Ever since the attack on his car last year, Ferat Kocak has been noting down vehicle number plates he sees on the streets. He has frequently moved house and sleeps badly. “I wake at the slightest sound,” he said. “The fear is ever present.”
Mr Kocak, an official of the left wing German party Die Linke, said his life changed one night in
February 2018 when unknown assailants set fire to his car. The flames spread to the house where he and his parents were sleeping.
If he had not woken up in time, he said, his family could have been killed. Two men from the hard-right scene in Berlin’s working-class district of Neukölln were detained over the attack but released due to lack of evidence.
In June, Germans were shocked by the killing of fiBerlin, a local official in the central region of Hesse and the first German politician in the country’s postwar history to be assassinated by a right wing extremist.
Such attacks are rare. But they are the product of a changing political culture that has become increasingly brutish in recent years. The appearance of a wooden gallows marked “reserved for Angela ‘Mummy’ Merkel”, the German chancellor, at a far-right demonstration in Dresden four years ago, drew widespread condemnation at the time.
But since then, such menacing displays of hostility towards mainstream politicians have become routine. Germans were once renowned for sober debate. But the influx of nearly 1m migrants in 2015 and the rise of the nationalist Alternative for Germany (AfD) has led to increased polarisation and a shriller, more aggressive tone that has alarmed the political establishment.
President Frank-Walter Steinmeier recently bemoaned the “provocation, noise and daily outrage” in social media and said Germans needed to “relearn how to argue without foaming at the mouth”.
The authorities’ concern is that verbal attacks have sometimes tipped into something worse. There were 2,098 acts of violence by extremists on the right and left in 2018, compared with 1,678 in 2012 — an increase of 25 per cent.
The AfD itself is not immune. “Who has had to endure the most attacks?” asked Andreas Kalbitz,
the party’s head in the east German state of Brandenburg. “It’s the offices of AfD politicians that
are routinely destroyed.”
Georg Pazderski, the AfD’s leader in Berlin, has had his car smashed and his house and windows pelted with paint. The AfD official Uwe Jung broke his cheekbone in an attack in 2016. Frank Magnitz of the party’s Bremen branch was hospitalised with concussion in January after being
jumped by unknown assailants.
Mr Pazderski has blamed what he calls “the lack of linguistic inhibitions” in modern German politics. “There are no boundaries any more, either on the left or the right,” he said.
Civil servants and other officials have been targeted. “You’re seeing a real increase in verbal and
physical violence against public officials, mayors, even administrative staff,” said Andreas Hollstein, mayor of the west German town of Altena.
He experienced the brutality first-hand in 2017, when he was stabbed in the neck by a man who opposed his liberal approach to refugees. Then in late May, he said, an anonymous caller told him that “there would be another attack on me very soon, and this one would be more successful than the first”.
A recent survey found 2 per cent of the 11,000 mayors in Germany had been physically assaulted in the past four years, while more than a quarter of local Councillors said they had suffered personal abuse over the government’s refugee policy.
The city of Berlin is a particular hotspot for violence. According to Mobile Counselling against Right wing Extremism (MBR), a non-governmental organisation, there have been 55 politically
motivated attacks in the city in the past three years, mostly against left wing politicians or pro-refugee activists. That is up from 50 such incidents between 2009 and 2015.
The authorities’ failure to solve Mr Kocak’s case and similar incidents seems to have emboldened rightwingers, said Bianca Klose, head of MBR: “Now it’s not just arson attacks, it’s death threats too — a massive campaign of intimidation.”
The authorities deny they are not taking rightwing attacks seriously enough. “Incidents of arson are very hard to solve because the culprits often leave no trace,” said a person familiar with the investigation into the attack on Mr Kocak’s car.
But he confirmed that searches at the homes of the two original suspects, one of whom had connections to the neo-Nazi scene, had unearthed a “hit list” of 26 politicians and police officers, with their private addresses.
Germany’s interior ministry flagged up the issue of such lists last week, saying dozens had appeared containing data on “tens of thousands of people” — ranging from journalists, public officials and activists to private individuals active in the fight against right wing extremism.
The aim of the lists, said Horst Seehofer, interior minister, was to “sow insecurity and fear”.
