Inside an AfD Stronghold

A ZEITGEIST election special from the easternmost edge of Germany

This weekend, around five million Germans head to the polls. Sunday is election day in Thuringia and Saxony, two of the five states once part of East Germany. A third one, my native Brandenburg, will follow on 22 September.

The seats of the three state parliaments are up for grabs, something that doesn’t normally elicit much media attention. That’s very different this time. I have been asked for comment by media outlets in seven countries. Everyone wants to know the same thing: What’s going on in eastern Germany, where the far-right AfD party is topping the polls?

Good question. Is East Germany a political anomaly or in line with countries where the far-right is strong, like France and Italy? How will the results here impact the rest of Germany?

I wanted to stop talking about East Germans and went to speak with them instead. Follow me to Schenkendöbern, a rural community on the easternmost edge of Germany, where nearly 40 per cent of people voted for the AfD….

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Picture a beautiful late summer evening. I’m in the village of Schenkendöbern, not far from the Polish border. A harvest festival is underway and the whole community has turned out. Embroidered white shirts gleam in the sun, the men have straw hats on, and the women wear wreaths of flowers. Together, they ceremonially take the last crop from the field in the traditional way, using lavishly decorated scythes and rakes. It’s a timeless pastoral scene.

Suddenly, a thoroughly modern cacophony breaks the spell. Schenkendöbern’s mayor Ralph Homeister, still red-faced and covered in dust from working the field, pulls his mobile phone out of his trouser pocket. His face is serious.

“Incident!” the mayor calls in a calm, steady voice. He and a handful of men and women whose phones amplify the shrill alarm, run to their positions. They all belong to Schenkendöbern’s voluntary fire brigade. Seconds later, a loud siren begins to blare and a fire engine rushes off to the neighbouring village of Atterwasch where a car has veered off the road and crashed into a tree. 

When the emergency response team get to the site, the wrecked vehicle is ablaze. The injured driver has escaped from his Mercedes, but the flames have already engulfed nearby trees and shrubs. The brigade must act quickly. With no time to lose, they put on their protective masks and set to work. 

“How do you deal with this sort of thing?” I ask Homeister in his office at Schenkendöbern Hall, an impressive old manor house that serves as the district headquarters. The 61-year-old is on call now. Any minute, his phone could sound the alarm, compelling him to swap his suit for a uniform and attend a potentially harrowing incident. Extinguishing fires is the brigade’s core task, but they also help with traffic accidents, flooding and any number of other things – all on a voluntary basis, alongside their day jobs. 

Homeister shrugs. “Sacrificing our weekends and evenings to train and practice isn’t always easy, but without us, this country wouldn’t function.” He’s right about that. In Germany, over one million people participate in the voluntary fire brigades compared to just 36,000 professional firefighters. If you’re in an accident or your house is on fire, you’re likely to see the face of a local voluntary fire officer first on the scene. 

But Homeister has evaded my question. I try again. How do these volunteers deal with seeing so much misery and then going back to their day job? “The camaraderie helps,” says the mayor. “When you’ve just had to help recover a wounded or dead person from a wrecked car, you can talk about it to your fellow firefighters. We support one another.”

Sixteen villages belong to the 3500-soul Schenkendöbern district. Most have their own fire brigades which serve not only as incident response teams but also as a tight social network that holds these rural communities together. They turn out when a member gets married, provide playgrounds for children on their sites and organise events like the harvest festival.

The brigades also act as a bridge between generations, genders and groups. Children as young as six can join (beginning to develop the soft skills and mindset they need to attend incidents when they are older). Women are a sizable minority, making up around a quarter of the membership in the Schenkendöbern brigade. When I ask Melanie Bähr, leader of the youth programme, if it’s still considered strange to be a female firefighter, she laughs and tells me, “No, we’re all in it together to save lives.”

With roughly a quarter of the Schenkendöbern population active in the fire brigades, it’s perhaps not surprising that one of their own has been elected as mayor. Ralph Homeister does not belong to any political party but stood as a candidate for the “Group Fire Brigade”. 

It’s not just him. The big parties struggle to get into local government here. Of the sixteen seats in the Schenkendöbern administration only three are taken up by representatives of the conservative Christian Democrats (CDU), two by the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD) and one by the far-left Die Linke (The Left). The rest are independent candidates or representatives of local interest groups.

