Conclusion from Native American history according to German neo-Nazis: “We should have founded a National Indian Party.”

Since my first post on this topic in May, I have done a bit of research on Indian imagery in racist arguments regarding the current debate on immigration and the refugee crisis. I knew that neo-Nazis followed in the tradition of their grandfathers to co-victimize with Native Americans by placing the near-extermination of the buffalo and the massacres against Native Americans on the same level as the American bombing campaigns against German cities during World War II. I was not aware, though, that the old nationalist/Nazi notion of German Indigeneity was alive and well, too, that both conservatives and neo-Nazis use it for nationalist and racist statements, and that these statements are so widespread.

There are quite a few video clips with a message similar to the one on the Cherokee girl and the Green party leader Claudia Roth I described in Part I. I do not know who is behind the Cherokee/Roth video, nor their party affiliations, but the gist of the video matches many statements from the neo-Nazi party NPD (“National Democrats”). The Saxon NPD used a version of the slogan “The Indians couldn’t stop immigration, and now they live on reservations” on their program for the Saxon state elections some ten years ago.

Also, a Saxon historian in the NPD argued that “The ideologies of multiculturalism promote by all available means a massive land grab by people who are alien to our culture and race, which will turn us Germans into the Indians of the twenty-first century.” This notion reinforces the paranoid concept of Volkstod, the demise of peoplehood, which is supposedly brought on by miscegenation and the mixing of cultures. As discussed in Part I, in a völkisch reading, cultures are supposedly inherent elements of group identity determined by both blood ties and by the natural environment, and can thus neither be shared or learned, and don’t mix without conflict. So, the massive influx of immigrants, in this perspective, destroys German culture and, eventually, the German people.

At this point, I can’t help it, I must bring in one of my “favorite” Hitler quotes to exemplify this paranoia about the incompatibility of cultures. In his second book (only published as an annotated edition by the Institut für Zeitgeschichte in the 1960s), he stated:

“One cannot convey culture, which is a general expression of a particular people’s life, to any other people with completely different mental predispositions. This would, at best, be possible in a so-called international civilization, which, however, relates to culture like jazz music to a Beethoven symphony” (Hitlers Zweites Buch 166).

In this reading, then, jazz, as a representative of American (international) and, thus, alien civilization, threatened the integrity of German culture and German peoplehood already in the 1920s. Back to Indians and neo-Nazis, though.

In 2011, the Bremen chapter of the NPD published a short campaign ad for the parliament of the Bremen city state, the Bürgerschaft. In this, as in our Cherokee/Roth example, an animated film explains the history of American settlement, starting with the landing of the Mayflower. The video should convey its meaning to you even if you don’t speak German; the text lines are scarce and the images speak mostly for themselves.

It is the same story of naive Indians who help the first hungry and huddled immigrants but are pushed aside eventually because the numbers of aliens become overwhelming and because the immigrants turn out to be rowdyish invaders. In the end, the Indians are crammed onto some small patches of land, i.e., the reservations, that have “do not feed” signs posted at their borders. Now that it is too late, the Indians in this clip conclude: “We should have founded a national Indian party” (Wir hätten eine nationale Indianerpartei gründen sollen).

The scene now shifts to Africa and Asia, from where literal waves (better: blobs) of immigrants move to Germany: old German men in their lederhosen and bowler hats are pushed aside. At this point, the scared remaining Germans have a vision: an Indian family magically appears next to a NPD campaign poster on an advertising pillar reading “End this multicultural madness, Bremen stays in German hands!” (Multikulti-Wahn beenden, Bremen bleibt in deutschen Händen) The Indians say “yes, so you don’t end up like we did.” (Ja, damit es euch nicht so wie uns geht)

The clip is significant not only because of the hilarious notion of the NPD as the “National Indian Party” that caused great joy among liberals, but also it once more openly promotes racism and xenophobia as the only measure to protect both German culture and peoplehood.

In looking at these arguments, I wonder about the similarity of images and the absolute conflict of meanings if we compare them with immigration debates in the US. Consider this cartoon contextualizing Donald Trump’s recent remarks about Mexicans:

Found at: Memories of the People

I had heard similar jokes and seen similar posters and cartoons (“Who’s the illegal immigrant here, Pilgrim?!”) from American liberals and Native American activists who use them against American anti-immigrant conservatives. I always marvel at how easily reference to Native Americans can be used for both sides of the argument if you only change the setting and once you take into account the German tradition of imagining themselves as the Indians of Europe and, therefore, as soul mates of Native Americans.