Björn Höcke, a former history teacher who has become arguably Germany’s most successful far-right politician since the second world war, has the sort of piercing, deep-set eyes that, depending on your perspective, can either give you the impression that he is wrestling with weighty matters of life and fate, or thinking up elaborate ways to kill you – a philosopher-statesman’s eyes, or, as the comedian John Oliver recently called them, “Nazi eyes.”
Höcke, 52, is not like other figures in German politics. In a country where politicians often deploy dullness as a prophylactic against charges of demagoguery, Höcke gleefully takes a different tack. In his speeches, he thunders against a familiar cast of the far-right’s villains – immigrants, Islamists, European Union bureaucrats – but he also veers into an anecdotal, lachrymose style so distinctive that even one of Höcke’s closest colleagues told me he used to find it “strange”. His rhetoric of decline and redemption – he has told Germans they must choose between being sheep or wolves, and urged them to be the latter – has garnered comparisons to Joseph Goebbels, whose speeches many political analysts assume he has studied. To his critics, Höcke is one of the gravest threats to Germany’s postwar democracy since it was established. More than any other person, he is responsible for the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party’s metamorphosis from a Eurosceptic, economically liberal movement into a nativist, anti-Islam, climate-denialist party. In 2020, Thomas Haldenwang, the head of Germany’s domestic intelligence service, was asked whether Höcke was a rightwing extremist. “Björn Höcke is the rightwing extremist,” he replied.
In the late 2010s, when I was living in Thuringia, the central German state where Höcke heads the AfD, I heard his name come up all the time. But I didn’t really understand why so many people were worked up about him until one day in May 2019, when I went to see him for myself. State elections were approaching and Höcke was due to address a rally in Apolda, a once-prosperous industrial town about a half-hour drive from the Buchenwald concentration camp memorial. Like many towns in former East Germany, Apolda bears the scars of war, deportations and communism’s collapse. Listless at the best of times, in the rainy weather the streets seemed as if they’d been emptied by a plague. In the old town square, a couple of dozen AfD supporters stood huddled by a food truck, smoking cigarettes and eating sausage. An ageing keyboard duo called Easy Tandem sang Love Is in the Air in heavy accents, occasionally muddied by the jeers of anti-fascist protesters.
Over the previous few years, Höcke had been busy. In April 2013, the same month the AfD was founded, he set up the party’s Thuringia branch and quickly positioned himself as head of a loose confederation known as The Wing. Defining itself as a “resistance movement against the further erosion of German identity”, The Wing leveraged its numbers to push the AfD far to the right. Many members also seemed eager to downplay Germany’s Nazi past. By the time I saw him in person, Höcke had weathered two attempts to expel him from the AfD, most recently over a speech in which he had decried German self-flagellation over the Nazi era. “We Germans are the only people in the world that have planted a monument of shame in the heart of their capital,” he said, referring to Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. Both attempts to expel Höcke were spearheaded by AfD leaders who saw his radicalism as a liability; both times, those leaders ended up leaving the party instead.
As the band broke into Gimme Hope Jo’anna, the anti-apartheid song written by Eddy Grant – something of a surprise choice – a black sedan pulled up, and Höcke emerged, dressed in a beige raincoat, white button-up shirt, blazer and jeans. In the lashing wind, the grey coif of his hair betrayed the faintest of ruffles. For several minutes, Höcke slapped hands and posed for photos, and then leaped on to the stage. “The coldest May in 140 years,” he said. Then, with a comedian’s timing: “Strong evidence of man-made climate change.” The crowd laughed; Höcke beamed. If their numbers disappointed him, he offered no sign – he bubbled with the energy of a man addressing a roaring stadium. “Thank you for coming out,” he said. “Maybe you’ve managed to have a couple of beers, and a couple of good conversations, and made one or two new friends. That’s the point of this event: you are not alone.”
Over the next hour, I watched as, without notes, Höcke offered figure after figure to corroborate his audience’s vague suspicion that they were getting screwed: 4,000 EU bureaucrats earning salaries of more than €290,000 (“more than the German chancellor!”); €60m wasted in Thuringia each year paying inflated benefits to refugees who fake their ages. “Who gives, and who takes? We Germans, we always give,” Höcke told the crowd.
A few months later, Thuringia delivered him an unambiguous vindication. The AfD took nearly a quarter of votes, outpacing the centre-right CDU and nearly tripling the share of the centre-left Social Democrats. Far from consigning the AfD to the wilderness, Höcke had brought the party closer to real power than anywhere else in the country.
