The perfect dog whistle
One of the most extreme politicians in the AfD is about to stand trial. Did he knowingly use a Nazi slogan?
The accusation that a word or phrase used by a politician is a ‘dog whistle’ - i.e. it is pitched at a frequency that most listeners can’t hear but sends a clear message to a specific clientele - has become a journalistic cliché in recent years.
If you listen to the German left, Christian Democrat leader Friedrich Merz loves to deploy dog whistle phrases to win over voters that have migrated to the AfD.
After Merz told a Bavarian beer tent last summer that “Kreuzberg isn’t Germany, Gillamoos is Germany,” the accusation that this was “a shrill dog whistle” followed as surely as night follows day.
(For readers outside Germany: Kreuzberg is a hip Berlin neighbourhood with a large Turkish community, while Gillamoos is an ancient Bavarian beer festival.)
Think what you want about Merz’ attempts to rouse a tent full of Bavarian drunks, there is no dog whistle - i.e. no secret code - in this phrase.
Everyone in Germany knows exactly what a politician means when he says Kreuzberg, and most know what they mean when they say Gillamoos. The former is short-form for falafel and multi-kulti, the latter for bratwurst and conservatism.
By this standard, you could accuse the left-wing press of blowing a dog whistle every time they mention the fact that Merz owns a private jet. The unspoken insinuation is clear: men who fly their own jets will only look out for the rich.
The inflationary use of this language is counter productive. It means that people don't pay enough attention when dog whistles are actually used.
In Germany in particular, dog whistles are a sinister aspect of far-right politics that signal to a particular type of voter your secret admiration for the Nazis.
And, anyone interested in understanding the AfD would be well advised to listen to how influential party members deploy such secret codes.
Some members of the hard-right party appear to have sifted through Nazi slogans to find the perfect dog whistle: one that is innocent enough to pass over the heads of the masses, yet iconic enough to immediately resonate with those who hanker for a return to the years 1933-1945.
The phrase they have plumped for is “alles für Deutschland”, the central slogan of the SA, Hitler’s paramilitary group from the Weimar years.
For many years it was standard practice for Neo-Nazis to end their speeches with this phrase. It didn’t have the visceral capacity to shock like a “Heil Hitler” or “Blut und Ehre,” but it still sent a clear message to supporters.
Use of the phrase in public was banned around twenty years ago. But people in the neo-Nazi scene simply changed it to “alles für unser Vaterland.”
In recent years, AfD politicians in eastern Germany have started to use the phrase, either in its original version or in some close variation. Typically, they drop it into the final sentence of a speech.
When they are caught, they claim that they weren’t aware of the historical association. It is a clever trick: the phrase is innocuous enough that one could almost believe that it was used by mistake.
It is just that these innocent mistakes keep happening.
Most blatantly, the AfD basically campaigned under the SA slogan during the state election in Saxony-Anhalt in 2021.
Kay-Uwe Ziegler, AfD deputy leader in the eastern state, finished a speech in late 2020 with the words “alles für Deutschland”. When prosecutors opened an investigation, he protested that he hadn't been aware of the association.
Clearly though, Ziegler and his party had no great interest in distancing themselves from it. Their manifesto for the state election - a Nazi-style screed about a political elite “waging war” on the German Volk - was titled “alles für unsere Heimat.”
A few months later, Thuringian AfD boss Björn Höcke was invited to Saxony-Anhalt to join the campaign trail. He ended a stump speech in the town of Merseburg by saying: “alles für unsere Heimat, what a wonderful phrase that I can get behind… alles für unsere Heimat, alles für Sachsen-Anhalt und alles für Deutschland!”
Again, someone made a criminal complaint. Again, Höcke insisted that it was all a misunderstanding.
Next week we will find out what the justice system thinks of Höcke’s story.
On Thursday, he will go on trial in Halle on the charges of using a banned Nazi slogan.
Before entering politics, Höcke was a high school history teacher. He is also a man with interesting opinions on German history. Aa a young man, he marched with neo-Nazis to remember the Dresden fire bombing; he has lambasted the decision to build a Holocaust memorial in central Berlin and told an American newspaper that it was a mistake to see Hitler as “absolutely evil.”
If you believe him though, he has some surprising gaps in his historical knowledge. In a TV debate this week ahead of state elections in Thuringia, Höcke protested that he “didn’t know” that alles für Deutschland was a Nazi slogan, describing it as “an everyday phrase.”
He insisted in his defence that both Franz Beckenbauer and Deutsche Telekom had used it in the past. In fact, Deutsche Telekom has never used it and has since said it is going to sue him for claiming it did so.
It is true, though: Beckenbauer did once tell the German football team: “Gebt alles für Deutschland!” Which just shows what a great dog whistle the phrase is. For the majority, who don't know their history, it sounds too innocent to contain a hidden meaning.
No doubt, there were some people who watched Höcke on TV this week and were persuaded that he was just the latest victim of the “woke mob.” And who could blame them? Earlier this month Adidas was pressured into to redesigning the No. 4 on the national football shirt after someone on Twitter got upset at an alleged similarity to the SS insignia.
We live in times when people get angry about incredibly silly things.
Unfortunately, that makes it all the easier for the real Nazis to hide in plain sight. We need to look a little more closely to see who they are. And Björn Höcke, one of the most powerful figures in the AfD, is quite clearly a man who likes to deploy Nazi symbols.
What is the point of AfD using dog-whistles as described? Their voters are already on-side. surely the points made in any speech should appeal to an as yet unconverted audience, to increase the vote share. Not much point if the telling phrase is flying over the heads of the unconverted.