Germany and US look for lessons in other's extremist movements
BERLIN — In the heart of the capital, the crowd was amped up and angry, shouting hoarsely that the people had been betrayed. Brandishing smartphones and waving flags emblazoned with far-right symbols, a breakaway faction from a larger protest shoved aside barriers and scrambled up stone steps leading to the country’s best-known symbol of its democracy, the seat of government.
Just over four months before a mob overran the U.S. Capitol, triggering the second Senate impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump, Germany was shaken by chaotic scenes outside its own parliament building, the Reichstag. The country’s president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, called the spectacle an “unbearable attack on the heart of our democracy.”
The Aug. 29 episode in Berlin ended much differently from the Jan. 6 assault in Washington,
