Late last year, on a small stage in a bar in a wooded town in eastern Germany, right-wing ideologue Björn Höcke told a crowd of followers the story of his upcoming trial. He faces charges for saying “All for Germany” at a political rally – violating German laws prohibiting the uttering of Nazi slogans.
Despite the approaching court date, he looked down at the crowd and gestured to them with a mischievous smile. “What’s it all about?” he asked.
“Germany!” they shouted.
After a decade of testing the boundaries of political speech in Germany, Alternative for Germany (AfD) leader Hawke no longer has to push the envelope himself. The crowd did it for him.
That moment made clear why, to his critics, Mr Hawke is not just a challenge to the political order but a threat to German democracy itself.
Over the years, Hawke methodically repealed the ban Germany had imposed on itself to prevent another takeover by extremists. It has taken a tougher stance on free speech than many Western democracies, a result of the hard lessons learned in the 1930s when the Nazis used democratic elections to seize the levers of power.
The slogan “All for Germany” was once engraved on the swords of Nazi stormtroopers. Hawke’s opponents say that by reviving these phrases, he is trying to make fascist ideas more acceptable in a society where such expression is not only taboo but illegal.
In May, a judge found Höcke guilty of intentionally using a Nazi slogan and fined him the equivalent of $13,000. Mr Hawke is due to stand trial in the same court on Monday for using the same slogan again over his pub speech.
It is one of a series of legal cases he now faces – none of which appear to be slowing the resurgence of Hawke or his party. The Alternative for Germany came second in Germany in this month’s European Parliament elections, performing better than any of the country’s ruling parties.
Not long ago, Mr. Hawke stood on the fringes of a fringe party. Over time, he moved the party closer to him, making it more extreme, and in the process, experts believe, tilted Germany’s entire political landscape to the right.
To his opponents, he represents the far right’s efforts to discredit the country’s Nazi past.
To his supporters, he was a linguistic freedom fighter seeking to retract unfair slurs and, more broadly, to defend their view of German national culture.
On his final day in court, the 52-year-old Hawke, with silver hair and a slim dark suit, stood before prosecutors and a packed courtroom and passionately argued his innocence.
Although he was a former history teacher, he insisted he had no idea he was using an SA slogan. He said the words came to him accidentally – ignoring the fact that he has twice convinced crowds to repeat the Nazi phrase for him since he was charged.
“Are we going to ban German because the Nazis spoke German?” he asked the judge. “How far should this go?”
Mr. Hoch, who declined a request for an interview for this article, said his trial is part of a fight for a new narrative about Germany’s recent history, one that allows him to call himself German in an increasingly diverse country that is wary of new economic and Feel anxious about strategic challenges.
If Mr Hawke aims to sow the seeds of a new nationalism with echoes of fascism, he may achieve subtle gains.
Before the trial, many Germans had never heard of the Nazi slogan “All for Germany.” Now, the phrase is frequently debated and repeated on talk shows and articles across the country.
Playing with persecution
History played a huge role in Mr. Hawke’s life.
Mr. Hoch was born into a conservative East Prussian family, one of millions of Germans living in Eastern Europe who fled the Red Army’s advances at the end of World War II and sought refuge in western Germany.
In Mr. Hawke’s view, Germany’s story of displacement and loss was overshadowed by the nation’s reckoning with Nazi war crimes and the Holocaust.
He has exploited lingering pain to appeal to Germans — especially former communist East Germany — who feel cheated by their history and denied the right to national pride and expression.
He accused the victorious Allies of World War II of stripping Germans of their roots. “There are no longer any German victims,” he said in a 2017 speech, “only German perpetrators.”
Mr Hock moved to the eastern state of Thuringia in 2013. He has since risen to prominence amid a series of controversies over language.
He called officials of former Chancellor Angela Merkel “Tat-Elite,” as SS officers described them. He has repeatedly questioned why “living space”,The Nazis used the term “Lebensraum” to refer to territorial expansion in Eastern Europe, but Germans still avoid the term. He called Berlin’s Holocaust memorial a “monument of shame.”
References to Nazi-era ideas were so numerous that a court at one point ruled that critics’ descriptions of Mr. Hawke as a fascist were not defamatory but a “fact-based value judgment.”
Even his own party has tried to sideline him over the years. His allies now hold two-thirds of the party’s leadership positions.
Political analysts say the rise of Hawke’s supporters reflects the Alternative for Germany’s evolution from a small conservative party that was skeptical of the EU to a more radical party.
Its leaders now promote the argument that states are based on blood and that only harsh deportation policies can prevent Germany and other Western societies from being overrun by immigrants.
Today’s Alternative for Germany considers itself anti-globalist. It is skeptical of urban elites and excessive government efforts to combat the pandemic and climate change. Many leaders embraced conspiracy theories and questioned the legitimacy of Germany’s post-World War II government.
