Ein a boring conference room, on the table are flags of the federal states. Identity is negotiated. Philosophical considerations are made: Do children already have an identity – in the sense of a cultural identity as Germans? Silence, rustling, actually no, isn’t that a process? Nobody is really sure. Finally, the final argument, characteristic of his party, from Götz Frömming, the education policy spokesman for the AfD parliamentary group: “The other smartass come along and say we’re writing a new, multicultural identity – if your children don’t have an identity anyway.” Better, “ in the sense of Goethe’s Entelechy thoughts” to say: “They actually already have them.”
In the last few days, the AfD has once again received a little more attention. The “AfD Leaks”, an analysis of 40,000 internal chat messages from the party’s federal politicians in the last legislative period, was published just last week. The logs from the chat, to which more than 70 of the 92 MPs belonged from their first days in parliament until after the last federal election, show a party in which the board and colleagues are being hounded, driven by fantasies of revenge and homophobia, mockery and self-pity . So far, so predictable.
Now, almost at the same time, a work by the documentary filmmaker Andreas Wilcke, “People’s Representatives”, is being published. Wilcke shot the film alone and without funding and, unlike the “AfDLeaks” team from NDR and WDR, designed a behavioral study without comment that accompanies four AfD politicians in their first years in the Bundestag: Norbert Kleinwächter, teacher and now deputy parliamentary group leader, Götz Frömming, also a teacher and parliamentary manager with more than 17,000 Twitter followers, Armin-Paulus Hampel, a former journalist and foreign policy spokesman who is no longer in the Bundestag, and Enrico Komning, a lawyer who sits on the Economic Committee and is now parliamentary manager. Wilcke’s documentation also begins in 2017 with the first days in the Bundestag, in the “ivory tower”, as the AfDler say, with mockery in his voice as a quick measure against the respect that the institution inspires in its sudden presence.
Anyone who calls Höcke their friend
Wilcke chose different characters, the political camps of those portrayed played a subordinate role. Kleinwächter is the man whose cup reads “Monsieur le Président” and who is moved by the words of his own speech, Hampel the Elder Statesman who quotes Schiller. But there are also party colleagues in your circle who have no idea what it means when a Chancellor takes part in a government survey. Then there is the gallant Frömming, who used to be with Greenpeace, and Komning, who calls Björn Höcke his friend. How Komning designs T-shirts that say “Kommando Komning”, how Hampel explains in front of an audience that day care centers are not there to provide children with the best possible care, but to indoctrinate them, like little guards at the citizens’ dialogue in Berlin the countries of origin of the national football players reads aloud and allows his listeners to utter savage racist abuse: all this happens in front of the camera.