Theatrical performances don’t usually end with a packed auditorium chanting “Everyone, together, against fascism” for 10 minutes after the curtain call, even at the Berliner Ensemble, a left-leaning German theatre by the river Spree founded by the playwright Bertolt Brecht. But then Brechtian epic theatre is rarely as politically galvanising as what the audience witnessed last Wednesday night.
In a “scenic reading”, five actors dressed as waiters took turns re-enacting scenes from a media report that jolted the nation awake from its winter slumber in the second week of the new year, triggering sackings and resignations, mass rallies across German cities – and a politically risky debate over an outright ban of the country’s second-strongest party.
Published only a week before this dramatic adaptation, the report by the independent investigative outlet Correctiv had revealed details of a covert meeting at a countryside hotel outside Berlin last November, where politicians from the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party and neo-Nazi activists discussed a “masterplan” for mass deportations to be carried out in the event of their coming to power.
The fact that thought experiments about the expulsion of German citizens were also on the agenda of these so-called “Düsseldorf forum” talks has not been denied by its participants, only that they were discussed in an approving tone.
The radicalisation of the AfD, a party formed a decade ago by a group of comparatively moderate anti-euro economics professors, was well-established beforehand: in three states of the formerly socialist east, the party is currently under surveillance by the German domestic spy agency for its “certified rightwing extremist” positions.
What the report did do was to show how emboldened the AfD has become by a prolonged rise in the polls over the past 18 months, and how far advanced it is in thinking about how to reshape the state if and when it enters government.
According to Correctiv’s account of the meeting, the AfD’s parliamentary group leader in Saxony-Anhalt, Ulrich Siegmund, spoke about the need to change the streetscape of German towns and cities by putting foreign restaurants under pressure. Siegmund has insisted he attended the meeting only in a “private capacity”, though a further report published on Thursday showed that he had turned up with his press officer, himself a former member of a rightwing extremist group.
The mix of proven neo-Nazis and notionally respectable business people at the meeting was instructive. Invitations to the Düsseldorf forum were issued by Gernot Mörig, a retired dentist who once led the rightwing extremist Association of Homeland Faithful Youth (BHTJ), and Hans-Christian Limmer, co-founder of high-street bakery BackWerk and a major shareholder in popular burger chain Hans im Glück and health food delivery service Pottsalat. Limmer, who did not attend the meeting, has left the latter two companies’ boards since the report was published.
Around the table were not just politicians for the AfD but also two members of the centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), though neither holds office in the party. Even as the AfD is riding high in the polls, it would require the CDU to do away with its firewall against coalitions with the far right in order to form a future government.
Most importantly, the centrepiece of the meeting was a lecture by Martin Sellner, a founding member of the Austrian Identitarian Movement, part of a pan-European “new right” activist network whose membership the AfD still officially declares incompatible with party membership.
At director Kay Voges’s “scenic reading” on Wednesday, Correctiv revealed fresh information about another member of the Identitarian Movement who attended the meeting. Mario Müller, who has previously been convicted for criminal assault, had allegedly bragged about tracking down a former antifascist activist and passing on details of his whereabouts to Polish football hooligans.
The performance teased out the implications of that claim. Müller works as a researcher for an AfD MP who sits on several Bundestag committees, which could allow him access to classified information. “What if we were to think of the executive and the judiciary as one?” the actor playing the Müller character at the Berliner Ensemble staging asked. “There are historic precedents: Gestapo.”
Confronted with the allegations, Müller has denied ordering a “thug squad”, merely confirming that he had “exchanged information” about the leftwing activist with “Polish journalists”.
The theatre also made public how Correctiv obtained its information about the meeting at Potsdam’s Adlon countryside hotel, whose secrecy its organisers had stressed by only communicating about its existence via post. Having been leaked one of the written invitations, the journalists set up dashboard cameras in two cars parked outside the hotel, and placed a photographer with a long-focus lens in a sauna boat moored on the lake outside.
