#33: The madness of Höcke: German-speaking Americans and German-speaking Germans
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I don’t like drawing attention to AfD politician Björn Höcke but I trust that Update Germany’s readership is unimpressed by his brand of snake oil.
It’s important to try to understand what we’re up against.
Höcke, as everyone knows by now, is one of the most extreme voices within an extreme party. A court even ruled that it’s okay to call him a fascist. The Verfassungschutz (Office for the Protection of the Constitution) categorises the Thuringia branch of the AfD, of which Höcke is the leader, as a “confirmed right-wing extremist organisation.” You can read up on all the nasty Nazi or Nazi-adjacent things Höcke has said and done on Wikipedia.
His track record of racist, anti-semitic, xenophobic statements is well-known. But in a video interview with the Swiss newspaper Weltwoche, Höcke revealed some of the weirder ingredients of the ideological stew cooking in his warped brain.
He said, for example, that West Germans weren’t real Germans.
He said West Germans had “allowed themselves to be completely overwhelmed by American culture”.
In case you were wondering where the real Germans still live:
“In the east, people are still German. In the west, they have developed a substitute identity over the decades.”
Quoting “something he had read somewhere”, Höcke said in western Gemany you have “German-speaking Americans” while the East is populated by “German-speaking Germans”.
One imagines millions of people attending baseball games, gathered around tables for Thanksgiving, driving Dodge Ram pickups or just being super-friendly to complete strangers. While speaking with a Hessian, Hamburg or Bavarian accent. The odd thing is that Höcke himself is a West German who moved to the east to lead the AfD in Thuringia.
Of course, the Wessis are more influenced by American culture than the Ossis. That goes without saying. After World War II, the cultural influence of the US, British and French occupation of what became West Germany was hugely positive following the military, societal and moral collapse of a country that had perpetrated the Holocaust and caused unspeakable suffering and destruction across Europe.
Thanks to the Federal Republic’s integration into “the West”, basic notions of democracy, human rights, personal freedoms, racial and gender equality, sexual liberation became more or less ingrained in West German society.
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In the 1950s and 1960s, West German youth embraced American pop culture but also American rebellion and radicalism. The Vietnam War, in particular, woke German youth up to the fact that the western hegemon wasn’t just benevolent, and that capitalism had its dark side.
To this day, Germans continue to be largely influenced by US culture and US political discourse (#metoo, #blacklivesmatter, to name two recent examples). Only now, in the Trump presidency, are things beginning to shift.
Höcke sees behind everything coming from the US a grander strategy of domination on all levels, a plan to control the world. For him, the destruction of Germany as a nation is a byproduct of that plan.
According to Höcke, the US’s geostrategic aim has been to control central Europe (and, after the Cold War, eastern Europe) so it could control the “heartland” of the world. Here, he cites an obscure theory put forth by British geographer Halford John Mackinder in 1904.
Germans, according to Höcke, are powerless pawns within this grand strategic game. And American soft power — from Elvis to Tailor Swift, from Casablanca to Instagram — provided Germans a new layer of cultural identity, a “new suit” in Höcke’s words, so that they would play along in the American power game.
He, and the AfD, want to “rebuild” German identity “before it’s too late”. Before “finis Germania” — short-hand for “when white people become the minority”.
A few more Höcke morsels:
The “winners wrote the history books” after the war.
Germans are living in an American-built “digital prison”.
Transatlantic elites like “Blackrock-Merz” don’t represent the interest of real Germans, but of Wall Street. Merz is, of course, is still working for his former employer.
And yes, it all sounds like a thinly veiled antisemitic conspiracy theory coming from that point of the horseshoe where the far-right meets the far-left.
Like all conspiracy theories, it’s an apocalyptic narrative which feeds on real concerns and anxieties. Yes, the super rich are getting richer. Yes, the dominance of the US tech industry is frightening.
But it totally downplays or ignores the disastrous places Germany can go if it abandons its cultural and political ties to the West and re-embraces the enthnonationalism Höcke believes in. It denies that post-war West Germany and unified Germany after 1990 have been the most prosperous, most peaceful, most democratic and most just Germanies that have ever existed. Thanks, in no small part, to Germans being “Americanised” or “westernised” or whatever you want to call it.
If West Germans are Geman-speaking Americans, then what are the East Germans? German-speaking Soviets or German-speaking Russians? East Germany, a satellite of a continent-spanning authoritarian, communist empire, was “democratic” in name only. And why is that part of the country the “real Germany”? It makes no sense at all.
Höcke’s pseudo-intellectual musings are riddled with half-truths and fallacies. Not unlike Donald Trump, he floods the zone with craziness but with the sternness of a history teacher in the 1950s.
It’s one more reminder that if Höcke gets anywhere near real power we’re in big trouble. For now, he’s just the AfD’s Thuringia party boss but this guy is extremely well networked. He’s the glue between the national leadership of the AfD and even more extreme movements in the base. If the AfD ever joins a national government coalition he will demand a key ministerial post. This shouldn’t ever happen.
Thanks for reading!
Maurice
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