As Homeister explains this to me, I can’t help but address the elephant in the room. “What about the AfD?” The far-right Alternative für Deutschland has seen a surge across Germany, currently polling as the second most popular party. The east of the country is a particular stronghold, and in Schenkendöbern itself, a staggering 39 per cent of people voted for the AfD in the European elections in June. 

There’s a real possibility that the far-right party may win on 22 September, when a new regional parliament is elected for the state of Brandenburg to which Schenkendöbern belongs. Ever since German reunification in 1990, Brandenburg has been in SPD hands, but the party of Chancellor Olaf Scholz is currently trailing behind the AfD in the polls.

“So why is the AfD not represented in Schenkendöbern?” I ask Homeister. “You know,” he begins with obvious reluctance to address a topic he doesn’t want to be the thing that defines his community, “we are concerned with practical politics here, not ideology. People elect people rather than parties.” 

Steffen Krautz, a local SPD politician who had stood and lost against Homeister in the last mayoral election, thinks big parties like his have themselves to blame for haemorrhaging support. I meet him when I hire a bicycle from his business to get about in a community with almost no public transport. 

Krautz runs a camping site by the Deulowitz Lake, which is so small that it’s affectionately known as the ‘bathtub’. I go for a swim and then seek out Krautz in the little cafe he runs right by the shore. He pours me a ‘Postdamer’ shandy – an East German classic made by mixing lager with raspberry lemonade – and tells me that he’s not surprised that his SPD finds it increasingly difficult to convince hard-working locals here to vote for them. 

“The party has lost its way. The SPD was once the party of the working class. Not anymore.” Why is he still in the party then, I wonder aloud. “For nostalgic reasons,” he laughs. “And after all, what’s the alternative?”

It seems Schenkendöberners have decided the alternative at local level is to vote for independent interest groups. Their issues here don’t neatly overlap with ideological fault lines. Between 2007 and 2017, the conflict that most divided this community was that the local brown coal mines were to be extended and the villages of Grabko, Atterwasch and Kerkwitz sacrificed in the process. 

For ten long years, 900 residents (a quarter of Schenkendöbern’s population) lived in purgatory, not knowing if they’d have a future here until the coal plans were finally abandoned. In that time, two camps emerged: those fighting against the demolition of the villages (chief among them Steffen Krautz who lives in Kerkwitz) and those fighting for fair compensation for their houses (like pensioner Hanni Dillan who chairs the district council). Bitter memories continue to poison community cohesion.

I understand why people may want a local firefighter like Homeister to negotiate local issues. But there is no getting away from the fact that nearly 40 per cent of Schenkendöberners voted for the AfD when it was on the ballot paper for the EU elections. So why didn’t the party even try to field a candidate in the local elections? Where do AfD voters find their vent if not in the polling booth? Homeister takes a deep breath when I ask. He knows where I’m going with this. 

In 2019, the AfD circulated an internal strategy paper on how they plan to become a major political force by 2025. It envisioned the party’s ideological “march through organisations”, i.e. the infiltration of club life, ideally of institutions with a high membership and national reach. The fire brigades tick those boxes perfectly. 

It’s hard to assess how effective this strategy has been. Cases where AfD and fire brigade membership overlap often make the German headlines but whether party members have deliberately joined to infiltrate the fire brigades isn’t always clear.

Take the case of Lars Schieske in the city of Cottbus, half an hour south of Schenkendöbern. Classified as an extremist by domestic intelligence, he is both an AfD politician and a firefighter. His case became well known when he ran for mayor and lost against the SPD candidate. But Schieske joined the fire brigade 25 years ago, before the AfD even existed.

That the AfD actively courts the fire brigades, however, is indisputable. It’s an attractive institution for all politicians to seek association with. Fire officers are the single most trusted profession in Germany. So in Thuringia, where the AfD expect their strongest result this weekend, the party dedicated an entire section of their manifesto to them, promising better funding and equipment. 

It’s a manifesto that makes no secret of the far-right leanings of the Thuringian AfD leader Björn Höcke who has recently been found guilty of using the Nazi slogan “Everything for Germany”. In mockery of the trial, his AfD manifesto is entitled “Everything for Thuringia” and begins with the lyrics of a song written by Franz Langheinrich, a poet who supported Nazi ideology on art and culture during the 1930s. 

By contrast, the section on the fire brigades is written in formal language and makes a number of practical suggestions such as the need for further investment in things like fire engines, protective clothing and defibrillators. Within a far-right manifesto, it’s a notably polemic-free offer to an institution bound to political neutrality. But most brigades actively resist being associated with any political party, including the AfD. Their federal youth organisation stipulates in its handbook, “political neutrality in the work and image of the fire brigade should be emphasised.”

