Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere (31 page)

But on 30 January, Adolf Hitler was appointed Germany's chancellor. The first performances of
The Silver Lake
were disrupted by Nazi activists in the audience, and on 4 March 1933 it was banned. The score was torched, together with the set designs, in an infamous book-burning ceremony outside the opera house in Berlin.

It is easy to see why the Nazis didn't like
The Silver Lake.
Weill being Jewish, their theatre critics found the music ‘ugly and sick'. Moreover the plot contains an allegory of the political situation on the eve of the Nazis' rise to power. But there is something else about
The Silver Lake
that goes beyond politics. Something hard to fathom. Spending time in Greece, as the far-right Golden Dawn Party was breaking up theatre performances with impunity, and street violence was rife, I finally understood what that something is.

The Silver Lake
is ultimately about how people feel when they switch from resistance to hopelessness, and about how strangely liberating hopelessness can be.

Greece right now is a place with a lot of hopelessness. Its own prime minister, Antonis Samaras, has compared the current climate to that of the late Weimar Republic. ‘Greek democracy stands before what is perhaps its greatest challenge,' Samaras told the German newspaper
Handelsblatt.
He said social cohesion is ‘endangered by rising unemployment, just as it was toward the end of the Weimar Republic in Germany'.

The comparison seems plausible on several fronts. There are far-right gangs meting out violence on the streets (a report in October 2012 identified more than half of all officially recorded racial attacks as perpetrated by people in paramilitary uniform). Every demonstration ends with tear gas and baton charges. There is mass unemployment. There is the collapse of mainstream parties. The press and broadcast media are struggling to remain independent, indeed solvent.

Yet the comparison with the ‘end of Weimar' only holds if you know nothing about the Weimar Republic itself. Sadly, this condition is common. School students are rightly taught a great deal about Nazi Germany, but not very much about how it came into being.

In the elections of 1928, the Nazis, who had—like Golden Dawn in Greece—been reduced to a splinter group in the years of economic recovery, got just 2.7 per cent of the vote. But in March 1930, as the Wall Street Crash cratered the German economy, a cross-party coalition government of the centre-left and -right collapsed. It was replaced by the first of three ‘appointed' governments, led by Hein-rich Brüning and designed to prevent either the communists or the now-growing Nazis gaining power. Faced with a recession, Brüning followed a policy of austerity while keeping Germany's currency pegged to the Gold Standard (much as Greece as follows a policy of austerity dictated by euro membership). This made the recession worse.

As unemployment rocketed, so did the Nazi vote: in a shock breakthrough they came second in the elections of September 1930, with 18 per cent. But Brüning was determined to maintain order: he cracked down on both the right and left, banning the Nazi paramilitary organization, the
sturmabteilung,
along with the rival communist uniformed groups.

As recession worsened, the Nazis grew massively: they came first in the election in 1932, gaining 14 million votes (37 per cent). Although the socialists and communists combined polled higher, while the parties of the centre collapsed, the presidential system of appointing governments nevertheless allowed the remnants of conservatism to go on ruling Germany—now under a new Chancellor, the aristocrat Franz von Papen. Von Papen unbanned the Nazi stormtroopers in June 1932 and, as street clashes escalated, a low-level civil war took off.

By the end of 1932, with the communists now also growing rapidly, the political establishment made one final attempt to pre-empt the move to outright fascist rule—by appointing a right-wing militarist, Kurt von Schleicher, and further constraining democracy. Schleicher had written:

I am really glad that there is a counterweight [to the Social Democrats] in the form of the Nazis, who are not very decent chaps either and must be stomached with the greatest caution. If they did not exist, we should virtually have to invent them.
¹

Schleicher was appointed Chancellor, and tried to form a government with the support of everybody from the left wing of the Nazis to the Christian trades unions. But this too failed, opening the door to Hitler. The historian Ian Kershaw has written of this fiasco:

Only crass errors by the country's rulers could open up a path [for Hitler]. And only a blatant disregard by Germany's power elites for safeguarding democracy—in fact, the hope that economic crisis could be used as a vehicle to bring about democracy's demise and replace it by a form of authoritarianism—could induce such errors. Precisely this is what happened.
²

The names of Brüning, von Papen and Schleicher, troublesome though they are to remember, should be as famous as the words Stalingrad, Arnhem and Dunkirk. These were the men who tried and failed to use a mixture of economic austerity, authoritarianism and what we might now call ‘technocratic' rule to avoid an outright fascist takeover. They thought the Nazis were malleable tools in the continued rule of the old elite, and they played to the gallery of Nazi populism on race and nation.

And therein lies the parallel with Greece: a country committed to austerity, whose centrist parties are clustered into a coalition which represents all the remaining forces of conservatism and social democracy. The coalition, which sees itself as the last bulwark against a government of the far left, is trying to crack down on ‘extremism' using a police force which has itself been criticized for extremist leanings.

But despite these parallels, at time of writing Greece was not on the brink of a Weimar-style collapse. Nor was it ‘in civil war' as claimed by Ilias Panagiotaros, the deputy leader of Golden Dawn, when I interviewed him for the BBC. If anything, Greece displayed—by the time of the passing of its third austerity memorandum in November 2012—levels of instability and political radicalization closer to the levels seen in Germany in early 1930, not late 1933. The problem was that Greece was approaching 1933 levels of
economic
collapse.

