FCK NZS: How noble protestors "against the right" assembled yesterday evening at the Dresden Altmarkt to shout about Alternative für Deutschland and finally defeat the Nazis

In which eugyppius attends dumb government-backed demonstrations AgAInST FasCIsM so you don't have to.

Yesterday I finally went to one of these unceasing ritual protests “against the right.” I’ve been planning to do this for a while, and the time had finally come. I donned a sensible cap and a wool overcoat in an effort to look the part of a random sympathetic leftist academic, and set off into the night.

The demonstration was announced for the Dresden Altmarkt at 7pm, and as I rode the tram from leafy bourgeois Kleinzschachwitz, it slowly filled with activists – mainly university girls with token Antifa pins on their stylish jackets. A few carried lazy scraps of cardboard onto which they had scrawled things like “FCK AFD,” and many had reluctant boyfriends in tow. Authorities had closed all traffic to the centre, so we disembarked at Pirnaischer Platz and walked the last 500 metres. Along the way I saw a lot of riot police, chatting and chewing gum. I passed a band of transgender drummers dressed all in pink and one LGBTQIA+ contingent after the other, all with the obligatory septum piercings. The men were smoking and drinking beer, the women were taking selfies and tweeting, all while leftist anthems blared from loudspeakers. Antifa flags and weathered anti-Nazi placards recycled from the big counter-demonstrations “against the right” on Sunday waved over the square.

This was not just any protest. Yesterday was 13 February, the 79th anniversary of the joint British-American air raid on Dresden in 1945. As everybody knows, the bombs set off a firestorm that destroyed much of the centre and in the official tally claimed 25,000 lives. This has made 13 February both a solemn holiday for the city and an occasion for perennial controversy. “Right-wing extremists” generally organise a “funeral march” to commemorate the victims of the bombing, while municipal officials attend a memorial event before the city hall, which culminates in participants forming a “human chain” in a strange ritual to defend “human rights.”

My protest was organised by an Antifa front group called “Dresden Wi(e)dersetzen,” who demand “abolishing the marches of the old and the new Nazis in Dresden.” Translated from Antifa, this means that the “old Nazis” who conduct the “funeral march” are no different from the “new Nazis” of the “human chain”:

“Both convey the same victimisation story about Dresden,” says [Dresden Wi(e)dersetzen spokeswoman Anne] Herpertz … “The city’s commemoration is not anti-fascist, it is not part of a progressive culture of remembrance that takes responsibility … The focus of remembrance politics should … be on the victims of National Socialism: Jews, anti-fascists and all others persecuted and murdered by the Nazi regime.”

The human chain defended liberal rights and freedoms for ten minutes, starting at 6pm. Thereafter, organisers invited the links of their chain to stick around and “positively occupy” city squares. Our good liberals, in other words, having finished their extremely correct commemoration of bombing victims and taken a stance against the “instrumentalisation” of 13 February “by the right,” were then told to join the “Dresden Wi(e)dersetzen” demonstration, whose organisers had smeared them in the press as “new Nazis” just five days previously. You might be thinking that this is all very stupid, and you would be right. Towering unbelievable stupidity was the order of the night.

All protests are the sum of their participants. Right-coded demonstrations tend to be very uniform, but leftist actions are a crazy mix of all the different constituencies that participate in the Great Rainbow Coalition. This lends them a mercurial personality that changes from moment to moment as the balance of demonstrators shifts. I already mentioned the university girls, their reluctant boyfriends and the LGBTQers. To them came a vast array of different groups – the white-vested Omas gegen Rechts (“Grandmothers against the Right”), the middle-aged human chainers from the City Hall and even a few families with young children. But as the night dragged on and the music got louder, black bloc Antifa took over.

In the beginning, the focal point was a small makeshift stage established on the back of a truck on the south side of the Altmarkt. It was covered in two banners, the one on the right bearing some unknowable message in graffiti script, the one on the left screaming “FCK NZS.”

Image source: my own pictures were not clear enough to publish.