This is constantly challenged by AfD advances. Earlier this year, the AfD chapter of the small Thuringian town of Triptis posted a picture of its campaign stall on the market square with a fire engine in the background. They claimed their work there was “supported by the fire brigade.” The firefighters responded by saying they were there because one of their members was getting married in the nearby town hall. “We distance ourselves completely from any political association with the AfD,” they posted, adding “We are a neutral local institution. We don’t want to become a political football.”

It’s a message I hear again and again in Schenkendöbern. With a quarter of the population in the fire brigade and an AfD-votership of 40 per cent, there ought to be some overlap, but every single fire officer tells me the same thing: “We are not political. We don’t pick and choose whom we help or who joins us. If they are capable and dependable, they are in.” Homeister admits that political topics do sometimes crop up when the team sit down for their end-of-the-week beer. It’s hard to see where else people could have these conversations. After all, the fire brigades are still here, most of the village pubs are not.

I find this out very quickly. In Schenkendöbern itself, there is no hotel, so I rent an apartment in Kerkwitz, one of the district’s sixteen villages. The place turns out to be a converted set of rooms in the old village pub ‘Zum Dorfkrug’ or ‘The Village Jug’. Other than my holiday flat, the building was still exactly as it had been, complete with a large restaurant area. It had served locals and through traffic for over 400 years before it had to shut after Covid. 

I meet the owner Sebastian Wehland who brings a friend (a fireman from the Kerkwitz branch) and a few bottles of beer. We sit in his beautiful but abandoned beer garden as he tells me about his grandparents Gisela and Günther who ran the place for half a century. Now their grandson, who has returned with his young family after years spent living in western Germany, finds it difficult to get this village institution back up on its feet. Converting the pub into holiday flats seemed the only viable solution. But Wehland tries to open the place twice a year for the traditional spring festivals, determined not to “allow the Dorfkrug to disappear from Kerkwitz.”

“Is this sort of decline the reason why you have so many AfD voters here?” I ask the two young men. It’s gone dark and not a single sound fills the warm night air. “Well, there is a sense that some of the traditions here are lost,” says Wehland’s friend, who doesn’t want to be named. “We used to have a lively club here for those of us breeding pigeons, chickens and rabbits as a hobby. Now that’s as good as dead.” 

That is a story I hear again and again. Many bakeries, butchers, shops and clubs closed in the wake of reunification. A quarter of the population of East Germany has left since 1990. Schenkendöbern is a much smaller place now and a third of its population is of retirement age, bit by bit forced to give up the things they ran and organised. Young people like the two Kerkwitzers in front of me often find it difficult to build their lives where they were born and raised. Many move West in search of better opportunities.

Homeister proudly tells me that the demographic decline has now been halted if not reversed. Schenkendöbern was able to keep and renovate one of its three primary schools but the fact that some of the pupils have to travel on the school bus for an hour to get here tells its own story.

With so few young people in the region, local businesses are struggling as well, as Karl-Heinz Freitag tells me. He is one of Schenkendöbern’s biggest employers. Formerly from West Germany, he came here in search of investment opportunities after the fall of the Berlin Wall. He took over an old East German dairy farm, formerly run as a socialist collective, which he has converted into a hyper-modern model business that he is pleased to show me. The cows look happy and relaxed as we stand between them and Freitag tells me about the way their dung is turned into electricity in the biogas plant next door. 

Like virtually all farmers I meet in this agricultural region, he complains about overregulation that makes business difficult and eats into productivity. Many Schenkendöberners climbed aboard their tractors earlier this year and drove to Berlin where large farmers’ protests tried to force the government to rethink changes to sector subsidies. Almost every village sign here has a Wellington boot hanging from it in solidarity with the farmers’ protests.

Freitag has other worries too. He produces three lorries’ worth of milk every day and does so with sustainability and animal welfare in mind, but he cannot recruit or retain enough staff. Roughly half of his workforce now consists of foreign workers, mostly from nearby Poland or Uzbekistan. But turnover remains high.

I get the feeling that this combination of difficult economic prospects, demographic collapse and huge upheaval since 1990 has produced a deep fear of change. Homeister and his team try their best to hold the community together in spite of this with special events where people can meet.

A day before the harvest festival, 300 pensioners gather in Schenkendöbern for an afternoon of music, coffee and company. A Polish partner village has sent a delegation and their chatter mingles with the German voices as translators whisk back and forth.

