The wolves are coming back: The politics of fear in Eastern Germany

By Rebecca Pates and Julia Leser

Across Eastern Germany, where political allegiances are shifting to the right, the wolf is increasingly seen as a trespasser and threat to the local way of life. Styled by populist right-wing actors as an ‘invasive species’, the wolf evokes and resonates with anti-immigration sentiments and widespread fears of demographic catastrophe. To many people in Eastern Germany, the immigrant and the wolf are an indistinguishable problem that nobody in power is doing anything about. In this account of Eastern German agitation of wolves and migrants, Eastern German hunters, farmers, rioters and self-appointed 'saviours of the nation', Pates and Leser move beyond stereotypic representations of ‘the East’ and shine a light on the complexities of post-socialist life and losses.

As nationalist parties are on the rise across Europe, The wolves are coming back offers an insight into the rise of the far right in Germany. The nationalist Alternative for Germany represents the third-largest party in the German federal parliament, with representation in the vast majority of German states. They draw much of their support from the ‘post-traumatic places’ in Eastern Germany, regions structured by realities of disownment, disenfranchisement and a lack of democratic infrastructure. Pates and Leser provide an account of the societal roots of a new group of radical right parties, whose existence and success we always assumed to be impossible.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: May 25, 2021
• ISBN: 9781526147004

Book preview

The wolves are coming back

The wolves are coming back

The politics of fear in Eastern Germany

Rebecca Pates and Julia Leser

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Rebecca Pates and Julia Leser 2021

The rights of Rebecca Pates and Julia Leser to be identified as the authors of this work have been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Manchester University Press

Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 5261 4701 1 hardback

First published 2021

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Jacket design by Dan Mogford

Typeset by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire

Contents

List of figures

Preface

Acknowledgements

List of abbreviations

Introduction: Wolf politics

1The ‘East’: Depopulation, deindustrialisation, colonialism

2Wolf packs: Pogroms, pillories and riots

3Renaturing and the politics of Heimat

4Herding wayward citizens

5Affective politics

6Sheep in wolves’ clothing?

Notes

References

Index

List of figures

0.1 Graffiti on a bus stop in Saxony, ‘Wolf plague – Vote AfD!’ © Karsten Nitsch

0.2 Overwritten graffiti on bus stop © Stephan Kaasche

0.3 Lusatia, wolf country © Julia Leser

0.4 Possible trace of wolf © Julia Leser

1.1 ‘This house used to stand in another country.’ Idea and execution by Jean-Remy von Matt, in the Brunnenstraße, Berlin. Public Domain licence © Wikimedia Commons

1.2 Graffiti of wolves ‘We are coming’ in Berlin © Anne Dölemeyer

1.3 The city of Suhl in Thuringia © Julia Leser

2.1 AfD demonstration in Erfurt, 1 May 2019 © Julia Leser

2.2 George Soros, puppet master of Angela Merkel, on the cover of Compact magazine © Compact

2.3 Election placard by ADPM © Julia Leser

2.4 Kalifat Deutschland. Tweet by Markus Roscher-Meinel. Retrieved from https://twitter.com/lawyerberlin/status/915297556518899712 (Accessed 26 October 2019)

5.1 Silke Grimm (AfD) on election placard © Stephan Kaasche

5.2 Wolf-induced livestock loss in Germany

Preface

South of Leipzig where this book was written, just at the edge of the Auwald forest, the flâneuse trying to escape the bustle of the city stumbles upon a curious monument: a stone wolf erected on a plinth with an inscription that reads: ‘The last wolves were sighted here in 1720’. At that time and until the late nineteenth century, the wolf was a serious competitor for local farmers, and the animal’s extinction was apparently worth a monument. Today, three hundred years later, the wolves are returning to German territories, and it is a problem: not because the returning predators pose a serious threat to humans objectively but because the wolf has become a cypher of political agitation and outrage that goes hand in hand with the politics of fear central to the rising nationalism in Eastern Germany. Amidst the turmoil of the rise of the far right and the crisis of democracy, the wolf today is a metaphor for what is going on in Eastern German politics.

