The Last Return 24

[Top two photos: poster for the Europe-wide anti-nationalist demonstrations for ‘One Europe for All’ in May 2019; at the demo at the Frankfurt Opera House, image by a telecom union group says ‘Mono-culture has failed’ showing a Berlin Brandenburg Gate in post-war ruins. Bottom photo of the 70s radical sponti-‘HQ’ in the Nordend district, today with a hip bar at ground level].

Saturday 18^th May

Meet up with old friend A., who has come all the way from Berlin. We meet at the university we both attended at different times and then head for the nearby Palmengarten for a long lunch en plein air on a small pavilion terrace. We haven’t seen each other for fifteen years, and I do the automatic reciprocal scanning for time’s inevitable patina on our faces, as I imagine she probably does as well. Any exterior changes seem quite superficial, inside nothing changes, and there is still that personal resonance.

A. tells me at length about her experience with her dying father in hospital, and I deeply admire the way she responded and, instead of trying to ‘reality-check’ or ‘correct’ them, creatively went along with and supported the flow of his delusions, quite in the spirit of the drama improvisations we used to do so many years ago when we did street- and free impro-theatre together. I accompany her back to the Hauptbahnhof, the central station, to catch the train back to Berlin, walking through the social classes again, from the wealthy Westend with its beautiful Gründerzeit-villas in tree-lined streets and then through the bleak, rough area around the station.

On TV in the evening, I learn of the Labor Party’s surprise loss to the Liberals in the Australian national elections. The majority of the electorate has roundly rejected the former’s even mild social-democratic attempts to wind back some middle-class welfare in tax policies and introduce policies merely favouring electric vehicles. The staunchly pro-coal, neoliberal and ‘folksy’ Prime Minister was re-elected for another term.

Sunday 19^th May

M. and I go to the Opernplatz for the Europe-wide event in the lead-up to the European elections: ‘Ein Europa für Alle’ (One Europe for All). I like the egalitarian and anti-nationalist unifying slogan and my motivation is simply to here stand up to the general drift to far-right populism and nationalist proto-fascism (and to perhaps, in the long run, help transform the bureaucratic, over-centralised and neoliberal European political system into something far more democratic, decentralised and egalitarian).

There are a few thousand people, a fairly even mix of young and old. Carried by the usual mainstream progressive spectrum: SPD, trade unions, churches, Catholic Workers, Union of Nazi Victims, Green Party. We mill around in front of the central stage, listening to the warm-up rap-reggae band Boom Orchestra. Their one serious false note is an aggressive anti-populist song called ‘Haut dem Volk aufs Maul’, which translates literally as ‘Hit the People in the Gob’. In German this title is a pun, where a common saying, ‘dem Volk aufs Maul schauen’ (literally: ‘looking at the people’s snout or gob’, i.e. listening to the common people), has been changed by changing the verb ‘schauen’ (looking at) to ‘hauen’ (hit). The singer explains that the song is setting up an opposition between the word ‘Volk’ (people) as commonly used by right-wing populists and the word ‘Gesellschaft’ (society) as often used by progressives for whom ‘Volk’ is a word much favoured by totalitarian Nazis and communists in Germany’s past.

Fair enough, but the irksome aggressiveness and implied elitism of ‘Hit the People in the Gob’ remains; I would argue that this kind of naïve, militant, ‘politically correct’ ‘anti-fa’ simply mirrors, reproduces and, in the end, defensively strengthens the worst features of its far-right and fascist opponents. Resistance to far-right populism and fascism has to be far more creative, understanding, complex, comic and appealing than that if it is to have any hope of stemming the tide.

The MCs are two young, black women. There are speeches by Frankfurt’s SPD lord mayor stressing Frankfurt’s internationalism and long traditions of tolerance, pluralism, multi-culturalism; one by Workers Welfare stressing the need to change neoliberal Europe and its social inequalities into a ‘social Europe’ that caters to the quarter of Europe’s population that is impoverished; one by Medico International stressing the historical and colonial dimension of global inequalities as well as enduring  Enlightenment values such as democratic and human rights; one by a woman representing ‘Leicht Deutsch’ (Easy German) that, most interestingly, attempts to translate the apparently ‘difficult’ German of some of these speeches into simpler terms. The central trade union representative uses the left-populist binary of the People versus the System of profit-maximisation and competition), while representatives of young environmentalists and the Fridays for Future student climate movement elucidate the climate and extinction emergencies, the need to phase out coal by 2030 etc.

As usual, the creativity is not on the organized stage but in the non-organized, small personal messages: ‘Nazis essen heimlich Falafel’ (Nazis secretly eat falafels) or ‘Euer Hass beschämt uns’ (Your hatred make us feel ashamed).

After one and a half hours of standing in the sun and passively listening (always the consumerist problem with such mainstream party-political spectacles), we decide to skip the march as it begins, and instead have lunch and walk on to the Nordend neighbourhood. This is the district where M. lived in the same old apartment house as then-radicals Cohn-Bendit and Fischer, RK ‘headquarters’. It has now much gentrified of course, with many new street cafes, restaurants, pubs, ice-cream parlours now gracing its horse-chestnut-lined streets. According to M., a four-bedroom apartment in an old Gründerzeit-building, such as the one M. etc. lived in as a radical student, can now cost about 1.2 million euros. Gentrification, c’est nous; is this another ‘achievement’ of our boomer generation, I wonder?

~ by Peter Lach-Newinsky on September 2, 2021.