Politics is a predictable business. The state election in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern produced the expected AfD quake. The media reacted – also predictably – with shock. They routinely get worked up about the stupidity of the voters. After that, everyone feels better and goes back to the political agenda. Which is not to say that nothing will change in the country. Angela Merkel will be […]
Politics is a predictable business. The state election in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern produced the expected AfD quake. The media reacted – also predictably – with shock. They routinely get worked up about the stupidity of the voters. After that, everyone feels better and goes back to the political agenda.
Which is not to say that nothing will change in the country. Angela Merkel is being counted out for her skepticism about isolationism. It is even conceivable that her time as chancellor is over. But what is not happening: People are not taking a close look at what exactly is really changing in the north-eastern federal state – or in Germany as a whole.
It’s not just about a new distribution of seats in Schwerin Palace. And the rise of the AfD is not just to do with “the refugee crisis”. In any case, the main source of information on Rügen is probably the newspapers. The excitement about migration is just a vehicle for something more fundamental.
What is changing at the moment is the emotional state of society as a whole. People are talking about national identity again, searching for what is “German”. And people are developing aesthetics of demarcation that convey a sense of Scholle, homeland, simplicity, homogeneity and ethnic superiority.
This search leads to new aesthetic – and spatial aesthetic – preferences. These turn out to be quite zombie-like and creepy. Anyone who reads the cultural report by architecture theorist and Baumeister author Stephan Trüby in Die Zeit on September 1 will gain an understanding of this. In it, Trüby traces the spatial visions of the new right. And he finds quite a lot of absurd things. So-called fortified courtyards are being restored. Right-wing sympathizers are buying dilapidated castles in East Germany to conform to a vague image of chivalry. Supposedly harmless village communities are being founded around organic farms, whose ethnically excited inhabitants want to satisfy a longing for a pure, pre-globalized, naturally beautiful life free of foreigners.
I find the latter interesting because an insignia of a lifestyle that actually has “left-wing” connotations – the organic farm – is being appropriated for right-wing aesthetics. As surprising as this may seem, it is ultimately not. The rejection of globalization and its consequences, the scepticism towards the evil market economy, the latent anti-Americanism and the search for a morally superior German (or even anti-Western European) culture are shared by the new right with many a left-wing romantic.
And it is also interesting – as well as highly questionable, of course – that the spatial manifestation of this crude world of ideas is concentrated regionally. It seems as if the architectural dark visionaries prefer to let off steam in eastern Germany. There is enough building material there for the crude folk role-playing games, for example castles that have not yet been transformed for tourism. On the other hand, the architectural expressions of western market-economy democracy have not spread here over 70 years, but at most over the last 25. And – another advantage – Mecklenburg-Vorpommern in particular is large, empty – and relatively free of foreigners. No ethnic diversity disturbs the medieval game that the AfD and NPD sympathizers that Trüby has tracked down are playing there.
The fact that the whole thing seems rather ridiculous to observers like Trüby and myself does not make it any less problematic. Because the mummery dance is obviously socially connectable. Many people throughout Germany long for such a simple, homogeneous, less “decadently westernized” world. And they are trying to live it – even if only temporarily. It is no coincidence that there are more and more knights’ festivals and medieval markets in Germany. The costume industry is booming.
At the same time, we are talking about an “identitarian movement”. The issue of national identity is really boiling up again, as Mark Siemons has just discussed in the FAZ. A panicked search for spatial counter-models to western-oriented democracy has broken out. It is only a matter of time before the first architects seek to express it architecturally – even beyond the retro-Germanic Ting aesthetic in MeckPomm. A funny idea, but not a pretty one.