Five years on, voices critical of Höcke within the AfD – once common in German media – have dissipated. A few months after the 2022 party conference, where Höcke embarrassed the party’s co-leaders, Tino Chrupalla and Alice Weidel, by sponsoring a resolution to dissolve the EU, Der Spiegel declared him the “real boss” of the AfD. Under Höcke’s influence, the party regularly polls as the country’s second-most popular, far ahead of any parties in Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s centre-left coalition. The AfD has won a district government in Thuringia and a municipal government in neighbouring Saxony. On 1 September, elections in those two states and later in the month in Brandenburg, also in the east, could make the AfD the largest party in one or more state parliaments.
For years, Höcke’s critics have insisted he represents something much darker than a nationalist strain of conservatism. As evidence of what they see as far more radical convictions, they point to phrases, peppered throughout his speeches, in which Höcke has appeared to echo language of the Third Reich. In 2016, Andreas Kemper, a German sociologist and author, claimed to have identified more than a dozen such instances. These included calls for Germany to have a “thousand-year future” and references to internal AfD rivals as “degenerate”. Both terms are commonplace in German, but critics argue they have a different resonance when uttered by a senior figure in a party enthusiastically backed by neo-Nazis. Other examples, such as his reference to a political opponent as a “Volksverderber” (“corrupter of the people”, used by Hitler in Mein Kampf) or calling his movement the “Tat-Elite” (“action-elite”, used by the SS to describe itself), are more unusual, and harder to explain away. (Höcke did not respond to repeated requests for comment, but Torben Braga, an AfD politician who has worked with him closely, told me that the criticisms were evidence of a “pathological” obsession with tarring every rightwing conservative as a Nazi. “I don’t know anyone, not even the federal president or the federal chancellor, whose every speech is subjected to such deep analysis,” he said.)
In Germany, using Nazi slogans is not just distasteful, it is criminal. But nothing Höcke said had ever strayed into prosecutable territory, until May 2021. That month, a Green politician in Saxony-Anhalt noticed that Höcke had ended one of his speeches by saying, “Everything for our homeland, everything for Saxony-Anhalt, everything for Germany.” Innocuous taken at face value, but the last phrase was a slogan used by the Nazi SA paramilitary unit, and carved into its service daggers. The politician brought a criminal complaint, and the public prosecutor filed charges. Höcke, who denied knowing the phrase’s origins, faced up to three years in prison.
Earlier this year, ahead of the trial, Höcke declared on X that, “Once again, Germany is at the forefront of persecuting political opponents and suppressing free speech.” When Elon Musk, who had stumbled on the post, asked why using the phrase would be illegal, Höcke responded: “Because every patriot in Germany is defamed as a Nazi.” The criminal code contained provisions “not found in any other democracy”. The point, he said, was “to prevent Germany from finding itself again.”
One morning this April, I headed to the city of Halle, in Saxony-Anhalt, for the first day of Höcke’s trial. The case would concern whether he had violated Paragraph 86a of Germany’s criminal code. The law, adopted after the second world war, outlaws the “use of symbols of unconstitutional and terrorist organisations”, which courts have interpreted to apply to a range of Nazi and neo-Nazi imagery and mottoes.
The trial was held in a modernist complex built on the site of an old East German car factory. About 200 protesters were outside when I arrived, chanting and holding signs reading “Stop the AfD” and “Björn Höcke is a Nazi”. Inside, the building was drab: smudged tile floors, fluorescent lighting, walls plastered with auction notices for foreclosed homes. Höcke’s name appeared on a list of upcoming cases among instances of theft and cannabis dealing.
I was whisked, along with a substantial share of Germany’s press corps, through a metal detector, past a bomb-sniffing dog, and into a chamber of foam-board panels and linoleum so reminiscent of a suburban office that I half expected to spot a cubicle and a photocopier in the corner. A minute later, the line of photographers at the front were jolted into action as Höcke entered. His expression was grave. Three lawyers flanked him. A stack of history books was tucked under one arm.
The cameras had just a few minutes to capture the images that would fill the evening news. As with most criminal trials in Germany, photos and recordings were forbidden. The crews were ushered out, and two judges in black robes entered, alongside two lay judges in everyday clothes. (In Germany, volunteer judges perform the function of juries.) The presiding judge, Jan Stengel, had the weary manner of a man who has spent his professional life dealing with difficult people.