The wolf has always been a popular protagonist of folk imaginaries and a central metaphor in fairy tales, mythology, religion and political theory. Until the end of the nineteenth century, popular stories about the ‘big bad wolf’ seemed to correlate with the widespread wish to exterminate the predators that supposedly killed entire flocks of sheep. In fairy tales such as Little Red Hiding Hood, the wolf symbolises impending disaster, menacing evil and existential threat. The wolf stands for the dark side of nature, serving as a boundary object between the safety of civilisation and a hostile, threatening, uncontrollable and libidinous nature. For centuries, the wolf has served as a culturally anchored metaphor of fear, and, as such, has found entry into modern conceptions of politics. As we shall see again later, Thomas Hobbes famously argued that man himself is wolf to man – homo homini lupus – unless civilisation intervenes. The wolf, then, is part and parcel of a dualism between good and evil nature, between order and chaos, civilisation and barbarism — and a metaphor for the damage that people do to each other. So even though, in a literal sense, the wolf is no threat other than to sheep or deer, as an anthropomorphous object the wolf becomes accessible to political discourse.

The invocation of the returning wolf as an object of fear in far-right politics is thus a powerful strategy. Styled by populist right-wing actors as an ‘invasive species’ that does not belong here and poses an existential threat to ‘our women and children’, the wolf evokes and resonates with anti-immigration sentiments and widespread fears of demographic catastrophe. In Eastern Germany the returning wolves have easily claimed new territories for themselves, which they found within extensive renatured areas that tell of thirty years of structural changes, massive deindustrialisation and depopulation processes that amount to the loss of two generations.

A British radio journalist, Trevor Dann, asked one of us in February 2018 during a workshop at Cambridge University: ‘What is going on that can explain the rise of the far right in Eastern Germany?’ The Wolves Are Coming Back is one answer to that question. For the wolves have been returning for three reasons that are closely connected to the transformations that have been affecting the political life in Eastern Germany for three decades. First, Nature is rebounding. Eastern Germany had been devastated by heavy industries turning rivers blue, the sky grey and the population sick. In the course of the last thirty years, a great deal of the environmental degradation has been reversed: there is just much more nature to come back to. Second, walls have come down between Germany and Poland. With the lack of border guards and fences, animals can move more freely, and wolves have roamed westwards. Third, depopulation has rapidly accelerated since the end of the GDR. Even towns have been shrinking. Many medium-sized and large towns have lost a considerable segment of their population since the 1990s. So, wolves have come back. But with modernisation of industry, including of agriculture, and with the privatisation of formally commonly held land, many traditional rural occupations are waning. The predator thus acts as a cipher for change, but also for globalisation and migration, for environmental politics that harm ‘the little man’, for the perception of a Western German colonising. This book, which covers events up to 21 May 2020, is an attempt to explain the rise of the far right in Eastern Germany through the lens of the returning wolves, while moving beyond stereotypic representations of ‘the East’ and shining a light on the complexities of post-socialist life and losses..

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Pauline Betche, Anna Bentzien and Ronja Morgenthaler for giving us permission to quote from their interviews. They would also like to thank Pauline Betche for fact-checking, Ariane Kolden and Lena-Marie Schmidt for editorial help, and Mario Futh and Birgit Ruß for taking on a great number of administrative tasks, keeping our desks free for a summer. Ariane Kolden did additional research for this book. Trevor Dann and BBC Radio 4 are to be thanked for letting us develop the idea of wolves coming back for a documentary on Eastern German politics in November 2018, thus providing an occasion to develop some of the ideas we then used for writing this book. This radio documentary led Jonathan de Peyer from Manchester University Press to approach the authors with an idea for this book, and we are highly indebted to him for his support throughout the process of writing it.

Parts of this book have been shared at the 26th International Conference of Europeanists – Sovereignties in Contention: Nations, Regions and Citizens in Europe in Madrid in 2019, at the European Conference of Politics & Gender in Amsterdam in 2019, at the Beyond Identity? New Avenues for Interdisciplinary Research Workshop, organised by the Academia Europaea Wroclaw Knowledge Hub & Willy Brandt Centre for German and European Studies at Wroclaw University in 2019, at the Die politisierte Gesellschaft? Politik, Emotion und Protest Conference, organised by Deutsche Nachwuchsgesellschaft für Politik- und Sozialwissenschaft in Hannover in 2019, and at the Vorstellungen von Gemeinschaft und Nation im Kontextgegenwärtiger rechtspopulistischer Mobilisierungen Symposium, organised by the International Psychoanalytic University in Berlin in 2020.