The organisers asked us to thank this group, to thank that group, to thank all the different party apron organisations that had sent people and money to our demo. This took a while. Then the organisers told us we were all really great people for showing up and so we should also take the opportunity to thank ourselves, which at least in the family-friendly phase of this protest seemed to be the main point of being there. They said that because the Nazis and the fascists and the AfD are evil revisionists peddling lies, it was necessary to recite “facts” about the history of National Socialism and the Dresden bombing. This recital went on for a while, and beyond the tight ranks of Antifa around the FCK NZS truck, interest faded markedly. The university girls, the Omas gegen Rechts, the well-meaning human chainers all started to bleed away. I ended up standing next to a tall man who had a very insistent and robotic style of clapping every time the announcers deplored Nazis. I decided, for the purposes of cover, that it would be best to clap when he clapped, and the lingering uni girls behind me decided it would be best to clap when I clapped. Every time the organiser denounced Nazis, we all clapped together, and in this way we defeated fascism.

When the history lecture ended our leaders lost sight of the AfD for a moment. Some woman started speaking about how bad the social democrats are. She was especially pissed off about Olaf Scholz’s remarks last autumn that Germany should begin deportations “on a mass scale.” This kind of pandering to the populist right is nothing short of fascism! They are basically Nazis in the SPD! Now the Antifa chants started to take over. “Siamo tutti antifascisti!” rang out over the square, and some people behind me started hopping for some reason. “Siamo tutti antifascisti!” I had to chant too to maintain my cover, and the tall robotic clapping man eyed me with approval.

Next to speak was an immigrant with a heavy accent who denounced as “inhumane” government plans to supply asylum seekers not with cash but with payment cards. There ensued a period of English chanting that all refugees are welcome in Germany, but this rapidly devolved once again into the usual Italian Antifa slogans. It was nearing 8pm and there just weren’t enough normal people left to make the action about anything but Nazis and Antifa. We had a musical interlude, which featured an interminable song about how we need to shoot all Nazis. Whether these were the old Nazis of the “funeral march” or the new Nazis of the human chain or the even newer Nazi sympathisers in the SPD was never clarified. “Nazis belong in the ground!” shouted the robotic clapping man. “Nazis belong in the ground!”

After this, an organiser delivered the terrible news that police were detaining some of our fellow demonstrators. He was very upset about this and he started screaming about the injustice of it all. We were all playing by the rules and still we had to face this official repression. As he talked he got more deranged, and so I went to investigate, but the police on the edge of the Altmarkt were just standing there as before, looking slightly bemused. The screamer’s voice cracked, he was on the verge of tears. He apologised for getting emotional, but the authorities had to understand that this needed to be a “safe space” for antifascism. Playing always and in the very same moment the victim, the aggressor and the saviour is the very essence of Antifa.

Immediately after this came the next twist: There was an urgent medical emergency at the FCK NZS truck! They desperately needed a medic! Any and all people with any medical training were called to render aid! Please, doctors, anybody! We all just stood there; any doctors who might’ve been in attendance had long since left. Eventually some medics did climb out of an ambulance at the edge of the square, but they appeared to be attending to some other uninvolved party. The organiser picked up the microphone again. They urgently needed water! A bottle of water! Preferably still! If possible unopened! Please, anybody with water! Robotic clapping man, who was in the middle of rolling a cigarette, marched forth to deliver a bottle of this precious life-saving water.

Around this time a second stage arrived, in the form of an even larger truck. I have no photos; the protest had turned slightly aggressive and it seemed a bad idea to pull out my phone. They turned down the music because the ambulance crew had asked for quiet. Two Antifa guys helped an Antifa girl with robot clapping man’s water all over her face out of the square, and shortly after the organisers announced that the FCK NZS medical emergency had been resolved. What a relief.

We were all thanked for showing such remarkable solidarity, and then the next drama began. It was at this point I realised the whole night would be like this – one fake emergency after the other. This time, it was the evil AfD. They were sending counterprotestors! We were under siege! Happily, “very solid antifascists” had been dispatched to defend all entrances to the Altmarkt! They had formed their own human chain! The square was ours! We would never surrender it! The Antifa chanting started again, an incantation to keep the AfD at bay. “Alerta, alerta, antifascista!” “Alerta, alerta, antifascista!”

Except, we were plainly not under siege. Anybody could freely enter or leave the Altmarkt. As if to emphasise this point, a puzzled crowd of Korean tourists happened by, pausing slack-jawed to take in the spectacle. Nor could I find a single even remotely plausible AfD protestor anywhere. I did, however, finally locate the “very solid antifascists” who were defending us from the phantom Nazis. They had formed a battle line in front of a barricade at the southeast corner of the Altmarkt, which the police were also defending. Why we had to deploy our “very solid antifascists” to stop people from going where the police also did not want them to go was never explained.