I had been warned that the first session would probably be dry, technical and short. But Höcke’s defence team had different plans. Before the prosecutors could read out the charges, one of Höcke’s lawyers asked that the proceedings be taped – a striking request in a country where recordings are almost never allowed. “The purpose is to ensure that the defendant receives a fair trial,” the lawyer said. As a maligned public figure, Höcke faced the risk of “meaning-distorting truncations” by hostile media.
The judge took the motion in stride, but after a recess, it was rejected. Prosecutor Benedikt Bernzen, a towering, bearded man in his early 40s, stood to address the court. “The defendant, Mr Björn Höcke – ”
“Stop!” cried a lawyer for the defence.
Most of the journalists were familiar with the stout, bald man who had interrupted. Ulrich Vosgerau had made the news a few months earlier when he had joined a meeting in Potsdam between senior AfD officials and a far-right Austrian activist to discuss the “remigration” – a euphemism for mass deportation – of migrants and naturalised Germans. News of the meeting sparked nationwide protests, but left the AfD’s polling figures largely intact.
Vosgerau proceeded to reel off a list of complaints, including a demand that the case be relocated to Merseburg, where Höcke’s speech took place, even though that request had already been denied by a higher court. He also asked to end the session early so he could make another appointment.
When Bernzen spoke again, he made no effort to conceal his annoyance. “In all my professional years, I’ve never been interrupted during an indictment,” he said. “You stepped over my words,” he told Vosgerau. “That is outrageous.”
The AfD is often portrayed as a bull in the china shop of German democracy, flouting norms and decorum in an attempt to undermine institutions of state. When, after five recesses and multiple rejected motions, the hearing finally concluded, it seemed clear that Höcke’s team were not afraid to be seen in the same light. By the time I got back to Berlin, headlines across the country were declaring: “Grotesque appearance in Halle: How Björn Höcke tried to slow down his trial” and “Höcke in court: Bizarre and disturbing.”
It is in East Germany that Höcke has built his base. His success comes from his ability to articulate the frustrations and anxieties widely felt in a region where faith in institutions has been shaken by the loss of jobs and pensions, the implosion of an ideological system once portrayed as incontestable, and perceived discrimination at the hands of an arrogant west. Above all, Höcke has channelled these resentments towards migrants and asylum seekers, whom he portrays as free-riders soaking up taxpayer money. But he himself is a child of west Germany, and he was born, ironically enough, to a family of refugees.
Before the defeat of the Nazis, Germany’s borders stretched as far east as modern Lithuania. In the war’s final convulsions, the advancing Red Army expelled millions of Germans from the country’s eastern provinces, which were soon made part of Poland. Integrating the Vertriebene, or “expellees”, was among postwar Germany’s most severe challenges. They struggled to find housing in bombed-out cities. Food and jobs were always scarce. Their dialects, though intelligible, fell oddly on west German ears. “They didn’t have a different skin colour and they didn’t come from a different country, but ultimately they were just as much refugees,” says Karsten Polke-Majewski, who went to high school with Höcke and later researched him for the weekly newspaper, Die Zeit.
Höcke’s grandparents, who had lived in a hamlet in the former province of East Prussia, were among them. They eventually settled outside Neuwied, a town of about 30,000 people about 60 miles from the border with Belgium. Growing up in West Germany, Höcke would lie in bed beside his grandparents as they told him stories from their lost “homeland”. The images left a deep impression. “They presented it so vividly that I could really feel it,” Höcke said in a 2015 interview. “It certainly nourished a lasting political interest.”
German media has found evidence Höcke may have been exposed to more radical views. According to Die Zeit, Höcke’s father’s name appeared on the subscriber list for Die Bauernschaft, a newspaper published through the 1970s and 80s by Thies Christophersen, a prominent Holocaust denier. Höcke’s father also signed a petition in solidarity with a Christian Democrat kicked out of the party for suspected antisemitism in 2004. Polke-Majewski told me that his interviews with neighbours, acquaintances and town notables led him to believe the family remained fairly isolated in Neuwied.
