Dhe event has been going on for about an hour and a half when the woman sits all alone at her table. She actually came here because she was against the war, she says. And because she hopes to meet like-minded people. “War is something really terrible,” she says and talks about her father, who had to flee Silesia with his sister as a young man in the last days of the war. These stories have been told over and over again in her family.
“It’s not about me today,” says the woman, wiping a few tears from her face. Her life is almost behind her. “But my children and grandchildren, what will become of them if this all escalates?”
she looks around There’s a kind of horror show going on at the front of the stage. A woman and a man dressed as TV presenters and health ministers try to perform a skit. Neither of them know their lyrics, and when they do think of something again, either the microphone doesn’t work or it squeaks through the hall completely overdriven. It’s been like this for a quarter of an hour now. “Completely below the waistline!” grumbles an older man who hurries towards the exit. “Really, something primitive,” he exclaims and then stays with two acquaintances who also look embarrassed.
The question is what they actually expected at the “Patriotic Ash Wednesday” in Ronneburg near Gera. The organizers had announced a “brilliant hall event” and a “signal of patriotic unity and a declaration of war on the politics of the regime”. The main organizer is Christian Klar, a man in his forties with close contacts in the right-wing extremist scene, who organizes so-called Monday demos against everything possible in nearby Gera, at which Thuringia’s AfD boss Björn Höcke also spoke. That is missing this time, but associations such as “Freie Thüringer” and “Aufbruch Deutschland” by the former AfD politician André Poggenburg, the right-wing extremist party “Freie Sachsen” and “Compact”, the specialist magazine for conspiracy believers, are also at the start.
A straw man rented the municipal hall
It looks like a right-wing rest ramp that has gathered on the stage of the “Bogenbinderhalle”. This in turn belongs to the city, which is why the award caused a lot of trouble in advance. The CDU mayor had apparently rented the hall to a company that served as a straw man. However, the actual purpose did not remain hidden, which is why the local SPD member of the Bundestag, Elisabeth Kaiser, intervened. “Behind this event are organizers classified by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution as right-wing extremists and anti-state and anti-democratic,” she wrote to the town hall and called for the contract to be terminated if it was concluded with false information. The Thuringian Ministry of the Interior also offered help.
But the mayor disappeared and was not available to anyone. Thuringia’s CDU leader Mario Voigt defended his party friend. She is a “responsible mayor who has both feet on the ground,” he told the newspaper “Thüringer Allgemeine”. He assumes that she was tricked. In the hall itself, the joy about the “coup” is great.