Parts of Chapter 2 are developed in a longer article, ‘Performing resistance – the far right’s master narrative’ in The Journal of Culture 8(1), 13–21, authored by Julia Leser, Florian Spissinger, Jamela Homeyer and Tobias Neidel. Chapter 5 includes material from the article ‘The functionality of affects. Conceptualizing far-right populist politics beyond negative emotions’ in Global Discourse 10(2), 325–342, by Julia Leser and Florian Spissinger. In this regard we would like to thank Florian Spissinger, Jamela Stratenwerth, Tobias Neidel and Paul Lissner for their valuable input and feedback.

Finally, we wish to thank all the colleagues and friends at Leipzig University where we have been fortunate to teach and conduct our research while writing this book. And most importantly, we are immensely grateful to Stephan Kaasche, who helped us understand the many dimensions of the wolf problem, and even took us to the vast and empty landscapes of Lusatia to find actual wolves, though in the end, they eluded our curious gaze.

List of abbreviations

Introduction: Wolf politics

The great transformation brings us mass murder, rape to an extent never known before, the brutalisation of our society, and the wolf experiment brings us damages to the tune of hundreds of thousands of Euros.

AfD MP Karsten Hilse in an address to the German Bundestag in 2019¹

Homo homini lupus? Hunting predators and the politics of belonging

On a cold January evening in 2019 we find ourselves driving through Lusatia, a region in eastern Saxony spanning into Brandenburg and western Poland. This region is home to the Sorbs, one of the four officially recognised German national minorities. Lusatia is also home to a rising number of wolf packs. In the spring of 2019, 73 wolf packs and 30 wolf pairs roam the north-east of Germany, their territory extending from the Polish to the Danish borders. Along with wolves and Sorbs, what Lusatia has to offer besides beautiful pine forests, glacial sand dunes and renatured areas reminiscent of the former brown coal industrial complex are beautiful medieval and Renaissance towns. These include Hoyerswerda, Bautzen and Görlitz, where endemic right-wing attacks on visible minorities, refugees and left-wing youth, arson attacks on refugee shelters and vociferous anti-establishmentarian political splinter parties have of late gained the attention of the national press. None of this is visible as we drive through the dark and deserted landscapes on this winter evening. All we see in the headlights of our car are narrow empty roads meandering through forests and fields. Just before we reach our destination, we are startled by four gleaming eyes from a couple of deer staring at the approaching car from the side of the road.

Our destination that night is the Gaststätte zur Grafschaft, a German inn in Neudorf Klösterlich near Wittichenau. Neudorf Klösterlich is home to about eighty people and its inn has a reputation for serving an outstanding venison stew. We are here at the invitation of the Blue Party, which invited Lusatians to a public hearing concerning the wolf. We find the inn traditionally furnished with wooden chairs and tables, embroidered tablecloths and wooden beams, and ourselves a little out of place. The waiter offers us seats in a corner, well away from the well attended centre table at which farmers, hunters and small business operators concur that the wolf is a significant problem, and its defenders at best bloody-minded opponents of the rural population.

The Blue Party is reaching out to rural voters – like the other new nationalist parties – and takes a clear position towards large predators: They have no place in German territory as they endanger ‘our’ way of life. The dentist who organised a petition with some 18,600 signatures in favour of regulating the wolf population is present, as is the spokesman of a citizens’ initiative for ‘wolf victims and worried citizens’ (Bürgerinitiative ‘Wolfsgeschädigte/besorgte Bürger’), a sometime speaker at Patriotic Europeans against the Islamisation of the Occident (Patriotische Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes, PEGIDA) rallies and the odd local farmer seeking to protect their sheep, as well as various hunters. The evening’s host, the Saxon MP Kirsten Muster (Blue Party), is giving a number of dispassionately presented legal arguments.² Since 1990, the wolf has been a protected species in Germany; killing a wolf has become a crime punishable by a sentence of imprisonment of up to five years. Still, the MP’s presentation goes, these wolves are not Saxon wolves, or even German ones, but rather western Polish ones. As migrants, she explains, they do not deserve our protection, they do not belong here, they are invaders of our territory, threatening the local way of life. She argues that they are not even real wolves but merely impure hybrids – the offspring of wolves that have mixed with the local canine population – and thus undeserving of being lawfully protected.

