Ronen.Dvarim

My dear freind Charlotte Misselwitz who has worked as a journalist in Israel, Palestine and Russia is now back working in her home town of Berlin. She joined us in the Anti-Nazi demo on Mayday. 

Hello friends in Russia, Israel and Palestine,
We beat them! This is what I told my colleague from the politics desk, after having come back from the Anti-Neonazi demonstration in Erfurt this first of May. The thin, tall super model type turns her beautiful head striking her dark long hair out of her face. She gives me one of her usual radiant and irritated smiles. Of course, surrounded by the morning light, the amazing view over the city from the rooftop palace that we share as an office, words like Nazi, demonstration or even Erfurt (a town in Southern Germany) are ghosts for her. They make her shiver but at the same time they don’t belong to reality. So I spare her the rest, just say there were 600 Neonazis from all over Germany and about 2000 regional demonstrators. And her world is back in order.
(more…)

On the May 1st (2007) the so-called “free forces” and the NPD – the Nazis, tried to march in Erfurt. We the anti-fascist counter demo successfully blocked over one thousand of these extreme right wing fascists. It was a good day; the Nazis did not manage to march more than 200 meters and were stuck for hours in the sun in an off-central part of the city. There was very little violence and thousands of people showed up to make sure that the Nazis would not feel welcome, a task especially important in East Germany where they still have some popularity. But the day was also upsetting, because for the first time I was confronted with large numbers of Neo-Fascists. I saw them wave flags, shout slogans and assemble. Watching them made me sick, standing nearby these people, I just wanted to throw up and I felt a little dizzy. They were chanting slogans like “the streets of Germany for the German young men” but also there were slogans such as: ‘Future instead of globalization — work for millions instead of profits for millionaires.’

What I noticed and later learned is that Germany’s most popular far-right group, the National Democratic Party - NPD hopes to benefit from the populist battle between rich and poor by joining the many left-wing groups protesting globalization, using anti-capitalist rhetoric. But it’s an anti-capitalist anti American rhetoric that is paired with anti-Semitic and xenophobic ideas aimed at keeping immigrants out or sending foreigners living in Germany back home. Of course this is not a new strategy and fascist groups have always been doing this, but what is scary is to see how they purposely and blatantly copy not only the rhetoric of the radical left but are also taking its customs and even aesthetics. The English Fascist National Front Party hijacked the skinhead subculture of the working class youth in England in the sixties and seventies and built their power and strength through an originally genuine youth culture. It looks like the NPD in Germany is trying to do the same with the autonomist–anarchist–punk–street culture of Germany today. There are still many bonehead old school skinhead style Nazis. But in many cases it was hard to tell the difference between the sides and many fascists are not only using the slogans of the left but are dressed looking like anarchists, in shorts, hoodies and even Mohawks.

The day:

Originally I thought of going to Berlin for Mayday. Berlin has a long tradition of resistance, demonstrations, rioting and of course parties on May 1st, so of course I wanted to experience the day in Berlin. But when I heard that the main Nazi demonstration was planned in Erfurt, the capital Thuringia only 20 minutes from Weimar I knew that my plans had changed.

The tension and fear was already felt as before we* left Weimar. At the train station the were dozens of cops in riot gear and rumors were going around that the Nazis could at the last moment change their plans and march in Weimar. This would be even worse because the people mobilizing against them were in Erfurt and this would have left Weimar, Hitler’s favorite town, free of Nazi resistance.

The anti Nazi march was planned for 12 o’clock because the Nazi’s were marching at 2pm, this would allow nonofficial decentralized actions against the Nazi march to commence after our demonstration. Stupidly we missed the 11 o’clock train so we had to wait 40 minutes for the next train, when we came back to the train platform we already started noticing some right wing skins and there was even a young man with a Hitler haircut. Later I was told that he was the Nazi leader in Weimar and that he killed a Vietnamese kid and sat in jail for five years. Before the train arrived a police officer approached us and recommended that we do not go on to the train because they would be filled with fascists and it would put us in danger. So we took a step back and watched as the train from the east pulled in to the platform carrying the boneheads, many with beer bottles and freshly buzzed heads. Yes, at this moment we were scared and for the first time (and not the last that day) I felt comfortable with the heavy German police presence.

We met up with some leftist punks and took the next train to Erfurt still not sure how we would handle getting through the train station. The Erfurt train station was full of riot police, as we got of the train a middle aged police man came up to us and asked, links or rechts? (left or right?), we quickly replied that we on the left and were shown the safe way out of the station. We arrived at the meeting point just in time to join the antifascist march and we marched with around another 2000 demonstrators through the streets of the town. When we got to the center we realized the hundreds of cops were totaling blocking any exit from the demonstration preventing anyone from leaving the march and going to block the Nazi march. We were told from other friends from Weimar that many antifascists were already on the side of town and were attempting to block the route of the Nazi march by sitting on the road. We made a few failing attempts to leave the march and join the blockers but the police really closed the march from all sides. We marched through the main big street of the city and then came to a stop. The police blocked the direction we wanted to go and we had no desire to continue marching in circles. The organizers announced that there where 1200 fascists marching but also the there are people blocking there march and hinted that we should leave the march and try to join them. There was a small standoff but after around a half an hour we realized that the crowd was getting smaller and that people were sneaking out of the square where we were stuck. We soon found the opening and also left the demo in an attempt to join the blockers on the other side of the city.

