2023-08-01 14:24:31
East Germans vote for AfD. That’s a popular tale these days. There is just one catch: the East Germans who don’t vote for the AfD don’t appear.
Researchers are investigating why many East Germans agree with far-right statements, and journalists travel to Saxony and Thuringia to hear East Germans say far-right phrases. Somewhere in the studies and articles they always write that not all East Germans are like that, of course. And then come back to the extremes. This follows the laws of attention: the unusual is interesting. But when everyone is talking about the extremes, it also does something to the normals.
You slide to the edge. In the middle are suddenly the explanations why East Germans vote for the AfD: the GDR, the Treuhand, the West Germans, the frustration. As a logical consequence, right-wing extremists would have to appear as saviors. The majority of people in East Germany are East Germans, have worries – and still don’t vote for the AfD. Also interesting.
Never been to the west
Sample in Eberswalde, Brandenburg. Pretty typical East German. Not a model city like Leipzig, but not a dump at the end of the world either. Eberswalde has beautiful sides, lots of forest, half-timbered houses and well-known spritzkuchen. Before reunification, they lived here from heavy industry, crane construction, and rolling mills. In Eberswalde, however, Germans also beat the Angolan contract worker Amadeu Antonio Kiowa to death, that was in 1990. In the 2021 federal election, the AfD came second behind the SPD in the constituency to which Eberswalde belongs. The AfD has been running a citizens’ office in Eberswalde for a few weeks.
Pensioner Gisela Lange wants nothing to do with the AfD. She dislikes “all the rushing about what they’re doing and nothing concrete”. : Image: Hannes Jung
A Friday in July, sun between clouds, people in cafés, German bratwurst and Polish cherries at the small weekly market. More walkers than prams, but that may also be due to the fact that it’s morning and the holiday season in Germany.
AfD voters appear self-confident. A man leans in the sun in front of an electronics store. He votes for AfD, he says, and everyone he knows does too. He didn’t want to know anyone else at all. One sits in front of the ice cream parlour, licking ice cream, and when he hears that non-AfD voters are being sought, he triumphantly replies: “You’re completely wrong here.”
A man is sitting a few tables away, reading a newspaper. He is happy that journalists approach him. He’s reading the local newspaper, but it’s a piece of cheese. He used to read the FAZ, but now it’s too expensive for him. In the “Bild” he only reads the page with the sport, because this newspaper is a hate newspaper. How they chased the Federal President Christian Wulff out of office! Jörg-Peter Klaws, 70, born in Eberswalde, is a man with strong opinions that often contradict each other. He has “No future” tattooed in fracture on one forearm and “Born to be free” on the other.
He says he had both tattoos done in prison in Bautzen. He had been in prison for eight years because he had smuggled people to West Berlin through sewage systems and subway tunnels. He rolls up his left T-shirt sleeve: the federal eagle on the German flag, engraved in 1972. He got an extra six months for that. One might think that the Federal Republic was his dream destination. But when it was finally open to him, he didn’t want to go. He has never been to the West, says Jörg-Peter Klaws, not even to West Berlin.
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