The long read: As leader of the AfD’s most radical faction, he is infamous in Germany and his critics have long accused him of using language that echoes the Nazis. This year, a court put that question to the test
As leader of the AfD’s most radical faction, he is infamous in Germany and his critics have long accused him of using language that echoes the Nazis. This year, a court put that question to the test
As the band broke into Gimme Hope Jo’anna, the anti-apartheid song written by Eddy Grant – something of a surprise choice – a black sedan pulled up, and Höcke emerged, dressed in a beige raincoat, white button-up shirt, blazer and jeans. In the lashing wind, the grey coif of his hair betrayed the faintest of ruffles. For several minutes, Höcke slapped hands and posed for photos, and then leaped on to the stage. “The coldest May in 140 years,” he said.
In Germany, using Nazi slogans is not just distasteful, it is criminal. But nothing Höcke said had ever strayed into prosecutable territory, until May 2021. That month, a Green politician in Saxony-Anhalt noticed that Höcke had ended one of his speeches by saying, “Everything for our homeland, everything for Saxony-Anhalt, everything for Germany.” Innocuous taken at face value, but the last phrase was a slogan used by the Nazi SA paramilitary unit, and carved into its service daggers.
I had been warned that the first session would probably be dry, technical and short. But Höcke’s defence team had different plans. Before the prosecutors could read out the charges, one of Höcke’s lawyers asked that the proceedings be taped – a striking request in a country where recordings are almost never allowed. “The purpose is to ensure that the defendant receives a fair trial,” the lawyer said.
The AfD is often portrayed as a bull in the china shop of German democracy, flouting norms and decorum in an attempt to undermine institutions of state. When, after five recesses and multiple rejected motions, the hearing finally concluded, it seemed clear that Höcke’s team were not afraid to be seen in the same light. By the time I got back to Berlin, headlines across the country were declaring: “t is in East Germany that Höcke has built his base.
Höcke started his job in 2001, when the hard-right was still on the political margins. At 29, with blond hair and an athletic build, he struck an energetic contrast to his older colleagues. But students soon discovered a conservative streak.
Kemper, the sociologist, has alleged that Höcke went further, by authoring several articles in publications run by Heise under the name “Landolf Ladig”. The articles, published in 2011 and 2012, argued that the world wars were started by foreign powers jealous of German “industry” and praised NDP economic policies aimed at “overcoming inhumane global capitalism” and encouraging the births of more “German children”.
In March 2020, a few months after the AfD’s strong performance in Thuringia’s state elections, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency said it was placing The Wing under surveillance. The decision, unprecedented in the country’s modern history, was justified in a, which referred to Höcke more than 600 times. In another setback for the AfD, the Covid-19 pandemic initially led Germans to rally around Chancellor Merkel. In the general election of 2021, the AfD lost 11 seats.
Höcke’s defence evoked a quandary at the heart of Germany’s militant approach to defending its postwar liberal order: where to draw the line? Many phrases, such as “Heil Hitler”, obviously fall under the scope of Paragraph 86a. Others, such as “Führer”, a common term applied to bus drivers and tour guides, and “Lebensraum”, which is widely used in ecology, do not. Playing in the ambiguous space between these two extremes is something of a pastime for Germany’s far-right.
Vosgerau delivered a point-by-point refutation of the prosecution, which built to a theoretical crescendo: “The difference between a liberal, constitutional state and a totalitarian state is not that there are very, very, very strict laws in a totalitarian state and in a free, constitutional state very lenient laws. The difference is that, in a totalitarian state, nobody knows exactly what is punishable.
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