After studying history and athletics at university, Höcke took a job teaching at the Martin Buber school in a small town south of Frankfurt. Housed in what Höcke called an “unsightly 70s-era concrete building”, the school, named after the Jewish philosopher and theologian, didn’t always have a shining reputation. One of Höcke’s former students, André Alexander Kiefer, told me that knives and drugs were common. Many students were from migrant families, and small “gangs” often formed along ethnic lines. White Germans turned to metal or far-right rock scenes. “You always had both sides of violent people in that city,” Kiefer told me.
Höcke started his job in 2001, when the hard-right was still on the political margins. At 29, with blond hair and an athletic build, he struck an energetic contrast to his older colleagues. But students soon discovered a conservative streak. “The students – many with a migrant background – were not receptive to my educational concerns, including the transmission of German and European cultural traditions,” he said in his book, Never Twice in the Same River, published in the form of an interview with the rightwing journalist Sebastian Hennig. Though he said he stayed on good terms with most students “regardless of their social or ethnic background”, he looked sceptically upon colleagues who “dreamed the dream of a multicultural society and sang the high song of so-called ‘diversity’”.
In the book, Höcke tells the story of how, one summer, students started wearing T-shirts with the names of countries printed on them. “Turkey”, “Russia”, and “Italy” shirts were everywhere. Then one morning, a girl showed up in Höcke’s gym class wearing a “Germany” shirt. “The Turkish and African boys were beside themselves,” claimed Höcke. “These otherwise divided Turks and Africans spontaneously agreed in their aggressive rejection of ‘Germanness’.” The next day, Höcke showed up in his own “Germany” shirt, which, to his delight, inspired a couple students to do the same.
What Höcke took from his experience was that “humans need a great deal of trust in our everyday interactions, and this is only possible if we can rely on a familiar, safe environment and established customs”. Here was the “great mistake of the multiculturalists”. They didn’t actually take cultures seriously, and instead tried to reduce them to “a bit of exotic folklore and varied gastronomy”. Chaos inevitably followed. “As nice and cosmopolitan as they may seem, at their core, multicultural entities are societies of pure mistrust,” Höcke said. “They automatically create countless frictions and conflicts – even without any bad intentions on the part of the people involved. And that is sold to us as a sunny future.”
This message was one he would repeat regularly, with varying degrees of virulence, during his swift rise from obscurity to the heart of German politics.
In 2008, when Höcke was 36, he moved to Bornhagen, a town in Thuringia. At the time, he was teaching at a school a 20-minute drive away, across the old east-west border, in the central state of Hesse. His commute traversed one of the sharpest divides in German society: Thuringia had Germany’s second-lowest gross regional product per capita; Hesse, its third highest. Hesse’s largest city, Frankfurt, is known as a financial hub, home to Germany’s Bundesbank and the European Central Bank. Thuringia, by contrast, would soon be known for the National Socialist Underground, a terrorist group that murdered nine immigrants and a police officer during the first part of the decade.
In the years before his move to Thuringia, there is almost no public record of Höcke’s political views, but in 2018, Die Zeit uncovered compelling evidence that he was in contact with far-right circles during this period. The newspaper reported that Höcke was assisted in his move to Bornhagen by Thorsten Heise, an activist in the neo-Nazi National Democratic party (NDP). Neighbours told the paper that Heise, who lived nearby, visited Höcke regularly. More damningly, a video surfaced showing Höcke chanting during a neo-Nazi march in Dresden on the anniversary of the city’s bombing in 2010. (Braga, the AfD politician, told German media that Höcke had merely gone to get an “impression” of the event.)
Kemper, the sociologist, has alleged that Höcke went further, by authoring several articles in publications run by Heise under the name “Landolf Ladig”. The articles, published in 2011 and 2012, argued that the world wars were started by foreign powers jealous of German “industry” and praised NDP economic policies aimed at “overcoming inhumane global capitalism” and encouraging the births of more “German children”. Some of the language in these articles was strikingly similar to phrases that later appeared in Höcke’s speeches, including particular descriptions of Bornhagen and the recommendation of a book that both “Ladig” and Höcke referred to by the same wrong name. In 2019, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency said it was “almost indisputable” that Höcke wrote the articles. (Höcke has denied this, but has not taken legal action against Kemper over the claim.)
If there was once a time when Höcke needed underground outlets to express his views, that changed in 2013 with the establishment of the AfD. Founded in response to the eurozone debt crisis, the party took its name from former Chancellor Angela Merkel’s assertion that there was “no alternative” to bailouts for southern Europe. Höcke set up the party’s Thuringian branch and won office in state elections in autumn 2014. In March the following year, he burst into national consciousness when he co-authored the “Erfurt declaration”, which decried the AfD’s direction under its co-founder, Bernd Lucke, and laid the foundations for what would become The Wing.
