Germany’s first Nazi vegan cooking show…the first episode: mixed salad, tofu scramble.
“The left-wing doesn’t have a prior claim to veganism,” says Tim.
“Industrial meat production is incompatible with our nationalist and
socialist world views.”
Even Nazis can be hipsters and wear Che Guevara uniforms. It is a strange world indeed.
Back in his 2010 book What Was the Hipster?,
Mark Greif described the term as meaning a “consumer” who “aligns
himself both with rebel subculture and with the dominant class and thus
opens up a poisonous conduit between the two.”
……
It’s a rainy Sunday evening in May, in the town of Weiden, in
northeastern Bavaria, and Patrick Schroeder, whom the German press has
dubbed the “Nazi-hipster,” is preparing for his big webcam entrance. As
the opening sequence for his weekly Internet TV show, FSN.tv,
plays silently in the background, he ties a bandana stitched with the
slogan “H8” around his mouth and fiddles with his mouse. A map of
Germany in 1937 hangs on the wall above him.
“If the Third Reich was so bad, it would have been toppled,”
he argues, before the filming begins. “Every half-intelligent person
knows there is no system where everything was bad.”
FSN.tv is Germany’s only neo-Nazi Internet TV show, and in
the two years since it has existed it has turned Schroeder into a
well-known, if highly controversial, figure in the German extreme right,
largely because he has been open about his desire to give the German
neo-Nazi movement a friendlier, hipper face.
Over the past year, partly because of leaders like Schroeder and
partly because of the unstoppable globalization of youth culture, the
hipsterification of the German neo-Nazi scene has begun to gain steam.
This winter, the German media came up with a new term, “nipster,” to
describe the trend of people dressing like Brooklyn hipsters at Nazi
events.
The term hipster has, of course, always been notoriously slippery. Back in his 2010 book What Was the Hipster?,
Mark Greif described the term as meaning a “consumer” who “aligns
himself both with rebel subculture and with the dominant class and thus
opens up a poisonous conduit between the two.”
But in Germany, as
elsewhere, the newly discovered hipster is often reduced to its more
superficial component parts: “skinny jeans, a bushy beard, bright
sunglasses” (Welt), “strange, nerdy and somehow different,” (Sueddeutsche Zeitung), “self-important culture snobs” (Tagesspiegel). Here, the hipster is simultaneously a uniform, a cooler-than-thou weltanschauung and signpost of globalized American youth culture and consumerism.
“We don’t want to cut ourselves off,” Knape says, about hipster
culture. “I see rap and hip-hop, for example, as a way of transporting
our message.” In recent years, a number of extreme-right hip-hop acts
have emerged in Germany — with names like Makss Damage and Dee Ex.
Despite the awkward politics of using hip-hop to preach the virtues of
German identity, they’ve amassed a small, but significant presence
within the scene. Dee Ex, for example, has over 7,000 likes on Facebook
and posts photos of herself in a revealing outfit on her blog. There is now neo-Nazi techno (biggest act: DJ Adolf) and neo-Nazi reggae.
Knape, on his end, has also gotten increasingly invested in online
culture: “The Internet allows us to reach people we can’t reach on the
street.” Now young people can get in touch with him over Facebook or
e-mail without their parents, or anybody else, finding out. “They don’t
need to out themselves immediately,” he says. Knape is especially proud
of his viral-video outreach: last year, his group filmed a “Harlem Shake” video.
In the JN video, people in masks bounce around junked cars while one of
them holds up a sign saying “Have more sex with Nazis, unprotected.”
It has over 17,000 hits on YouTube.
But, perhaps partly because of this
internationalization of German culture, Knape struggles to define the
“German traditions” he’s trying to preserve. It’s understandable:
Germany, even by European standards, is a supremely contrived state
composed of 300 formerly distinct political entities. Founded in 1871,
it is also younger even than Canada — there’s a reason Hitler had to
reach back to centuries-old, mythical folklore when trying to sell
people on the idea of Germanic superiority.
Knape says he wants more
people to mark the “Sonnenwende” or solstice — a celebration the Nazis
tried to revive in the Hitler era — for example, and to preserve the
German language. He is concerned that “these days, we see a lot of
people mixing German and English” — though he acknowledges that when it
comes to technology, it’s “not easy to avoid.” He notes, with some
resignation, that there is no German word for “hashtag.”
In their latest 2013 report, the Bundesverfassungschutz
concluded that there are approximately 22,000 members of the extreme
right in Germany, including 9,600 who are “willing to engage in
violence.” According to official statistics,they committed 473 violent
crimes against foreigners last year — a shocking 20 percent rise over
the previous year.
In September, for example, three suspected neo-Nazis brutally beat a
15-year-old in Saxony, allegedly because the boy was half Taiwanese. The
same month, a Turkish immigrant was nearly beaten to death by a group
of nine alleged neo-Nazis in a train station in Saxony-Anhalt and this
February, a group of more than a dozen neo-Nazis walked into a community
center in the town of Ballstaedt, in the state of Thuringia, and began
assaulting the attendees at a party, sending two of them to the
hospital.
