Welcome to Marzahn, a German neighborhood of the far right
Far-right populist parties around the world show stark similarities and their platforms are moving further toward the fringes.
BERLIN — Berlin is gritty and urbane, where techno music throbs against the graffitied walls of sex clubs and drag bars. The city is known for being progressive and tolerant — but hop on the S-Bahn to one of the last stations in the East and you’ve entered Marzahn.
This is the other Berlin.
Marzahn is tucked in the northeast corner of Berlin, a working class industrial region, dotted with high-rise flats dating from the Communist era. Far-right politics find fertile ground here. After the Berlin Wall fell, Marzahn became a hub for skinheads and swastikas in the 1990s, an area rife with nationalism and populism.
Today, Marzahn is a stronghold of the country’s most successful nationalist party, the Alternative for Germany or AfD. The party embraces a platform of familiar right-wing causes — anti-immigration, isolationism, anti-LGBTQ, anti-vaccine, antisemitism and climate change denial — which are part of the American political landscape as well. Like former U.S. President Donald Trump, some in the AfD have grudging admiration for Russian leader Vladimir Putin. They oppose supplying arms to Ukraine to defend itself against Moscow’s recent invasion.
Although AfD support slipped in the most recent elections last year, its formerly fringe politics are moving deeper into the mainstream —in Germany as abroad.
Jorn Geissler, treasurer of the Marzahn branch, is keen to explain himself and his views to American readers. He invited me into his office, projecting a voice that exuded his buoyant demeanor as he walked me through the local city hall. This German nationalist wore a pair of gray khakis and greeted me with vanilla wafers and black coffee.
“You are now leaving the politically correct sector,” reads a mousepad on a desk in the AfD Marzahn office. This is a party that trades inclusive policy and progress on human rights — or political correctness — for nationalist and anti-immigrant sentiment.
Of course, speaking to an American journalist, Geissler presented the polished rendition of the far-right faction, meticulously packaged as socially acceptable. Geissler wanted to make this remarkably clear.
“I’m not a Nazi and I’m not a racist,” said Geissler. “We hear so much about fascists and Nazis in Germany, in Berlin, in Marzahn, but I’ve never seen a Nazi.”
The AfD party was founded in 2013 by mainstream Christian Democrats, who wished to abolish the euro as Germany’s currency. It adopted a clear anti-immigration platform amid the influx of Muslim refugees in 2015, when the party’s popularity rose.
Supporters are primarily from the former Communist eastern part of the country, where the political divide today reflects a split along the former Iron Curtain. During the AfD’s peak in the 2017 election, only 11.1% of western German voters cast a vote for the AfD as compared to 22.5% in the eastern states, according to tracking carried out by the German publication FOCUS.
Right wing parties have made strong inroads in the former East Germany, a phenomenon attributed to high unemployment and loss of identity after the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, what Germans call the Wende, which means ‘Turn.’
“The whole East lost its political orientation in 1989,” Geissler said. “The former parties collapsed and all people in East Germany had to orient in a new way because we had no strong connection with the existing parties.”
Upon its creation in 2013, the AfD did not meet the five percent threshold to elect members to the German parliament. Very quickly, however, party support skyrocketed due to its feisty social conservative politics and its opposition to an influx of asylum seekers from the Middle East and Africa.
In Marzahn, support in 2021 hovered around 16%, maintaining the right-leaning reputation of the neighborhood. In the 2017 national election, 20.6% of Marzahn voters chose the AfD in the first round of voting, the party’s peak year.
Geissler, a construction engineer, joined the far-right party in 2014, attracted to its nationalist stance against the euro. He came to appreciate the party’s disruptive politics, seeing it as the German counterpart to Trumpism.
“We are not controlled by the system,’’ he said.
Even as a young man, growing up in the Germany Democratic Republic, or East Germany, Geissler was the rebellious type, dissatisfied with the living conditions maintained by the ruling Communists.
The same goes for Jeannette Auricht, 62, a member of the Berlin Senate who as a child danced around her room to Michael Jackson and Earth, Wind & Fire on the radio. In all areas of Berlin, TV and radio channels were left unrestricted which also gave her and other East Berliners access to the American Forces Network, a U.S. Army-run radio channel that contributed to her rising angst over lack of freedoms in the East.
Auricht was arrested in her teen years for demonstrating against the Berlin Wall. Now, she represents the AfD in Berlin and says she has “learned to read between the lines” in German politics, meaning she has a long-standing mistrust of government.
As she pledges to hold onto her center-right stance, not all of her party co-members do the same, instead drifting further right.
The alternative ideology of the party has attracted many extremist members, prompting the German courts in March 2021 uphold the government-declared designation of the AfD as a “suspicious entity,” which makes it legal to monitor groups who may be engaging in anti-constitutional activities.
Germany’s attempt to put the AfD under surveillance for extremism does not phase Auricht, who said she does not fear wiretapping because she has nothing to hide.
“I’m not planning a revolution,” she said. “Criticizing the government is a job you have to do and that is nothing against the country or the democratic ways.”
Within the party, leaders try to push out extremists by researching whether they have a racist or fascist history, Geissler said. However, German laws make it difficult to remove members from their parties and this proactive measure was only implemented a couple years into AfD’s existence, he said.
So, extremists do still exist here. And while the party is currently split between center-right and far-right directions, the far-right fringe casts a dark shadow on the reputation of the party.
