My life inside a far-right party
Franziska Schreiber cannot leave home without a police escort. Why? Because she wrote a book about how Nazis took over the AfD, she tells Oliver Moody.
Today, in an anonymous little coffee shop near the Potsdamer Platz in central Berlin, Franziska Schreiber feels safe. This is something of a rarity. There are days when she cannot leave her home in Dresden without police protection. Schreiber, a 28-year-old book editor, is one of Germany’s most recognisable apostates. Until a few days before the federal election last September she was the public face of the youth wing of the Alternative for Germany (AfD), an upstart political party that has turned the country’s political order on its head in the space of five short years.
Reading Inside AfD, the bestselling book Schreiber wrote about her experiences in the party and why she had to leave, you can see why she has received so many death threats. It is an astonishingly bluff denunciation of a movement to which she dedicated half of her adult life.
Schreiber claims the AfD is out of control. That it is a runaway juggernaut that threatens to bring down German democracy, crush its opponents and break the free press under its wheels. That it has been taken over by a hard-right clique who are locked in a ‘‘selfradicalising’’ cycle of fear and fury.
Schreiber grew up in Saxony, a proud state in the east that has never got over the ignominy of being absorbed into the German empire in the 19th century, let alone into the Eastern bloc and then West Germany in the 20th. Her mother is a die-hard socialist. Her stepfather carried on voting for the Marxists long after reunification. ‘‘I want the wall back,’’ he once told her.
She joined the AfD in 2013, a few months after its foundation. At the time it was ostensibly a party of geeky liberals chiefly concerned with reforming the eurozone. For four exhilarating years Schreiber rose through the AfD’s ranks. She joined its federal board and yoked her political fortunes to Frauke Petry, a clever and occasionally offensive populist nicknamed Little Star by her admirers, who seized the party leadership in 2015. With every passing election the AfD gained ground.
Yet something unsavoury had begun to seep in through the cracks. There had always been members who got away with saying obnoxious things: that the Jews, for example, were the ‘‘inner enemy’’ of Christianity or that unaccompanied teenage refugees should be sterilised. Now these people were floating to the top. Schreiber found the atmosphere inside the party to be increasingly tense. It became hard to be an opinionated young woman.
In 2016 a Tunisian whose asylum application had been turned down drove a lorry into the crowds at a Berlin Christmas market; 12 people died and 56 were injured. ‘‘In closed [social media] groups, party members were rejoicing at this attack,’’ Schreiber says, ‘‘because they thought people would finally realise that the AfD was right about migration.’’
The last straw was on June 30, 2017, when the German parliament voted to legalise gay marriage. Schreiber, who is bisexual, was jubilant. Then she opened Facebook. One of the first things she saw was a video from Nicolaus Fest, a tabloid journalist turned AfD ideologue. ‘‘Above all,’’ Fest said, ‘‘marriage for all is brilliant for one group: pederasts.’’ They could get hitched, adopt children and enjoy the resulting tax breaks.
Polls routinely rank the AfD as the second most popular party in the country. It is the official opposition in the Bundestag, with 92 MPs. By the end of this month it is forecast to have representatives in all of Germany’s 16 regions.
If you want to understand the AfD’s extraordinary success, a good place to start is the German comedy film Look Who’s Back, in which Adolf Hitler is suddenly resurrected in the year 2014. One of the reasons the film did so well at the box office is that it exposed the many ways in which the early 21st century has become a bit Nazified. On discovering the internet, Hitler is delighted by ‘‘this wonderful technology’’. Facebook and Twitter have broken the country up into irate little tribes who only have to talk to one another through their keyboards.
It is a world where sensation prevails over reason. Conspiracy theories are rampant. The mainstream press is widely mistrusted. The traditional Volksparteien, or ‘‘people’s parties’’, of the centre are bleeding voters to the extremes of left and right. Hitler is, in a small but meaningful sense, already back.
It all adds up to what is known in German as Unbehagen: a poisonous collage of unease, angst and irritability. Schreiber says nobody has nurtured this feeling so well as the AfD.
The AfD has gone to great lengths to clean up its image. It doesn’t just bang on about immigration and the corrupt elite backpocketing taxpayers’ cash. It campaigns for Swiss-style referendum democracy. It calls for small government, welfare reform and increased fiscal support for families. It has carefully condemned antisemitism and even founded a group for its Jewish members. All 20 of them.
Germans have got into the pious habit of insisting the party’s voters are not racists, yet the more explicitly xenophobic the AfD becomes, the farther its poll numbers rise. You could argue this a sign of a healthy democracy – that a section of society that had been crying out for something other than the liberal consensus has been given what it wants by a democratically legitimate party. Schreiber is unconvinced. ‘‘The AfD doesn’t represent this unease and restiveness. It manufactures it and it uses it as propaganda. It creates it and it nurtures it.’’
She once believed in unfettered freedom of speech yet now she thinks the only solution is for the state to curb the AfD before it is too late. ‘It has to come from the outside. It’s like an infection. All this anger and all this hate – it’s so hard to stop.’’