'Friedrichshain bleibt antifaschistisch'
Members of the right-wing extremist group Aktionsbündnis Berlin showed up to march from Ostkreuz Station to Lichtenberg--it didn't go as planned.
A week ago Saturday, around 60 members of the right-wing group Aktionsbündnis Berlin (Action Alliance Berlin) showed up for a planned “provocation” march through the district of Friedrichshain into a neighboring area of Lichtenberg.
According to news reports, they were met by almost 3,000 counter demonstrators who staged sit-ins at several points along the route, ultimately forcing the march to end early.
Around 3,000 people took to the streets in Berlin-Friedrichshain on Saturday in several demonstrations against the march of a right-wing extremist group. According to police reports on Sunday, around 900 participants were expected for the right-wing extremist demonstration, which started with 63 demonstrators.
[Translated from German]
Although I had heard about the march and the planned counter-demonstration on a neighborhood Signal group, I confess it had largely slipped my mind. There are a lot of protests, demonstrations, and counter demonstrations in Berlin.
I was a bit on edge because there have been problems before with members of the far-right organization Der Dritte Weg (The Third Way) attacking immigrants and members of left-leaning political groups in our area. Members of that group are suspected of assaulting members of an anti-fascist group at Ostkreuz station in July.
But we had family visiting us from the States and I was focused on Christmas shopping and sightseeing.
I should have known this time was a bit different when I saw all buses and trams in the neighborhood were cancelled. (Unfortunately, that’s not exactly rare here, either.) But it didn’t dawn on me until my husband’s stepmother and I finished a shopping trip to Ring Center and walked outside to see, basically, this:
There was no violence that I could see.
Mostly people yelling at each other and the police.
At various points along the planned route, police cleared counter-demonstrators out of the street so that the march could proceed. One of those people was Ferat Koçak, a member of the Berlin state parliament who is running for a seat in the Bundestag. You can see footage of this that he reposted to Instagram.
Many people objected to the police providing protection to a group flashing the ‘White Power’ symbol and chanting, “Zecken raus!” (Ticks out!) through the neighborhood, while removing peaceful demonstrators.
The police did refuse the group’s plan to march down Rigaer Straße because of the presence of the left-wing cooperative house at Rigaer 94.
As we made our way back to our apartment, we passed crowds of people of all ages bringing signs to protest along streets. People lined the route completely along Neue Bahnhofstraße/Gürtelstraße, shouting down the marchers.
As the left-leaning news outlet Taz reports:
“Aus der linksalternativen Wagengruppe Rummelplatz tönt es aus einem Lautsprecher: „Ihr glaubt auch, ihr könnt einfach durch Friedrichshain laufen! Friedrichshain bleibt antifaschistisch!“
—
“From the left-wing alternative wagon group Rummelplatz, a loudspeaker blares: "You also think you can just walk through Friedrichshain! Friedrichshain remains anti-fascist!"
By the time the group made its way up to the corner at Frankfurter Alle, the police decided they had gone far-enough and made them end the route there.
According to Turkish outlet A News:
Counter-demonstrators managed to stop the march on Frankfurter Allee, after police ruled it was disproportionate to clear a gathering of thousands of people in order to ensure the passage of a few dozen far-right protesters.
But why did so many people turn out to stand up against what seemed to be a very small display by several dozen obnoxious young people?
Is it because of the assaults in July?
According to some neighbors I spoke to, the answer is yes, but it goes deeper than that.
Echoes from Nazi era
Friedrichshain, for more than a hundred years, has been a largely working-class, left-wing stronghold—home to many factory workers, immigrants and labor organizers. In the 1930s, it was targeted by the then-fledgling National Socialists for very similar provocations.
Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels targeted the working class areas popular with the Communist Party of Germany (KPD).
