A German Who Explains Trump

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/06/opinion/german-explains-trump.html

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BRANDENBURG AN DER HAVEL, Germany — Klaus Riedelsdorf calls himself a German patriot. He’s tired of German shame over its Nazi past: enough of “schuldkult,” or guilt celebration. He did not give up East Germany, a vassal state to Moscow, to join a united Germany that’s a vassal state to the European Union and Washington. He wants his country back. “We need to be sovereign in our land,” he tells me.

Islam is an ideology, he says, and an Islamic takeover of Germany is the greatest danger the country has faced since the Cold War. Not since the Cuban missile crisis has Europe been confronted with a danger as acute as the Arab Islamist threat to the West. When there are terrorist attacks by Muslims “and we say that has nothing to do with Islam, it’s a very dangerous development,” he says, because it deludes people.

Riedelsdorf’s tone is flat, clipped. The tension in his face gathers in his pursed mouth. The room is warm; occasionally a bead of sweat appears. Slim, a smoker, he wears glasses, a gray jacket, jeans and a blue tie. He’s a middle-aged Everyman: thoughtful, tortured and angry about the drift of Angela Merkel’s Germany.

There was the euro fiasco, where Germany ended up paying to bail out other countries. There was the environment fiasco, where Germany renounced nuclear power and Merkel went “green,” embracing the view that, as Riedelsdorf put it, “humans can change the climate when the climate does what it will.” There is the refugee fiasco, where Merkel has let in a million-strong “army with stones” since 2015, “an irresponsible and crazy thing to do.”

In all of this, Riedelsdorf says, Merkel insisted that she was, in effect, “alternativlos” — or had no alternative, which is precisely why his political party is called Alternative for Germany (AfD). As Merkel’s Christian Democratic party had forsaken the right to merge into some center-left hodgepodge, and the chancellor had joined the cohorts of the politically correct, there was, of course, a need for the AfD, formed in 2013, he says. There must always be alternatives.

“Germany,” he tells me, “has no special responsibility for Arab refugees just because 80 years ago we persecuted the Jews.” It should have said no.

Riedelsdorf is a German who has thrown in his lot with a nationalist and xenophobic party that, breaking taboos, has just taken almost 100 seats in the German Parliament. He lives in this small, formerly East German town an hour’s drive west of Berlin where, in last month’s election, he got almost 17 percent of the vote (up to 41 percent in some parts of the constituency), not enough to win, but still. He’s a rightist German, though in the current political climate he could be from anywhere: the United States, France, Britain, the Netherlands. It’s important to recognize him: a conservative white man — intelligent, patriotic, uneasy, resentful, who’s had enough.

“The pendulum is swinging back,” he tells me. Then, using a German expression for a situation where something has to give, he says, “The bow was stretched too tight.”

Propped in his office is one of the AfD campaign posters with the words “We will take our country back.” There are peculiarly German elements to Riedelsdorf’s story — life under the Stasi in a divided Germany emerging from the ruins of Nazism will play with anyone’s mind — but this slogan is the universal cry of rightist reaction. It’s Trump’s “America First.” It’s Brexit. It’s Marine Le Pen’s nationalists against the globalists. It’s behind the word of the moment: sovereignty.

The question arises: back from what or whom? In Brandenburg, as in Trump-world, there’s plenty of political energy against globalized, mealy-mouthed, quinoa-loving, inequality-fostering, immigrant-embracing elites with their gender spectra, climate doomsdays, multilateral organizations, mainstream parties and smug no-alternatives views of existence.

When the pendulum swings, pay close attention. Riedelsdorf riffs onward, turning to gay rights and women’s rights. All fine, all great, he says, but if gays can marry now in Germany, does what homosexuals do with each other really need to be taught in some German schools? Do gender-neutral neologisms, like “studierende” for students, really need to be adopted to satisfy feminists?

“Our language is being raped for ideological reasons,” he says.

Later he writes to me. In East Germany, he says, everyone was taught to love peace, socialism and each other. But as soon as the wall fell, there were racist attacks against blacks, the Vietnamese, other foreigners. Riedelsdorf’s conclusion: “It makes no sense to force people to think this or that when they don’t believe it. They will do the opposite as soon as they can. Political correctness will lead to the opposite!”

Riedelsdorf often sounds like Trump (who incarnates the election of the “opposite”) but won’t be drawn on him, beyond saying, “We are very lucky that the biggest economic power got out of the Paris climate agreement because billions will be spent and nothing accomplished.”

I ask Riedelsdorf if Muslims are today’s Jews for the AfD. He denies any possible analogy. He tries to argue that most Germans never had anything against the Jews. They followed orders. “My grandfather and three of my father’s brothers fought in the war,” he says. “They did what they were told to do, as any soldier in the world would. They tried to be honorable. The war was a crime, we know that, but soldiers did not commit the crimes. That was the SS. We need a differentiated view of the Third Reich.”

I disagree with this German on just about everything. But I think it’s important to listen to him. It’s critical to listen to people you disagree with, however difficult. Oh, and I don’t think Riedelsdorf is an anti-Semite.