The audience does not take kindly to this presentation. No objection is made to the arguments as such – no one cares about legal arguments. For who decided that German law or even EU law applies to this region? ‘We are the people’, ‘This is a democracy, and we don’t want wolves!’ are statements often repeated this evening. The wolf is protected, they feel, by the establishment, by Brussels, by Berlin and, in particular, by those Greens who are also in favour of other types of dangerous immigrants threatening our way of life, threatening our women and children, threatening our very existence. Nobody has asked us, they complain, and we just don’t want to live with the wolf breathing down our necks as we go about our business. For them, the wolf, like the refugees centrally allocated to cities, towns and villages all over Germany, has been a problem and nobody seems to be doing anything about it. And in fact, smallholders and sheep farmers are having considerable problems keeping afloat, and professional shepherds, especially peripatetic shepherds, are becoming ever rarer; so lambs and ewes being killed don’t help those small businesses survive, and though it’s as often as not ravens that kill the lambs on the fields, the wolf is used to bring the point home that shepherds are losing their livelihoods.³

A man introducing himself as Dr Manfred Habert*,⁴ the local aquaculture tsar, stands up: ‘We’re against the settlement of wolves in Saxony and Germany,’ as the audience approvingly knocks on the tables, ‘and we want to shoot the wolf as we used to in the GDR! We didn’t miss anything in the GDR! We didn’t have problems with our sheep, or with our wildlife population, and we weren’t afraid of going into the forest! Now we reached a situation that is no longer bearable, and you come here proposing some small legal changes. You won’t get any votes from the people present here tonight!’ He sits down, to the applause of the room. And so it goes on, many repeat that the GDR was more democratic and refreshingly wolf-less. Finally, one of the few women attending the event stands up and introduces herself as a local farmer who owns a couple of sheep: ‘I’m just a stupid peasant. But I love my sheep! You might say, I like to eat my sheep, too, just like the wolf, but when I kill the sheep, it’s with respect. Wolves do not respect my sheep, they cause carnage. It’s the Greens, they got the wolves to come, they want to kill us all, with wolves, with refugees …’ Her point made, her voice faltering, she adds quietly, vengefully: ‘I think they should be shot, too.’ And Engelbert Merz, the PEGIDA speaker, suggests: ‘Let’s send those wolves to the Greens, let’s catch them, put them in cages, and send them straight to those people in the cities who like wolves.’

The rural population in Lusatia, the sheep farmers, small business operators and local dignitaries, hunters, the mushroom foragers and the parents whose children have to wait for school buses in the late winter dawn, have to bear the consequences of what the distant, wolf-unaffected people living in cities, the Green party, the elites, the romantic wolf lovers and the even more distant decision-makers in Brussels have agreed upon. That is one side of the complaint. But the underlying logics why the wolf does not belong ring a familiar tune. The trope of the wolf in this argument reminds us of the AfD manifesto that states, ‘Islam does not belong in Germany’. Wolves and immigrants, in the populist arguments, share the negative qualities of bringing no benefit, incurring costs to the locals, including potential physical harm to women, whilst simply belonging elsewhere. According to the far-right ethnopluralist narrative, there are areas in which Muslims belong, and it is not Europe. There are areas in which wolves belong too, and it is not here.

After the stabbing of a man in Chemnitz in 2018, André Poggenburg tweeted that the ‘mass migration’ to Germany would turn into a ‘knife migration’ (Messermigration). Markus Frohnmaier, AfD member of the Bundestag, tweeted on the night of the Chemnitz pogroms: ‘If the state fails at protecting its citizens, people go to the streets to protect themselves! It is that simple. The citizens are obligated to stop the death-bringing knife migration.’⁵ Years ago, in 2015, Marcus Pretzell, former AfD member, then member of the Blue Party and husband of former AfD member Frauke Petry, argued in an interview with the newspaper