Speech by Prof. Dr. Andreas on 25.8.2024 during the Festival of Democracy on the Hohenzollerring by Arsch huh
Dear ladies and gentlemen, dear friends,
“The womb from which it crawled is still fertile.” Many will know this saying from our great poet, Bertolt Brecht. He warned that the Nazis could become strong again; that fascism could be revived because its causes had not been eliminated. The womb is still fertile. What did Brecht mean by the womb? What causes or reasons did he mean that could move people to vote for Nazis, fascists, racists or nationalists? By the womb, Brecht meant capitalism. For him, it was capitalism that made the Nazis strong. But what is capitalism? Now in the Weimar Republic, as is well known, many major industrialists and companies such as Thyssen, Krupp, the chemical industry and the newspaper mogul Hugenberg supported the Nazis. They financed them directly. Fortunately, things are different today. Apart from a few crazy people, companies have no interest in the AfD. Business is booming across Europe and the world. Capital does not need nationalist blockheads in government. Brexit is a nightmare for most companies. Oetker, Schüco, Miele and Claas have launched an anti-AfD campaign with other companies; a campaign for democracy.
The womb is still fertile. But the womb is still the social, or rather the antisocial, conditions in capitalism: inequality, injustice, loneliness and insecurity that capitalism creates. “People need someone to kick,” sings Konstantin Wecker. Small-minded people need someone who is worse off, someone they can look down on. There is nothing they can do from above, it seems. So people voluntarily submit to the strong and powerful. The wealth of those at the top is accepted – as long as they are not at the very bottom. That is where foreigners belong, according to the AfD. So it is not strange that many who are not doing so well financially vote for the AfD, against their own interests. The AfD does not want to eliminate inequality and poverty. For them, the law of the strongest, of those who prevail in the market, rules.
The AfD, it writes itself, wants to cut taxes. Now you might be thinking that taxes are high enough. When a party promises to cut taxes, it is usually the rich who are meant, those who pay far too little in taxes anyway. And because they pay too little in taxes, there is too little money for kindergarten places, for the renovation of dilapidated schools, motorways and for a railway that runs on time. Cutting taxes comes at the expense of the services that we citizens need. The money goes into the pockets of companies and the rich. No reason for poor people to vote AfD. We need redistribution from top to bottom and not redistribution from bottom to top, as the AfD intends.
The womb is still fertile. Capitalism creates uncertainty. How secure is my job? Will my company be able to switch to climate-friendly production? How many people will still be needed then? Or can artificial intelligence replace me? What about the Chinese? Can’t they produce much more cheaply? And what if I become unemployed? Will I still find a job in my profession and at my age? Or will I slip into the citizen’s allowance? What if I then have to move? Will I even find an apartment? Uncertainties and ambiguities. Of course, it is not the case that everyone asks themselves these questions every day. But they are there in the background. And even in large companies with secure profits and a secure market position, new management suddenly creates uncertainty when a savings program is announced. Many people long for security, and rightly so. But they wrongly believe that the AfD will provide this security. Incidentally, this is one possible explanation why the AfD is so much stronger in East Germany. The loss of security after the collapse of the GDR is considerably greater than in the West. But what really helps?
What helps is a good welfare state and strong unions. But the AfD does not want a welfare state, it wants to cut the benefits of the citizen’s allowance, abolish the employment agency, but instead introduce forced labor – they call it compulsory work. This is not compatible with the Basic Law. And unions and works councils? They can at least draw up social plans and help shape company policy in a socially acceptable way. The AfD believes that unions are superfluous and that works councils do not represent the interests of employees. The AfD voted against the minimum wage in 2022 because – as they explained – “the political increase in the minimum wage overrides the market.” They were against strikes at Ryanair and are against a collective bargaining law that would ensure that public contracts only go to companies with collective agreements. The AfD is acting against the interests of those they themselves call “little people.”
The womb is still fertile. Capitalism has changed in recent decades. The mines have closed, the miners have died out. The large factories have disappeared or become much smaller. Ford in Cologne employs only about half as many people as in the 1970s. Sociologists speak of individualization or even of a society of singularities. All nice words for a banal phenomenon: loneliness. Solidarity went out the window in the transformation to neoliberal capitalism. In its place came egoism and the elbow man who aggressively attacks anyone who bothers him or is different. Isolation is followed by loneliness. Psychologists have only recently discovered it as a phenomenon of our time. Loneliness is coupled with depression and the longing for the larger community. The larger national community against the strangers who supposedly do not belong here. Loneliness leads to resentment. You do not know the stranger and do not want to have anything to do with him. Resentment, in turn, quickly turns into aggression against the stranger.
This is being served by the AfD, which babbles about remigration, about the resettlement of people who once immigrated to their parents’ home countries. They dream of national homogeneity, of pure Germanness. But who would want that? Will my pizzeria disappear then? And who will make my kebab pita nice and spicy? Shall we go back to roast pork with sauerkraut? That might not be a bad thing, but even pasta would have to be removed from the menu in German purity. And should we order a gentleman’s cover in the German way again? For the younger ones: that’s beer and schnapps. What about an ouzo or a Scottish whisky? Everything is un-German, it must be re-migrated. And what about Adele, Tupac and Eminem, Taylor Swift or Eric Clapton and the Rolling Stones? Everything un-German?
The womb is still fertile. The Nazis and half-Nazis in the AfD have found their enemy in gender and the woke. Scapegoats are a popular way of distracting from the real problems. Racist hate songs have nothing to do with language policing. They are a helpless expression of one’s own mediocrity, which is turned against the weak. There is poverty and misery in this society, but you cannot eliminate it by throwing foreigners out. Then things will not get better, but worse, as Jürgen Becker already knew in 1992 at the first Arsch huh concert. Things will get better when the rich and companies start paying taxes again. Brazilian President Lula has proposed a minimum tax for billionaires. Lindner rejected the proposal. The AfD was also against it. How high should the wealth tax be? Two percent of wealth. That gives you an idea of how little tax is really paid. The womb is still fertile, inequality is cemented. That is why the same applies today as it did 20 years ago:
Ass huh zäng ussander