Although the extreme right has existed in Germany, in various forms,
since World War II, the neo-Nazi scene as it exists today largely took
shape in the 1980s, and spread dramatically after the fall of the Berlin
Wall. Especially in the post-reunification East, where young people
were suddenly robbed of the Communist strictures and institutions they
had grown up with, extreme-right politics provided an easy outside
explanation for their economic and cultural alienation:
multiculturalism, asylum seekers, American “imperialism,” Israel and
global big business.
Around the turn of the 21st century, the skinhead look waned and the
scene underwent another philosophical and aesthetic transformation.
“Society had started to react against the extreme right, and it became
less attractive for young people to stigmatize themselves,” says Simone
Rafael, the editor-in-chief of Netz Gegen Nazis,
a blog that monitors the extreme right. As a result, a new
extreme-right group, the Autonomous Nationalists (AN), began aping the
look of the extreme left — black hoodies, black pants and even Che
Guevara T-shirts (with the words “Not only Che would be with us”) — and
incorporating traditionally progressive issues like environmentalism and
animal rights into neo-Nazi ideology. “Once [neo-Nazi leaders] saw it
was successful, it was taken up by the scene,” says Rafael.
These developments helped spur the notion, now championed by Knape
and Schroeder, that young neo-Nazis should be allowed to dress however
they want, as long as they have the “right” anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim,
anti-Semitic ideas. This newly relaxed approach allows neo-Nazi leaders
to attract young people from different subcultures and makes neo-Nazis
more difficult for their opponents to identify. “Now the neo-Nazi youth
culture is really broad,” says Christoph Schulze, one of several
left-wing activists who assemble the annual Versteckspiel (“Hide and seek”), a glossary of symbols used by members of the extreme-right to surreptitiously identify one another.
Those aforementioned symbols include everything from number codes
(the most obvious: “88” to replace “Heil Hitler” — because “H” is the
eighth letter in the alphabet) to logos (an eagle catching a Christian ichthys
— a symbol of Germanic strength over “degenerates”) to sayings (“14
words,” which stands for a quote by American white nationalist David
Lane). “The movement is always changing,” Schulze says. “One thing goes
out of fashion and there’s already something new. This year it’s the
hipster.”
The nipster came to widespread attention in February of this year,
when a photographer snapped a picture of a group of men wearing skinny
jeans, unruly beards, plug piercings — and, in one case, a tote bag with
the words “don’t shove me, I’ve got a joghurt in my bag” — at an NPD
march in Magdeburg. The photo quickly went viral in Germany and bloggers
came up with the new portmanteau. Taz, the left-leaning Berlin
daily, made a list of other hipster stances the Nazis could adopt
(“change your favorite band when they become too mainstream.”).
In recent years, a growing number of neo-Nazi groups have staged
savvy viral campaigns, including one where they dressed up as the Sesame Street
Cookie Monster and distributed pamphlets to schoolchildren, and another
involving a man in a bear costume calling himself the “deportation
bear” and posing in front of Hanover Turkish shops. “They can easily
produce something that has the appearance of looking hip,” says Koehler.
“These aren’t just dumb East German youth — they understand how to
package their political ideology.”
Tim and Kevin, two 21-year-old self-proclaimed “nationalists and
socialists” (“but anyone who reads this will know we’re Nazis”) from
Hanover — who did not want to give their real names — say they have also
noticed more people in the scene dressing like “hipsters,” with skinny
pants and tote bags. “It’s noticeable,” Tim says, over the phone, and
explains that everything that emerges in German mainstream culture ends
up in the [neo-Nazi] scene, just with a delay. “We don’t walk around the
city center with our eyes closed,” he says, “we see what people are
wearing on TV.” He also agrees that the Nazi Tumblr style has gotten
“more youthful” and “looser.”
In February, Tim and Kevin started Balaclava Kueche,
Germany’s first Nazi vegan cooking show. In each episode, the two
chatty, fast-talking men wear facemasks and earnestly explain to viewers
how to make an array of vegan dishes (the first episode: mixed salad, tofu scramble).
“The left-wing doesn’t have a prior claim to veganism,” says Tim.
“Industrial meat production is incompatible with our nationalist and
socialist world views.”
And then there are the Identitaeren, a two-year-old group
with origins in France that has gotten widespread attention for its use
of stylish viral videos to promote anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant
sentiment. Although claiming to be anti-Nazi, they, like many members of
the extreme right, espouse a concept called ethnopluralism, which
argues that ethnic groups should only live in their respective home
countries. Nils Altmieks, the movement’s boyish, 27-year-old current
leader, argues that Europe should be for Europeans — and not, for
example, Africans — and cites the United States as an example of the
dangers of embracing heterogeneity. “Multiculturalism isn’t a
contribution to cultural understanding, it’s a cornerstone for
conflict,” he says, over Skype. He becomes wishy-washy when pressed
about the exact borders of Europe (“Some might view Russia as European”) and can’t account for countries, like Canada, with high immigration and low crime.
