In the wake of the refugee crisis since 2014, populism, nationalism, and right-wing extremism have surged in Germany. Protagonists within this discourse frequently invoke Native American imagery for their nativist and xenophobic arguments. I have discussed aspects of their ideas and claims in earlier posts and linked them to the nationalist and Nazi ideologies of the early twentieth century:
The latest example of cross-cultural references to Indigenous peoples in German nationalism came up when I read about a ruling at the Federal Administrative Court (Bundesverwaltungsgericht). The issue concerned one of the so-called Reichsbürger (Reich Citizen) groups, a movement that does not acknowledge the Federal Republic of Germany as legitimate, arguing that the German Reich, as far as international law is concerned, never ceased to exist. They refuse to pay taxes and fines and have been known to physically attack representatives of the state, such as police, court officers, and civil servants. See this informative article in The Guardian for more details on the Reichsbürger, especially on incidents involving guns and violence in 2016.
This week, the FAC in Leipzig issued a statement that it did not acknowledge the legitimacy of a particular Reichsbürger group. The problem is that German courts had a thumb rule of never engaging in any dispute with Reichsbürger over their interpretation of the law, never accepting their phony documents, nor addressing them with their self-proclaimed titles. The FAC, apparently, had addressed one such group by their own title which they then had interpreted as the court’s acknowledgment of their legitimacy as an independent state. In a public statement yesterday, the court made clear that their address, in fact, did not acknowledge the group’s legitimacy (see this article in German in Legal Tribune Online for more).
Where is the connection to Native Americans in all this? The Reichsbürger group had proclaimed itself as the “indigene Volk Germaniten” (the Indigenous people of the Germanites), calling their state “Germanitien” (something like “Germanitia” in German). The court had apparently addressed them as “the Indigenous people of the Germanites” in their correspondence.
I have found one of their documents online, an “accreditation certificate” for a member of the diplomatic corps of “Germanitia” in which they describe their group as a “free church,” a “human rights organization,” but also as the representatives of the “constitutive Indigenous people of the Germanites” who claim the right to constitute a sovereign “interim” state independent from the laws of what they see as the illegitimate state of the Federal Republic of Germany.
I could not yet verify if this particular group, or others within this movement of conspiracy theorists, are particularly invested in ideas of German Indianthusiasm or if they make direct historical comparison to Native Americans, but I find it remarkable that their argumentation follows the old nationalist idea of Germans as an Indigenous people. Their bizarre notions of international law employ both blood-and-soil ideology, as well as a vague notion of modern Indigenous sovereignty/human rights claims.
frankusbeck 