Höcke’s activism did not endear him to the more moderate members of the AfD, which was roughly split between economic liberals and those of a more nationalist bent. In May 2015, Lucke tried to have Höcke booted from the party after Höcke told journalists that he didn’t “assume that every single member of the NPD” – the neo-Nazi party to which Heise belonged – “can be classified as extremist”. At the party congress in July, however, Lucke was voted out in favour of a new leader, the hardliner Frauke Petry, and the proceedings against Höcke were soon dropped. (When I contacted Lucke, he told me he had spoken about Höcke enough and had “better things to do than constantly repeat himself”.)
The experience did not push Höcke to soften his tone. In November 2015, he appeared at an event hosted by a thinktank run by Götz Kubitschek, a prominent rightwing publisher and intellectual. In his speech, Höcke outlined what he called the different “reproductive strategies” of Africans and Europeans. While Africans “aimed at achieving the highest possible growth rate” and migrating to other regions, Europeans did pretty much the opposite, having fewer babies and making “optimal use” of their environment. The collision of these two “strategies” necessitated “a fundamental reassessment of the direction of Germany’s asylum and immigration policy”. A little over a year later, in Dresden’s historic Watzke ballroom, he delivered what would become his most infamous speech. Dismissing Germany’s policy of Holocaust remembrance as a “stupid coping mechanism”, he claimed Germans possessed “the mentality of a totally vanquished people”. He called for a “180-degree turn in the politics of remembrance”, in favour of an approach that “brings us into contact with the great achievements of those who came before us”.
The Dresden speech prompted a second attempt to boot Höcke out of the AfD, this time led by his erstwhile ally, Frauke Petry, who called him a “burden on the party”. The party’s federal board declared that he had an “excessive proximity to National Socialism”. Despite the heavier guns brought to bear, Höcke was spared expulsion once again. In May 2018, after more than a year of internal party wrangling, the arbitration board of the AfD’s Thuringia branch rejected the federal party’s request to start the process of removing Höcke. By then, Petry, like Lucke before her, had left the AfD.
The episode bolstered Höcke’s growing reputation as the real power behind Thuringia’s AfD. Madeleine Henfling, a Green politician and vice-president of Thuringia’s parliament, told me that Höcke appeared to exert tight control over the local branch of his party. “Dissenters either quickly resign or are made to leave,” she told me. She pointed to a recent dispute between Höcke and a local AfD lawmaker, Karlheinz Frosch, over a candidate list for district elections. Displeased with Frosch, Höcke drew up a separate list, called the Alternative for the District, to run against him. Frosch left the AfD soon after, complaining that: “For the rightwing extremist part of the party, Höcke is like a Godfather.” (When I met Braga, the AfD politician close to Höcke, he dismissed these characterisations as way off the mark. “A boss, a chairman, is sometimes someone who might hit the table and say, ‘No, we’re going to do it the way I think it’s right and the discussion is over.’ Mr Höcke is not such a leader. He leads by moderating and connecting,” he told me.)
In March 2020, a few months after the AfD’s strong performance in Thuringia’s state elections, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency said it was placing The Wing under surveillance. The decision, unprecedented in the country’s modern history, was justified in a 436-page report, which referred to Höcke more than 600 times. In another setback for the AfD, the Covid-19 pandemic initially led Germans to rally around Chancellor Merkel. In the general election of 2021, the AfD lost 11 seats. Olaf Scholz, a Social Democrat, led a centre-left coalition with the Greens and market-liberal Free Democrats into power.
But this ebb in the AfD’s fortunes proved temporary. As the pandemic wore on, more Germans became receptive to conspiratorial views. (Höcke suggested the pandemic had been “staged” to prepare the way for “a new surveillance state”.) Scholz’s coalition fell into infighting and plummeting approval over policies from installations of climate-friendly heat pumps to its handling of inflation and the war in Ukraine. In September 2023, Thuringia was back in the headlines when the local CDU voted in tandem with the AfD, this time to lower property taxes. This was not the first time that the centre-right had broken the “firewall” – the principle that no mainstream party would ever lend legitimacy to the far right by co-operating with them. But this time, the backlash was relatively muted. “The ‘firewall’ is history – and Thuringia is just the beginning,” Weidel, the AfD’s national chief, wrote on X after the vote.