In late 2020, former AfD party official Christian Lueth was recorded saying that to allow more migrants into Germany would be better for the party because it would attract more membership. As for the immigrants, he said, they can “shoot them all afterwards.”
“Or gas them, whichever you like. I don’t care either way,” the Lueth was quoted as saying.
Geissler said that other political parties in the governing coalition fight against the AfD because of some outspoken extremists, and he also blames the media for misrepresenting the party, due to what he considers a journalistic lean to the left.
He also points out that most party officials are beginners in the political scene.
“AfD members are mostly newbies,” Geissler said. “Most people have no political experience compared to other political parties. And you have to go a long way to get to the top.”
The fringe is gaining ground not only in Germany but in other parts of Europe, where voters in countries like Hungary and Poland are also continuing to accept the far-right in their political mainstream. Despite the AfD’s drop in votes in Germany’s most recent parliamentary election, the nationalist movement is gaining traction among the general public.
“Far-right groups are starting to share straight-out white supremacist ideas that used to be unacceptable in ‘mainstream’ politics,” said Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the U.S.-based Global Project Against Hate and Extremism.
The AfD’s social platform places it far into the political edges with its subversive ideology on human rights, she says, adding that its populist platform reflects the shifting political climate in Germany.
“There is a hard move to the right built mostly on anti-immigrant positions, a simultaneous collapse of the left, and a scramble at the center to keep the fringe out,” Beirich said.
Far-right anti-immigration sentiment is the most obvious example of social conservatism that has the potential to turn dangerous — as it has on a few other occasions in the three decades since German reunification. The AfD platform pushes for strictly regulated borders, especially for Muslim migrants who “don’t take up German culture,” said Marzahn party treasurer Geissler.
He says there is a stronger opposition to Muslim refugees than to Ukrainian refugees fleeing the Russian invasion because the new arrivals are of European descent and share Christian principles and other cultural norms.
“Migrants from Islamic countries are completely different from European countries like Ukraine,” Geissler said. “The culture is more similar, such as how to speak to women, and the family culture.”
The AfD is vocal about its anti-immigrant stance, but its antisemitism is more hidden. It does not support certain inclusive laws and regulations, such as those governing circumcision and animal slaughter rituals — some of which affect both Muslims and Jews, said Sigmount Koenigsberg, Commissioner Against Antisemitism at the Jewish Community of Berlin.
“The AfD is pretending to be pro-Jewish and pro-Israel,” Koenigsberg said. “It’s a fig leaf to hide their anti-Muslim sentiment. The far right parties are all antisemitic and that is clear.”
In July, the state of Brandenburg, outside Berlin, voted to amend its constitution to include stronger language banning discrimination against Jews, and specifically naming the Sinti and Roma diaspora for protection, codifying a commitment to fight antisemitism and antigypsyism.
The AfD was the only party to vote against it.
Beirich, of the global anti-hate project says the AfD’s populist rhetoric is now part of a global fabric, and she cites parallels between the German AfD and the American Republican Party.
“There’s a lot of political science work that’s been done about where the Republican party sits now and AfD is one of the parties that they most compare our GOP to nowadays,” Beirich said. “So it just shows how far the Republicans have moved to the right.”
She said the GOP and AfD dovetail most on their anti-immigrant positioning, seeking to deny benefits to migrants and cut back on numbers.
But while abortion laws are politically charged in the United States , especially after the Supreme Court reversed the Roe v. Wade right to abortion, the German right has maintained a more ambiguous stance.
“Every woman should make their own decision about their body,” said Auricht, who represents the AfD in Berlin. “With vaccinations too, you cannot say ‘my body my choice’ and then not hold that same principle with receiving the vaccine.”
Gun rights and regulation is also a hot topic for polarized America, and the AfD spokespeople cannot understand the American obsession with guns.
While the far-right narratives are similar worldwide — anti-lockdown fervor, dangerous conspiracy theories, and opposition to gay rights, just to name a few — the U.S. might be in more danger of veering into reactionary politics than Europe is, say analysts.
“There are some parallels with a hard shift to the right and openness by regular conservatives, especially here in the United States, to white supremacy and street movements,” American anti-extremism activist Beirich said. “I think the situation actually is worse here in the United States than it is in Germany.”
Because of Germany’s Nazi past, democracy is better protected by a state that is highly concerned with anti-democratic movements and hate speech, she said.
Beirich points out that far-right wing parties tend to be opportunistic, attaching themselves to crises such as the pandemic to keep their numbers up. If there is another social or economic crisis tomorrow, she said, party support would likely reflect the country’s circumstances.
“They are going to rise and fall in various ways depending on the mood of the country,” Beirich said. “The fringe is not disappearing like they did in previous eras. They seem to have a foothold now and are surviving.”
So the AfD may have lost some ground electorally, but its ideas have seeped into mainstream politics, strengthening the broader array of rightist parties.
Annemarie Schmidt, 74, a retired teacher from Marzahn who identifies herself as left-leaning, admits that she shares the AfD’s concerns over refugees, over rising housing and energy costs and the financial burdens of the war in Ukraine.
Schmidt thinks the climate is ripe for the AfD to do well in the future.
“Poor people here get nothing and the refugees get a lot, so the state makes it difficult for everyone to get along,” Schmidt said. “Though the AfD is taking advantage of these problems, they could be right on this topic. I wouldn’t vote for them, but during the next election the AfD will be very strong.”
Alexandra Goldberg is a Communication and Journalism student at UC Santa Barbara, reporting from Berlin this summer.
