But there should finally be just as intensive a discussion about how the common Westphalian or the common Bavarian thinks. This would be due in the 35th year of unity.

You can find all of Martin Debes’ previously published columns .