By the time of Höcke’s trial in May 2024, with four months to go before state elections, the AfD’s polling lead in Thuringia appeared unassailable. The CDU, perhaps mindful that they had been criticised for helping the far-right exercise power, decided to stage a televised debate between their state leader, Mario Voigt, and Höcke. Though heavily publicised, and featuring several sharp attacks on Höcke – who, at one point, professed not to remember a passage from his own book – the confrontation did not change the AfD’s popularity at state level.
In Madeleine Henfling’s view, the effort was misguided from the start. “I always say that talking to the AfD is like playing chess with a pigeon. At some point they will shit on your chessboard and knock over all the pieces,” she told me. “People always believe that fascists, that Nazis, are stupid. That’s total bullshit, of course. They have an ideology and they know exactly how to get their ideology into society. They have strategies for it.”
On the trial’s second day, the purpose of the history books Höcke had brought became clear. Höcke’s defence rested on the argument that he had not known “Everything for Germany” was a Nazi slogan. In his debate with Voigt, he claimed he’d been riffing on Donald Trump’s “America First”, which he’d combined with the title of the local AfD branch’s election manifesto – “Everything for our homeland” – to achieve an “ascending rhetorical cascade”. The books, which he’d used as a history teacher, showed why it was silly to think he should have known better: not one mentioned the slogan. “The history teacher is not a polymath,” Höcke said. He could not know every single thing that had occurred in the past. “You are a criminal lawyer,” he said, addressing the prosecutor. “What knowledge do you have of patent law?”
Höcke’s defence evoked a quandary at the heart of Germany’s militant approach to defending its postwar liberal order: where to draw the line? Many phrases, such as “Heil Hitler”, obviously fall under the scope of Paragraph 86a. Others, such as “Führer”, a common term applied to bus drivers and tour guides, and “Lebensraum”, which is widely used in ecology, do not. (One of the stranger aspects of learning German as an adult can be undoing your old associations with these terms.) Playing in the ambiguous space between these two extremes is something of a pastime for Germany’s far-right. The numbers “18” and “88” – corresponding to the letters of the alphabet, with 18 meaning “AH”, for “Adolf Hitler”, and 88 meaning “HH”, for “Heil Hitler” – are often used in neo-Nazi circles, and have been upheld by courts as legal, for instance. I’ve reported on neo-Nazi concerts where attenders wore shirts with phrases such as “12 Golden Years”, without specifying which years, and “Adolf and Eva”, without surnames attached.
In a 2019 essay, Götz Kubitschek, the rightwing publisher and intellectual, argued that rightwing movements should “provocatively push forward into the border areas of what is just about sayable and doable” to create linguistic “bridgeheads”. They could then pursue a tactic of “interlocking”, whereby one would “advance, capture a few positions, and create an unclear situation” to prevent “enemy artillery” from firing. Linguistically, this meant “quoting and referring to speakers from the establishment who have said the same thing before, or at least something similar”. The final step was Selbstverharmlosung – a term meaning “self-trivialisation” – to “tear down the ‘emotional barrier’” built and “lovingly maintained” by the old elites against political alternatives. (Kubitschek did not answer my emails seeking comment.)
It is easy to suspect that Höcke, a longtime friend of Kubitschek, is playing precisely this game. Yet proving it is almost impossible. The prosecution in Halle took a swing at it all the same. Under cross-examination, Höcke was asked about some of his past statements. His use of words such as “Volksverderber” and “Tat-Elite” suggested he had “quite detailed historical knowledge of the vocabulary in the Third Reich”, did it not? Höcke responded that the terms were also used in the 19th century, for whose “flowery language” he had a soft spot. Be that as it may, could he really have missed the case of Ulrich Oehme, an AfD member in Saxony who had been investigated for using “Everything for Germany” on a campaign poster in 2017? Höcke said he hadn’t learned of the case until later. Part of the reason might have been that he had consciously avoided “established media” out of a need for “psychological self-protection”. After all, his every utterance was picked apart by “hundreds of antifascists”, who had made an industry of “discrediting and hounding” him. He had, he said, been made “the devil of the nation”.