Experts say the party’s popularity has shaped the entire country’s political discourse. Over the past year, mainstream politicians of all stripes have adopted the AfD’s hostility to immigration and even environmental policy.
The leader of the Alternative for Germany party said the critics’ ideas were regressive.
“There is no shift to the right,” said Torben Braga, spokesman for Thuringia’s AfD party, who has worked for Hawke for many years and keeps a photo of the politician above his desk. . “What happens is that certain beliefs – political demands that have always existed in society – find a voice after being suppressed for decades.”
Followers of the AfD see the court case against Mr Hawke as a witch hunt aimed at preventing this awakening.
Mr. Hawke’s comments were imbued with this sense of persecution. At a rally last month, he compared himself to Socrates, Jesus and Julian Assange – dissidents “beaten with the rod of justice”.
Coincidence or not, history also plays a huge role in the country he represents.
A hundred years ago, Thuringia was the first place where far-right politicians gained a majority in the state parliament. It later became the first country where the Nazis seized power.
In September this year, the Alternative for Germany is expected to receive the largest number of votes in the Thuringian elections.
“A year ago, I would have said there was no way Hock would become chancellor of Thuringia,” said Jens Christian Wagner, a historian at the Buchenwald concentration camp memorial in Thuringia.
“Right now, I say that’s unlikely,” he said. “But ‘unlikely’ means likely.”
Do they look alike?
In 2012, a German sociologist named Andreas Kemper began studying the rising anti-immigration rhetoric in German politics. This sparked his interest in the AfD and the speeches of the then relatively unknown Björn Höcke.
Mr Hawke’s use of the term “organic market economy” seemed to echo the term “organic order” used by the Nazis in their 1934 economic reorganization.
Mr. Kemper said that while searching the Internet for others who had used Mr. Hawke’s phrase, he “just happened to find one” – Randolf Rudiger, the pseudonym of a neo-Nazi magazine writer.
In an article, Radigue described the Nazis as “the first anti-globalization” movement that, if successful, “will find imitators everywhere.” Some people today still cling to those ideas, he said: “The embers here haven’t been extinguished yet.”
Mr. Kemper found other similarities between the men’s words. The strangest thing was that Mr Hawke quoted Rudiger from a book he mentioned in his speech – both men misquoted it in exactly the same way.
He eventually published an analysis that made a shocking allegation: Randolph Rudiger, he said, was Bjorn Hock. “It’s just too many coincidences.”
In 2015, the AfD leadership asked Mr Hock to sign an affidavit to clarify the controversy, saying he had neither written nor co-written articles under the name Landolf Ladig.
He refused. “Not because I have something to hide,” he told German media at the time, but because it was “an attempt to slander me.” He insisted that he never wrote under a pseudonym.
Germany’s domestic intelligence service later cited Mr Kemper’s work when it labeled the Thuringian branch of the Alternative for Germany party as a right-wing extremist in 2021.
Since then, several other AfD chapters and the party’s youth wing have been classified as extremists. The leader of the Alternative for Germany disputes the classifications but says it has not hurt their growing popularity. Mr. Braga, the Thuringian party spokesman, said it might even help them.
“My answer to this oft-repeated assertion is: keep writing,” he said.
“Self-deprecation”
Mr Hawke, appearing in a televised debate ahead of the trial in May, insisted he had been deliberately misrepresented. He insisted that he felt sorry for the Nazis. Furthermore, he believes that “All for Germany” has been used incorrectly by many before him – even in Deutsche Telekom’s ads.
The claim came to the attention of the telecommunications company, which denied the claim and issued a cease-and-desist order against him.
It also forced Mr. Wagner, the Buchenwald concentration camp historian, to leaf through a stack of books in his office from the right-wing publishing house run by the writer Götz Kubitschek, who was seen as Hawke Sir and intellectual godfather of Buchenwald concentration camp.
An article by Mr. Kubitschek is called “Self-Trivialization.” It develops strategies to attract supporters.
The first step is to create a verbal “bridgehead” with controversial words. The second is “Chain with the Enemy” – highlighting examples of mainstream figures using the same words – to raise doubts about how radical an idea actually is.
The third step is to “render yourself harmless” by insisting that these views conform to mainstream norms.
The article ends with a warning: The goal is to appear harmless, not become harmless.
Mr Wagner believes the court case against Mr Hawke has become even more important as many efforts to fight the AfD have failed.
“If politicians can’t draw the line,” he said, “then at least the judiciary will.”
Yet if there is a line, Mr. Hawke is still testing it.
In early May, he spoke again in the western city of Hamm on the eve of the European elections. He told the crowd that times were changing in his homeland, adding, “There are signs that a storm is coming.”
Those who know German history are familiar with this sentence. It was used by a Nazi newspaper in 1933, just before Hitler came to power.
Christopher Schutz Reporting from Halle, Germany.