In an article for Spiegel International, writer Uwe Klußmann explains:
“Goebbels turned Berlin into a violent laboratory for the future dictatorship, availing himself of the services of the uniformed Sturmabteilung ("Assault Division"), or SA, whose members were known as the "brownshirts." The SA combined soldierly romanticism, the hatred of younger people for the older elites, and the rage of Berlin's working-class in the eastern part of the city against its wealthier western districts.”
In the later years of Germany’s Weimar Republic, private militias allied with different political groups engaged in street battles with each other in support of their political and ideological goals. Political disagreements frequently turned violent.
It’s not hard to see the disturbing parallels.
According to reports in both the Tagesspiegel and RBB, the Dec. 14 march was publicly supported by an AfD politician, Ferhat Sentürk, from Aachen and by activists associated with the far-right in other regions of Germany.
And the police confirmed that many participants traveled to the march from outside Berlin, including four men who were arrested before the march for attacking workers at a campaign booth of an SPD politician in Lichterfelde.
According to the public prosecutor's office, the four suspects were on their way to the right-wing extremist march in Friedrichshain and Lichtenberg . The men had traveled from Halle to engage in "physical confrontations" with "leftists" at the demonstration. By chance, they came across an SPD information stand on the forecourt of Lichterfelde Ost train station.
As I was finishing this article, we learned of the attack on the Christmas market in Magdeburg, in which five people died and more than 200 were injured. The perpetrator—arrested onsite—was a Saudi immigrant who has allegedly expressed right-wing views, though he has not indicated a motive for driving into a Christmas market.
Among the many threats of violence reportedly made on social media by Abdulmohsen, a self-declared critic of Islam and defender of Saudi women, was the wish to kill former chancellor Angela Merkel for her attempts to “Islamise Europe” by allowing refugees into the country in large numbers in 2015.
He had accused German authorities of trying to censor him. He said he had been isolated by friends and family after officially announcing he had renounced his Muslim faith. Patients – often asylum seekers – at the clinic 15km south of Magdeburg, where he worked as a consultant psychiatrist and psychotherapist, had accused him of being a “bad person” for doing so, he said.
I’ve written before that I am not as afraid of the official policy goals of parties like Alternative for Deutschland as I am individual actors who feel empowered to take actions to implement their interpretation of what those goals are.
Attacking “violent leftists,” for instance, when it’s up to the individual to decide who is a “leftist” and what constitutes “violence.”
I would add to that the pseudo-military organizations that aligned with particular political groups. The political groups will publicly claim to have nothing to do with such extreme acts, but then refuse to condemn the activities before or after.
It’s particularly ironic that the title chosen for the AB march was “For law and order: Against left-wing extremism and politically motivated violence,” when its members engaged in overt political violence and were attempting to instigate more.
When a reporter for the Tagesspiegel asked the group’s spokesman, Jannick Giese, what left-wing violence he was talking about, he responded by saying it was in response to the left-wing extremism “one notices there every day” and shared, by way of example, a photo of an anti-fascist demonstration with a burning garbage can in the foreground.
When questioned further about the date and time of the photo, Giese admitted to the reporter it was from a demonstration in the state of Washington in the United States held in 2021, not in Friedrichshain or in any way related to Berlin.
So, making unfounded accusations (also known as lies) of violence that one then uses to justify violence in “response.”
I hope that we can all recognize the danger of where this leads. And why it’s important to not ignore or underestimate it.
More About It
You can see coverage of the demonstration and the counter-demonstration from the Tagesspiegel here:
Here is an article explaining the different known far-right groups in Germany.
DW.com: A guide to Germany’s far right.
Editor’s Note
This will be the last regular newsletter for 2024. Sorry it’s a bit of a downer!
Overall, it’s been a great year for us in Berlin. And we are looking forward to 2025. I’ll have a year-end wrap up and reader survey that will come out next week. And I hope to launch some little updates and tweaks to make Alte Frau - New Life even better next year.
Until then, ‘Frohe Weihnachten’ to those who celebrate and ‘einen guten Rutsch’ (a good slide) into the New Year.
Please be careful....