During a May Day address in Hamm, a town in the old industrial heart of Germany’s Ruhr valley, Höcke took this argument directly to his supporters. He invoked the spectre of witch trials and the Inquisition, and compared his case to those of Socrates, Jesus Christ and Julian Assange. “The club of justice is always used to beat the head of the dissident, the head of the opposition – and now it’s being used to beat mine.” Near the speech’s conclusion, Höcke said: “Times are changing, and people are realising that the signs point to a storm.”
The last phrase, Kemper, the sociologist, was quick to point out, was a headline run by a prominent Berlin newspaper the day Hitler was named chancellor.
The final session opened on a bright, cloudless morning in May. The prosecution began by reiterating their case, calling for a six-month prison sentence, “to make an impression on the accused and uphold the rule of law”. Then Höcke’s lawyers had their turn. Over more than two hours, all three spoke. References to Shakespeare and US supreme court Justice Benjamin Cardozo were made, as were promises to appeal against any conviction to the European court of human rights.
Vosgerau delivered a point-by-point refutation of the prosecution, which built to a theoretical crescendo: “The difference between a liberal, constitutional state and a totalitarian state is not that there are very, very, very strict laws in a totalitarian state and in a free, constitutional state very lenient laws. The difference is that, in a totalitarian state, nobody knows exactly what is punishable. But everyone knows, from experience, that the state can declare pretty much anything you do to be a criminal offence if it wants to.”
For all their verve, these were mere opening acts. Given his turn to speak, Höcke shot up from his chair. The idea that he had used the Nazi slogan deliberately was “one of those assumptions that is impossible, completely impossible to prove”, he said. Comparing himself to Joseph K, the protagonist of Franz Kafka’s The Trial, he said he could have never imagined he would be held to account “for such a banality, for such a triviality”. His parliamentary immunity had been removed eight times – not for bribery or corruption or breach of trust, but for expressing his opinion. “Am I not a human being? In the media, I’m treated as if I’m not.”
About 10 minutes in, Judge Stengel interrupted. “Mr Höcke,” he said. “Get to the point. No campaign speeches.”
Höcke nodded, but he would not be kept from a few more flourishes. “The Nazis also said ‘Guten Tag’,” Höcke said. “Do you want to ban the German language because the Nazis also spoke German? At some point, this has to end.”
It was an argument Höcke and his supporters often deployed – that an unhealthy obsession with the past had caused the AfD’s critics to see Nazis everywhere. But over the months I spent reporting this piece, when I pressed Höcke’s critics on whether they might be overstating their case, they rarely relented. “He’s playing with things that mean, if he came to power as a chancellor in Germany, he would have to do very radical things to fulfil his promises to the people,” Matthias Quent, an expert on far-right extremism, told me.
I was often reminded that the recent trial was not the first time that Höcke’s own words were used against him in a legal context. In 2019, a court in Thuringia was asked to rule on whether it would be libellous to call Höcke a “fascist”. The court said that it was not, because the view was “not pulled from thin air”, but stood on a “verifiable, factual basis”.
As evidence, the judges had cited a passage in Never Twice in the Same River, which comes at the end of a chapter, apparently signalling that readers are meant to dwell on its full implications. In it, Höcke forecasts that Germans – “at least those who still want to be” – may someday need to “return to our rural retreats like the brave and cheerful Gauls of old”. These might serve as a “fallback position from which a reconquest will start”. He goes on to say that “our primary political goal is, of course, to prevent all of these scenarios”, but “the longer a patient refuses urgent surgery, the harder the necessary cuts will inevitably be”. A “large-scale remigration project”, built on a “policy of ‘well-tempered cruelty’”, will probably be needed. “This means that human hardship and unpleasant scenes cannot always be avoided.” He concludes that “existential crises require extraordinary action”.
In Halle, the court fell silent as Höcke finished his speech. A final recess was called. When, an hour later, the court reassembled, Judge Stengel began quickly, almost anticlimactically, to read out the verdict.
“The court has to listen to almost everything, but it doesn’t have to believe everything,” he said. For all their discursions into historical and philosophical nuance, the defence’s case had stumbled on one salient point: it was “unrealistic” that Höcke had not known about the other AfD members running into trouble over the same phrase. Even so, a prison sentence would be “completely excessive”. Höcke would receive a fine of €13,000. (Höcke’s team would later appeal the sentence, which a federal court is deliberating.)
Addressing Höcke, Stengel said: “You are an eloquent, intelligent man, who knows what he is saying.”
As the sentence was read, Höcke looked deflated. The hearing was over. There was no rebuttal allowed.
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