Anti-Fascist rally (Press to enlarge)

After a small lunch break at a Turkish doner, we walked to the train station planning to cross it to get to the other side of the city where we were told that the block was happening. We put on our most innocent face and walked up to the police barricade hopping that they will let us by. This did not work, Oguz my house and class mate from Turkey suggested that we go into the station and walk out the other side. Surprisingly that simple plan worked and we found ourselves walking freely between the dozens of police vans parked behind the station. By approaching other lefty looking young people we learnt that we were on the Nazi side of the block and to join our comrades we would have to make a big circle around the police barricades. Not completely understanding where we were going we headed to a big mass of people that we assumed were blocking the Nazi rally, but as we got closer something started to look strange. Around thirty meters before we reached the first line of people we suddenly realized that we just walked into the Nazi rally. It was so confusing, there were black flags in the air, many young ‘normal’ looking guys and also nobody stopped us. There were a few riot cops standing between us but that was not really comforting. I was really scared but also really intrigued. I wanted to look close at them, maybe understand something, and see the Nazis close up. But all I saw was a bunch of young German men (and very few women) with casual clothes and mostly short haircuts, standing around and chanting. But this was what was so scary; many of them, looked so regular, so normal, like I could meet them next week at a student party. In the Israeli press they always show pictures of the Neo –Nazis with the skinhead uniforms and angry faces, there where those kind there of course, but it was the ones that looked like my friends that made me shiver.

Nazi rally

Later we left the Nazi side and managed to join some blockers. We heard that they were going to march back to the train station and march in Weimar. Quickly another kind of block assembled on the side near the station making the Nazi rally blocked from both sides. We later discovered that the police took away the assemble license from the Nazis because some threw some stones and bottles at the police, but they were still stuck, with hundreds of riot police protecting them from the thousands of anti-fascist that by now were surrounding them. What I noticed that the at this point the crowd was much more diverse than before, along with the antifa anarchist and punks there were, greens, old people, yuppie couple, many students and just ordinary indefinable German citizens.

Nazi rally behind police lines

Anti-Fascist Block Special Riot Forces

After so many hours in the sun and being satisfied that the block was so successful, we headed to the train station to go back to Weimar. We convincingly went through the police barricades speaking English, showing our student cards and generally acting like stupid tourists (something that came quiet naturally to us). But standing on the platform waiting for the train the scariest thing of the day happened to us. The police managed to assemble a security human tunnel for the Nazis and lead them to the train station. Suddenly we realized that they were marching right towards us, before we understood what was going on hundreds of Nazis where marching only meters away from us on the platform across the tracks. Them they started marching down the stairs and coming up on our platform. As this was happening the train arrived. The police quickly pushed into the last car and locked the doors, the rest of the cars were then filled with the Nazis. We pulled out of the station and them saw that hundreds of the Nazis were standing on the platform where we had just left. We got out of Erfurt safely but we still had to get out of the train in Weimar meeting our local frustrated failed Nazis who would be getting off the train with us. As we got of the train in Weimar we saw only two cops on the platform, so we were apprehensive about leaving the station considering the Nazis were eyeing us from the other end the platform. We pulled back two traditional looking Turkish guys who seemed uncertain of what was happening. So we waited a few minutes trying to figure out how to get home only to discover that down the stairs in the station there we around thirty riot cops just waiting to protect.

Nazi marching on train platform, we are just meters away (press to enlarge)

* ”We” is: my wonderful house mates: Teresa (the photos are mostly hers), Mark, Oguz, Sebastian and his three Italian hooligan friends and of course my dear friend Charlotte who report you can read here.

The Tel-Aviv based Rosenfeld gallery offered a mat representing Adolf Hitler’s skin as a big game trophy at Art Cologne, a major art fair in Germany. The artwork, entitled Nazi Hunter’s Room, by Israeli artist Boaz Arad, was priced at €35 000. I don’t know if it was sold. Arads art work reminded me of an article I wrote in 2003 about the use of Nazi symbolism in contemporary Israeli art and the differences of perception of the symbols in the different political spheres and cultures.

Boaz Arad, detail from installation, 2007

So here it is (link to deutch):

Pipi, Poo, Hitler, Auschwitz

In a protest rally I attended in a Palestinian village, a placard was raised bearing the sketch Swastika = Star of David. I didn’t dedicate any thought for it, but a group of young Germans who were there with me reacted to it very badly, they didn’t understand how could a sign like this be raised in the village centre and nobody was pulling it down. They were also surprised by the considerable indifference with which the placard was received by us, the Israelis. We, on the other hand, ridiculed the German’s over sensitivity. Was the sign really targeted at us, could a Swastika frighten us? And maybe the young Germans are reacting more appropriately to signs we don’t recognise?

