Thread by @Yascha_Mounk

For the past months, I’ve travelled the length and breadth of Germany to understand how far-right populists are exploiting the tragic case of a 14 year-old girl who was brutally murdered by a refugee.

Now, my story is finally out in @newyorker!

(Thread.)
newyorker.com/magazine/2019/…

I’m a trained political scientist, not a journalist. But every time I do on-the-ground reporting, I’m struck by how much I learn—and how much it changes my view of the situation on the ground.

That was definitely the case this time around.

The last months have changed my mind on two important things, in particular:

First, the far-right in Germany is much more sophisticated, and their alternative media universe way more developed, than most of us have realized.

This ain’t going away anytime soon.

Second, I fear that the political establishment is far more dysfunctional, and their grasp of the mood in the population far more tenuous, than it needs to be.

The authorities keep making shocking blunders. And those are a huge lay-up for the far-right.

There’s lots of details on both in the story.

But the finds that have stuck with me the most are the small lines and observations that don’t necessarily fit a simple narrative. In the hope of enticing you to read the piece, let me mention a few here.

(Please read the story?)

In Chemnitz, I met with Benjamin Jahn Zschocke, a frighteningly smart far-right organizer. He had the meticulously polite bearing of Hans Landa, Christoph Waltz’s character in Inglorious Basterds.

(And no, I'm not calling him a Nazi; that would, sadly, be too simple.)

Zschocke thinks the west of Germany is already lost; there's already too many foreigners in cities like Cologne. The task of people like him is now to keep them out of Germany's east. A new wall, he contends, is not necessary for that; a sufficiently hostile atmosphere will do.

Taking my leave, I asked Zschocke whether he would go to the protest he had organized. He shook his head: “The huge crowds, all that intense emotion—I’m going home to listen to classical music.”

In Wiesbaden, I went to interview the good, decent, well-meaning local politician in charge of integrating refugees.

Here’s what a plaque on his office wall said: “When the Smart Always Give In, the Dumb Will Rule.”

Yup, that about sums him up.

His lead civil servant was much more gruff and, um, impolitic. Talking about the apparently widespread phenomenon of young teenage girls hanging out with much older refugees, he mostly blamed their parents: “Do you even know where that girl of yours is running around?” he asked.

Claudia Roth, the longtime leader of the Green Party, is a lot of fun. We hung out at a party conference, went to a local café, and ate at what she describes as her favorite Turkish fast-food place.

(Here she is, ordering.)

Roth also dragged me to a klezmer concert at the local synagogue. As the singer, decked out in the robes of a 1950s diva, did her best impression of Bianca Castafiore, Roth told me: “What a blessing it is that there’s Jewish life among us again! A real chance for our democracy.”

Roth also introduced me to Bavaria’s first black state legislator, who had just been elected. Bidding him goodbye, she said: “Go make the parliament more colorful!”

(Yup…)

Oh, and I got to spend time with one of my heroes, Daniel Cohn-Bendit.

“The problem is both the AfD and the radicalization of certain immigration groups,” Dany Le Rouge told me. “The age of German exceptionalism is over.”

My favorite quote from Cohn-Bendit was cut down by my abashed editors: “There is a truth that politicians simply cannot say out loud: a part of the problem posed by refugees is unsolvable. Which society can stomach that much honesty—except perhaps ten readers of the @newyorker?”

But the emotional heart of this tragic story is the mom of the murdered girl.

A Jewish refugee from Moldova, she's in many ways an incarnation of Germany's multiethnic future. And yet, she blames Merkel for her daughter's death and in some ways makes common cause with the right.

There’s lots more in the piece, from the nightmarish feel of Chemnitz during the far-right protests to the local woman whose only concern about the refugees is their failure to sort trash in the prescribed manner.

So please read this story and spread the word? It would mean a lot.

Oh, and do have a look at the rest of this blockbuster issue. There’s:
* Lepore on the media!
* Caro on LBJ!
* Gopnik on the Good Book!
* A story by Murakami!

I mean, seriously.

[End.]
newyorker.com/magazine/2019/…