One reporter managed to reserve himself a room at the hotel via an online booking platform in spite of its supposed closure for a private function, disguised himself to avoid being recognised, and walked into the start of the meeting pretending to look for staff who could serve him coffee. Shaky footage recorded via a smartwatch was shown at the Berliner Ensemble on Wednesday night. Information on the meeting’s content, Correctiv’s report says, was obtained through anonymous sources.
The AfD has insisted that the Potsdam meeting was not a “secret meeting” but a “private encounter”, and the party’s co-leader, Alice Weidel, has complained of “Stasi-like secret police methods” by “leftwing activists”. Nonetheless, Weidel announced last week she was parting ways with her personal adviser, Roland Hartwig, who attended the meeting. Correctiv is financed through a mix of reader donations, public funds and business activities such as book sales. Before the AfD story, one of its most prominent exposés was about the CumEx tax fraud scandal that has also implicated the centre-left chancellor, Olaf Scholz.
That the revelations galvanised left-leaning theatregoers in Berlin may not be surprising, but its repercussions have been far-reaching.
Now due to enter their eighth consecutive day, anti-AfD protests have been taking place around the country, despite the enduring alpine chill. The biggest so far, in Cologne on Tuesday, was 30,000 strong.
“The important reason for being here is because if we didn’t know it before, this exposé has shown us just what this party stands for and no one can say they ‘didn’t know’, like many did in 1945 [after the collapse of Nazi Germany],” said Mahmud, a law student attending the protest in Cologne.
Although demonstrations against the party are nothing new, there is evidence that a new, sharply focused civil society movement is bubbling into life. A fledgling umbrella alliance called Hand in Hand, which by Friday had grown to include around 160 groups from churches to pro-asylum groups, is gathering under the motto “We are the firewall”, to hold what is likely to be a very large rally in Berlin on 3 February, at which a human chain is to be formed around the Reichstag building, the seat of parliament.
There is hardly a more symbolic representation of the country’s commitment to democracy. In 1933 it was damaged by a devastating fire, which gave Adolf Hitler the excuse to have civil liberties suspended, paving the way for Nazi dictatorship. After reunification it once again became the country’s seat of parliament, and stands as an omnipresent reminder in the city of the need to protect democracy from tyrants.
“If the mainstream political parties can’t succeed in stopping the rightwing extremists, the onus is on us to create a human firewall against them,” Tareq Alaows, one of the organisers, who has been building the alliance since the summer in reaction to the AfD’s rising poll ratings, told German media.
Among the protesters, the calls are growing for the government to seek to ban the AfD through the courts. The proposal is not new. Earlier this month, Saskia Esken, co-chair of the Social Democrats, suggested it again, “if only to shake voters out of their complacency,” she said.
But the vice-chancellor, Robert Habeck, even as he accused the AfD of systematically preparing “to turn Germany into an [autocratic] state like Russia”, warned of the “dangerous backfiring” that would likely occur if such a move were to fail.
Already, the very fact that state-level intelligence agencies responsible for surveillance of anti-constitutional groups have classified the party as rightwing extremist in three eastern states, with five others under review, has boosted its popularity. Initially seen by party leaders as an affront, prompting them to make comparisons between the intelligence agencies and the Stasi, the sinister secret police of communist East Germany, “now the party carries the classification … like a badge of honour, using it as yet further proof that it’s the only real alternative to the other parties,” according to Georg Mascolo, political commentator at the Süddeutsche Zeitung.
Petitions for a party ban and to remove the basic rights of top party figureheads, such as Thuringia’s party head, Björn Höcke, for unconstitutional behaviour are gaining traction though, and the government will struggle to show it is addressing concerns about the party’s rise if it completely ignores them.
Chancellor Olaf Scholz has hitherto tried not to engage with the AfD but last Sunday attended a “Potsdam fights back” rally, just metres from the front door of his own apartment in the city, which attracted 10,000 supporters.
The message of the rally was reflected in the closing minutes of the scenic reading at the Berliner Ensemble theatre on Wednesday when one of the actors addressed the audience, saying he hoped what they had seen was “a story that shows there are many of us, that we can raise our voice and that we won’t allow our society to be destroyed”.
