When ingesting my weekly dose of Instagram, I regularly feel a rush of relief that my every teenage move, thought, hairstyle and wardrobe choice was not recorded for posterity. Some Jugendsünden (juvenile sins), however, do catch up with the pre-social media generation. The latest example: Hubert Aiwanger, minister of economics, deputy PM of Bavaria and chairman of the conservative Freie Wähler (free voters) which polls around 12% has formed a coalition with the CSU, the southern sister party of Germany’s Christian Democrats.
Last week, Aiwanger was confronted with a particularly disgusting bit of teenage delinquency. It involves a sickening pamphlet from 1987 which contained a “National Competition for the Biggest Traitor to the Fatherland”. Since the scandal broke, the leaflet has appeared on the front pages of newspapers and online.
A few quotes stand out for being especially disgusting: as “first prize”, the competition offers a “free flight through the chimney of Auschwitz”. Other prizes offer a “lifelong stay in a mass grave”, “a free neck shot” and a “night’s stay in the Gestapo cellar, then off to Dachau”.
The leaflets had been distributed at Aiwanger’s secondary school and at least one of them had been found in his school bag. Aiwanger, then 15 or 16 years old, was reprimanded and now vehemently denies authorship. But somehow he missed crisis-communication-101, and clumsily talked about a smear campaign and witch hunt against him. Luckily for him, his older brother Helmut, an arms shop owner in a hamlet between Munich and Nuremberg, claims to have written the leaflet. His explanation: At the time he hated his school for making him repeat a year. Today he says he is hugely embarrassed about its contents.
Hubert stresses that he isn’t an antisemite, never has been and as for imitating Hitler and giving the Nazi salute several times upon entering the classroom – which school mates confirm that he did – he can’t remember that.
Public opinion is divided: many feel there should be a statute of limitations for youthful idiocy. The former chairman of the ruling SPD, Sigmar Gabriel, tweeted: “Why should young neo-Nazis leave the right-wing extremist scene when they see, through the example of Hubert Aiwanger, that 35 years later one is still publicly denounced for the madness of youth?”
Those who think otherwise – mainly the Greens and SPD politicians who call for Aiwanger’s dismissal from the cabinet of Bavaria – face criticism for double standards. Many of their own rank and file used to support Mao, the communist grand-master, and what’s more they did so well into adulthood. Others actively supported the Baader-Meinhof terrorist group.
Early this century, the then-foreign minister Joschka Fischer had to show remorse when confronted with 1970s photos that showed him beating up a policeman. And only a few years ago the newly elected chairwoman of the Green Party Youth, Sarah Lee Heinrich, had to explain her tweets about “faggots”, “retards”, “Heil”, “sweeping all white people out of Africa” and murderous fantasies like “I will find you, spit on you, hang you, poke you with a knife and make you bleed.” She was 13 and 14 at the time, and after her apology (“I was into battle rap”) and some fortunate amnesia, she went on with her political career as if nothing had happened.
Chancellor Olaf Scholz also has interesting ideological roots – he belonged to the Marxist stamocap wing (state monopoly capitalism) of the socialist SPD youth. Back then he ranted about an aggressive imperialist Nato, the US arms industry as the true enemy of peace and about Germany, the European stronghold of big business. Young (but very much adult) Olaf was invited to the East German youth organisation FDJ and even met operative Egon Krenz (the man who couldn’t save the GDR, much as he tried). But unlike Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn, Scholz eventually digressed to a version of common sense.
In the case of 52-year-old Hubert Aiwanger, nothing in his political career suggests an affinity to extremist or antisemitic ideas, but he certainly is a beer-tent populist (“the big silent majority has to win back democracy”). In the current climate, five weeks before the Bavarian state elections, neither he nor his party have seen their poll ratings drop. It seems that to some, the relentlessness of their political opponents and their media affiliates is more off-putting than a vile leaflet from the 1980s. Maybe a lesson for political debate.