This area, near the Kreuzkirche, soon became the site of an unofficial and technically illegal (because unregistered) secondary Antifa protest. The organisers urged us to support our comrades in their act of defiance. The pink transgender drummers decamped to this new spectacle and I took up position behind them, where I encountered a squadron of four or five extremely friendly “police communicators.” I thought they were going to tell us to leave, but in fact they had no problems at all with our illegal demonstration and wished us a good night.

A round short girl with crazy eyes held up a sign that said “Nazis secretly eat falafel.” She had a very loud whistle that she tried to blow in rhythm with the transgender drummers. More and more Antifa poured in. There began a new round of shouting: “Nazis out! Nazis out!” The target turned out to be a few well-dressed Germans who looked to be fresh from dinner somewhere and simply had the misfortune to wander by. “Nazis out! Nazis out!” One of the women was wearing a blue scarf, which was perhaps mistaken as a sign of AfD allegiance. “Nazis out! Nazis out!” The poor woman broke into a half jog and disappeared around the corner. Then a white van arrived with loudspeakers blaring heavy bass music. “Down with the state!” Things got so loud I could no longer hear even the drumming transgenders, so to preserve my hearing I made like a Nazi and got the hell out of there.

My retreat brought me back to the square just in time for the next fake drama. Our Antifa brethren had established a second illegal protest in front of the McDonald’s on the northeast corner of the Altmarkt, and they were facing incredible police brutality. Please, show yourselves at the McDonald’s! Show solidarity with Antifa! Everybody started streaming in the opposite direction, in a big half circle around the barricades from the Kreuzkirche to the fast food temple. I followed them, and indeed I found a large crowd of Antifa at the McDonald’s, but the police were nowhere in sight. Inside the restaurant a bunch of teenage girls were eating and watching TikTok on their phones. One of them finally finished her fries and came outside to join the revolution.

At this point it was after 9pm, and I’d had enough. I went to find a tram at Pirnaischer Platz. Some older human chain stragglers were there, looking baffled and a little deflated, studying timetables to find the best way to get home. A few Antifa trickled onto the platform, their inebriation having finally exceeded their heroic opposition to National Socialism. In the background you could hear their McDonald’s comrades, still shouting about killing Nazis.

I returned to the Altmarkt this morning. There I found some city employees in orange vests sweeping up cigarette butts and plastic bottles. It smelled faintly of urine, but otherwise few traces remained of our battle against the forces of evil. It was a total victory for all that is right and good, diminished in no way by the inconvenient fact that the enemy never once presented himself.

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Never have Nazis been in such great demand and such short supply. The much reviled right-wing “funeral march” happened on Sunday, 11 February; press reports credit it with 1,000 participants, a great many of them from out of town. Antifa counter-demonstrators outnumbered these “extremists” at least five to one.

Among the few organic, unofficial memorial gatherings yesterday was one announced by a local Covid protestor named Marcus Fuchs, on the Neumarkt in front of the Frauenkirche. About two dozen people showed up. Fuchs appeared genuinely touched and called it “a great showing.”

He placed a wreath on the pedestal of the Martin Luther statue, and then introduced a woman who read quietly from an eye-witness account of the events on 13 February 1945. Someone hung up a sign demanding peace and a cessation of weapons shipments to Ukraine, while tourists streamed by with click-clacking suitcases.

In the Altmarkt, hours ahead of the protest I attended, a steady stream of ageing Dresdners left flowers and candles at the spot where the bodies of almost 7,000 bombing victims – overwhelmingly women and children – were burned on 15 February 1945.

Since 2008, the site is the entrance to an underground parking garage. It used to carry an inscription commemorating the mass cremation, but municipal authorities quietly removed it, claiming that it merely attracted vandalism. After offended residents tried to restore the memorial, demonstrators from one of these earlier protests “against the right” tore down their efforts. As you can see from my photo, Dresdners have replaced the inscription yet again. They are quieter than Antifa, but in some ways more persistent.

Unlike the activists of Dresden Wi(e)dersetzen, the Germans who stopped by the parking garage entrance had old and worn clothes, they spoke in heavy Saxon accents, and their median age was about 65. These are the “Nazis” that Antifa want to put in the ground – people of my parents’ generation who grew up in the DDR, and whose cards and ribbons call for peace and denounce National Socialist crimes. A great many of them surely marched against the communists in 1989, with heady dreams of joining the liberal West. The SED called them fascists for their efforts back then, and now they get to be called fascists again, this time by the activist paramilitary arm of their own ostensibly liberal government. What a cruel joke this must seem to them.