Zoya Cherkassy, Jude 2002

In Israel, the central lesson one learns from the Holocaust is the need for a strong Israel. From our early childhood we hear that everybody hates us, that “a nation dwells alone”, that only the state secures the Jewish people’s existence. Whomever accepts the lessons of the Holocaust as they are taught in Israel uses every expression of antisemitism to amplify those lessons by using the power of Nazi and Holocaust Symbols. Every harming of Jews is a pogrom, all enemies of the Israel are Nazis, the borders of 67 are the borders of Auschwitz and Saddam is Hitler.

Boaz Arad, Loop 2001

However, many Israelis know that power has limits and that Israel is the place where the most Jews get killed only because they are Jews. Ironically, I have friends who make use of their entitlement for a German passport because they feel that only a passport like that gives a Jew security these days. We want to adopt the universal lesson, but have no one to do it with. Even though there are plenty of frighteningly inappropriate politicians in Israel, persons one can call racist and even Fascist, there is no significant anti-racist/anti-Fascist mobilisation (and there never was). While there is a public outcry against the desecration of a Jewish cemetary in the south of France, parks and roads are built over Muslim cemetaries just under our noses. All this without expanding on racial discrimination in state laws in general and immigration laws in particular and 35 years of oppressing the Palestinian population in the occupied territories (and you ain’t seen nothing yet).
Palestinian terrorism, presumably the thing we as young Israelis should fear the most, has nothing to do with Nazism. The debate about the legitimacy of acts of resistance to the occupation has nothing to do with the Holocaust. Jews murdered during Passover dinner by cruel terrorism. That is shocking enough without mentioning Treblinka. Any thinking person knows that comparing the Star of David to the Swastika is ridicolous and absurd.
That placard probably caused more damage to the Palestinian struggle than benefit it, but the Palestinian who carried it is not an antisemite. He says Nazis are evil, a negative, an ideology he resists. He is not a skinhead waving a Swastika in pride. For the Palestinian the Star of David represents the Zionist entity, the militarist state and the Israeli occupation. Whenever Israeli military and state policies are compared to Nazism in demonstrations or pro-Palestinian press, there is an inner contradiction apparent, for that comparison is simply ludicrous, certainly from a historical perspective. But it is impossible to claim that the comparison is an act of antisemitism. Granted, this sort of ignorance is dangerous and frightening, but as opposed to Fascistic and racial ideologies that call for no debate and for a fight without compromise, with the Palestinians and the Arab world we have a conflict that is difficult but solvable.

Roee Rosen, part of the instalation ‘live and Die as Eva Braun

We live in a country with a Jewish majority that contains no antisemitism, but occupation and racism. This threat does not walk around in shiny leather boots spraying Swastikas on walls (that is what the artists do). Therefore the Fascistic and Nazi aesthetic and symbolism do not posit a threat for us. Cynicism exchanges emotion. We are afraid to express genuine feelings towards the Holocaust because it has been appropriated by the Zionist nationalism which threatens us so much.
The seemingly cynical disrespect many young Israelis (including the young artistic community) demonstrate towards the symbols of Nazism and the Holocaust is nothing compared to the cynicism with which our leaders use the Holocaust in order to achieve military and policy goals. I can draw a Hitler mustache to whomever I want (myself included), if former Prime-Minister Netanyahu compares Arafat to Hitler. The authorities see the Nazi demons everywhere and cry wolf. We, embarrassed, perceive the wolf as a little puppy and want to play with it. Holocaust and Nazis, what a barrel of laughs. Who at all has the right to tell us not to toy around. We were not the ones to defile the sanctity of the Holocaust. In a place where there is no discourse on the oppression of the other, in a place where without the Jew there is no memory and only the Jew can be a victim, in a place where there is no serious coming to terms with the most horrible traumatic disaster ever to befall mankind, in a place where there is no real attempt to understand the source of evil and the growth of the Nazi monster, we stand confused like a little child and shout “pipi, poo, Hitler, Auschwitz”.

Yoav Ben-david, Join The Party 2002

In Europe the Star of David still signifies the victim, and the Swastika has many believers, and a placard in a European square like the one raised in that Palestinian village would have been shocking, scary and demanding reaction. There is no doubt that Antisemitism exists and even increased recently. Still many young, bright, intelligent Israelis dismiss the threatening signs, playing and toying with their visual symbols and ignore them when they build their own world-view. True, it’s very confusing, but; I’m afraid, even though the values are shared, the struggles are not in the same court. The fight against antisemites and racists in Europe is the Europeans’ duty, I can not help as I am preoccupied with other struggles. Swastikas don’t bother me and the symbols of the Holocaust should be stripped off their power so they can not serve the Israeli nationalists and Fascists. We need to conduct our struggle in the Israeli and Middle-Eastern language.

Tamy Ben-Tor, from the video “Hitler - the Horror and the Horrah, 2003

* Images from the exhibition “Wonderyears” Berlin 2003