Events like this retain social cohesion in a thinning population, but there is a palpable sense of loss. It’s a sentiment the AfD taps into. Their messages use emotionally loaded words like “Heimat” a German concept that isn’t quite covered by its usual translation of “Homeland” – it’s a word evocative of home, roots, nature and tradition. The AfD uses it to present itself as a socially conservative party, one that promises to slow or even reverse change. 

This applies particularly to the contentious issue of migration. The AfD’s “remigration” plan promises to deport illegal migrants immediately. The party argues in its programme for the Brandenburg parliamentary election that “mass migration is a massive concern for the citizens of Brandenburg.” 

I ask a Schenkendöberner how she feels about immigration since there are almost no foreigners in her community. “It’s not a problem here yet because we’re not a city,” she says and asks me not to publish her name, “but have you been to Cottbus? It’s unrecognisable from the city it was ten years ago. If I lived there, I wouldn’t let my daughter go anywhere. I don’t want to live like this here.” She didn’t want to say if she’ll vote AfD in the upcoming elections.

That is perhaps the most remarkable aspect of my stay in Schenkendöbern. Well over every third person I meet must have voted for the AfD in the last election, yet not a single person says so, and there is no local AfD candidate. When the party did stand for the previous legislature, they gained two of the sixteen seats but were only able to fill only one of them due to lack of personnel. The AfD councillor Jan Plessow only sat in local government for one term. Why didn’t he run again?

Curious, I contact Plessow who, incidentally, is not a fireman. He runs a business that reintroduced the ecological farming of traditional millet cereals. His organic produce was sold all over Germany until a shop in Leipzig realised that Plessow was an AfD councillor in Schenkendöbern. The owner launched a campaign and one business partner after another took Plessow’s products from their shelves. The case made it into the pages of national newspapers which debated whether it’s okay to boycott products for political reasons.

“I’m not surprised that nobody admitted to voting for the AfD,” Plessow tells me. “Just look at what happened to me, nobody wants that for themselves or their family.” He is no longer an AfD member today but still sympathises largely with the programme of the party. He too talks a lot about things that he feels have changed for the worse, particularly regarding immigration. “There is nothing extremist about feeling you lose your Heimat,” he insists, adding “I fear for my country.”

There it was again: fear. In Schenkendöbern, I get the feeling that the sense fear is palpable even if most people wouldn’t express it in such stark terms. But it isn’t just the AfD that addresses these fears. Many people at all levels try to listen to and reassure people with practical solutions rather than just polemic. Dietmar Woidke, the incumbent minister president of the state of Brandenburg, is currently travelling through his state tirelessly, speaking to as many people as possible. He’s an exceptionally popular figure here despite being from the SPD, which has slipped into third place in the polls at the federal level. 

A tall man, who was born in East Germany and studied agriculture, Woidke has earned the respect of many otherwise disaffected Schenkendöberners because he “knows his stuff,” as one farmer told me. “He is not afraid to come here and speak to us,” one of the ladies at the pensioner event lauded. One man tells me he normally votes “further to the right”, but will vote SPD again on 22 September because “I want Woidke”. Politicians who listen to people’s fears rather than condemn or ridicule them still have the potential to cut through communities that feel left behind by the political mainstream.

Schenkendöberns’ many clubs and associations also tell the story of people who care deeply about their Heimat and want to help make it the best place it can be rather than let anger win. I barely meet anyone who isn’t engaged in doing something in their spare time that benefits others. 

The fire brigade is the social glue that holds it all together, and I am not surprised Schenkendöbern has a firefighter for a mayor. Despite having no political background – Homeister worked in bus maintenance before taking office – people trust him. He seems indefatigable, rushing around his villages to secure investments, solve problems and find compromises to navigate the many conflicts that arise.

It’s possible, even probable, that some of his fellow firefighters are AfD voters, but the fire brigade isn’t about stoking fear. If anything, it seeks to quell it by providing a sense of belonging and rootedness that many here crave. It’s one of the few surviving social institutions in Schenkendöbern and provides an anchor of stability as the world around it changes at a bewildering speed. 

As I’m about to end my stay in Schenkendöbern, I meet the mayor one last time. Shaking my hand, Ralph Homeister smiles and says “I know you came here in search of the AfD. I hope you found much more.” Yes, I think I did. I found anger, fear and frustration, but I also found courage, engagement and positivity.

As I left Brandenburg again, it was with both concern and hope in my heart for a region I once called home.