German extremism researcher Alexander Haeusler has warned that the Identitaeren
are insidiously attempting to make “racism modern and hip.” Last year,
group members filmed themselves disrupting a multiculturalism conference
with a blaring boombox and they also have a dedicated video blogger — a
stylish-looking young man who often wears thick plastic glasses frames
and a hoodie and whose most recent dispatch is about the moral peril of eating ethnic food. In other videos they’ve dumped rubble in front of the office of a Green Party politician and posed with silly-looking 300-inspired shields
in front of the Brandenburg Gate. “We aren’t consciously a hipster
movement, but today’s young people grew up with this background,” says
Altmieks. “This is part of society.” His favorite movie, he says, is Braveheart.
Coincidentally or not, the emergence of the nipster has taken place
at the same time as the rise of a new far-right political scene in
Europe: In this May’s European elections, the National Front — the
anti-immigrant party headed by Marine Le Pen — won the biggest voting
share of parties in the French elections, and the British United Kingdom
Independence Party won 27.5 percent of the vote in the U.K. Many people
link these parties’ success to their ability to package themselves as a
friendlier, less-threatening far right. Dutch political scientist Cas
Mudde has argued
that these parties largely swept into power by linking the euro crisis
“to their core ideological features: nativism, authoritarianism and
populism.”
The current German wave of, for instance, hip, vegan neo-Nazis
functions in a similar way. Rafael says they attempt to slide into
debates where young people wouldn’t expect them, and then sell their
politics as a palatable outlet. “They use subjects like globalization
and animal protection as entry points, and then offer a very simple
worldview that makes complex subjects very easy to understand,” says
Rafael. “Of course, in the end, it’s always about racism and
anti-Semitism and nationalism.” The danger — in both cases — is that
extreme-right positions might quietly shift into the mainstream.
Over the past two years, Cynthia Miller-Idriss, an associate
professor at American University in Washington, D.C., has been
conducting research with young people in Berlin schools who are on the
periphery of the extreme-right. She says that, if anything, the change
in neo-Nazi fashion has made it more difficult to step in when young
people are being embroiled in the scene. “If you were a teacher,” she
says, “you used to be able to identify a skinhead in your class and you
could think of ways to intervene. But now it’s harder to mainstream
society to understand who these young people are and to engage with
them.”
Miller-Idriss suggests that for a generation raised on Facebook and Twitter, it may no longer feel ridiculous to, say, love Rihanna
in real life but disparage black people on Facebook. “The social media
space allows young people to have different expressions of their
identities in different places,” she says. “This generation of youth
likes the idea of having more control over their own identity. They’ve
realized your style doesn’t have to be connected to your ideology. You
can dress however you want to and still be a neo-Nazi.”
The stakes in the fight against extremism, of course, are more than
just semantic. Several weeks ago, after Dortmund’s local elections, a
group of about 20 neo-Nazis appeared outside city hall to protest the
recent banning of an extreme-right group. They yelled “Germany for the
Germans” and “foreigners out” and began singing the national anthem
before attacking people outside the building with pepper spray and
broken bottles, injuring ten. Dortmund city councilors have been meeting
under police protection ever since.
Back in Bavaria, Patrick Schroeder is driving around downtown Weiden
with his former co-host, Martin, a clean-cut 27-year-old computer
programmer. Martin is not his real name, but he’s already lost his job
twice because of his politics, and is worried about jeopardizing his
newest position. Both men are complaining about the repression they face
on the job market as neo-Nazis — since finishing his training as a
salesman, Schroeder has only worked for companies tied to the scene.
“We’re the new Jews in Germany,” he says, “except we don’t wear stars.”
They pull into the parking lot of a local Ernest Hemingway-themed
restaurant and walk into a room crowded with people watching a soccer
game. Heads turn. Schroeder is wearing a T-shirt of an extreme-right
band called Terrorsphaera (“Terrorsphere”) with blood-like paint
splatters. Martin, on the other hand, is dressed in gingham shirt, and
looks like a character on Silicon Valley.
The waitresses are all blonde and wearing “We love Germany” T-shirts,
in honor of the upcoming World Cup, and as he sits down, the multiple
men in the room give him dirty looks.
Schroeder also seems aware that the concepts of Germany and Europe —
and, for that matter, America — are becoming increasingly theoretical.
In the background, a soccer game is playing on the bar’s big screens,
and it helps launch him on a tortured metaphor explaining why Asian
immigrants don’t qualify as Germans. “It’s like if the Chinese bought 22
Brazilians and gave them Chinese passports and used them to win the
World Cup,” he mopes. “If everybody’s the same, then what’s the point?”
……
…….
regards