Unemployment was 30 per cent in Germany when Hitler took power; it was 25.1 per cent and rising in Greece in late 2012. GDP collapsed by about 7 per cent in both 1931 and 1932 in Germany. Its current rate of collapse in Greece is roughly the same: 7 per cent per year. Germany's banks had gone bust in 1931. Greek banks are effectively part nationalized already.

You can see the physical impact of this on Stadiou Street in Athens. There was an arcade where, in the summer of 2011, I remember blogging about how its small specialist businesses in Greece were doomed: the pen shop, the coin collecting shop, the stationery store. They're all gone now. So is much of the street itself. The Art Nouveau cinema was burned out last year; the Marfin Bank, next door, was torched with the death of three workers during a riot in 2010. On the walls somebody has spray-canned ‘Love or Nothing'. Right now there is a heck of a lot of nothing: shops closed, stripped, barred, graffitied, even the fascias chipped off as ammunition in riots.

And nowhere is the human impact of this weird situation clearer than when you talk to young people.

I met Yiannis and Maria in a bare flat in Exarcheia, the bohemian district of Athens. Despite their bruises and bandages they took some persuading to go on camera—anonymously and in their hoodies—to put on record their allegations of brutality in police custody. What struck me, beyond those allegations (denied by the police, but partially corroborated by a coroner's report), was their detachment from regular life. They expected the police to be brutal fascists. They were outraged that they'd had to listen, they said, to Golden Dawn propaganda in the police cells. But they were reluctant to bring a complaint within the system.

For tens of thousands of young people, life is already lived in a semi-underground way: squatting instead of renting; cadging food and roll-ups from their friends. Drifting back to their grandparents' villages, sofa surfing. Yiannis is a sporadically employed technician in a cultural industry; Maria a highly qualified professional who waits tables. The British author Laurie Penny captured the situation in a recent memoir of a trip to Athens: ‘We came expecting … riots; instead we found ourselves looking at what happens when the riots die away and the horrified inertia sets in.'
³

Horrified inertia is now seeping from the world of the semi-outlawed young activists into the lives of ordinary people. What people do—whether black-hooded anarchists in Athens, or young farmers in Thessaly on their third or fourth bottle of beer by lunchtime—is retreat into the personal. It's no longer ‘the personal is political', it's the personal instead of the political. True, demonstrators still turn out in large numbers, as in the October 2012 general strike. But they go through the motions—of demonstrating, of rioting even. ‘It's just for show on both sides, the cops and the anarchists,' I was told by my Greek fixer as we legged it through stampeding people and tear gas.

In 2011 the buzzword was ‘anomie': a listless rejection of the rule of law, with individuals beginning to make their own law, from lifting up the gates at road tolls to invading court hearings to disrupt house repossessions. There is not even much of that ‘anomie' activism anymore; the movement that defied road tolls in 2011 is tiny in 2012. If anything captures the buzz of late 2012 in Greece, it is the person who sprayed the slogan ‘Love or Nothing'. It's less about anomie, more about depression and fear. What has depressed and frightened much of Greek society—from the liberal centre-right to the liberal left—is the rapid rise of Golden Dawn.

In the two elections of May/June 2012 this party scored between 6–7 per cent. That is nothing like a 1930-style breakthrough. But once its MPs were in parliament, while austerity gnawed away at the fabric of society, its support leapt to 14 per cent. Then, like the Nazis in the critical years, it began a low-level battle for control of the streets. It began to do DIY law enforcement against migrants, with no intervention from the police. At street markets in Messolonghi and Rafina its uniformed activists checked the permits of migrant stallholders, demonstratively kicking over the wares of those who lacked the right document.

With electoral data showing—on one count—45 per cent of police personnel voting for Golden Dawn, there is rising concern that support for the far right has begun to skew the operational priorities of the police at the local level.

I met the party's second in command, Ilias Panagiotaros, in the back yard of the store he runs: a militaria shop, selling police uniforms to serving officers and Combat 18 t-shirts to football hooligans. In his opinion, ‘Greek society is ready—even though no-one likes this—to have a fight: a new type of civil war. On the one side there will be nationalists like us, and Greeks who want our country to be as it used to be, and on the other side illegal immigrants, anarchists and all those who have destroyed Athens several times. Golden Dawn is at war with the political system and those who represent it, with the domestic and international bankers, we are at war with these invaders—immigrants.'

Panagiotaros, one of eighteen fascist MPs, was clear as to the sequencing of the Greek denouement. It would not be like Weimar: it would begin with a left-wing government, and end with the rule of his own party: ‘If Syriza wins the next election, we will win the one after that. It is not a dream that within one, two or three years we will be the first political party.'

He claimed support within the police at ‘60 per cent or more'. And he gave a chilling explanation of how Golden Dawn's extra-judicial actions were affecting the rule of law. Referring to the market stall attacks, he said:

‘With one incident, which was on camera, the problem was solved—in every open market all over Greece illegal immigrants disappeared. There was some pushing and some fighting—nothing extraordinary, nothing special—only with one phone call saying Golden Dawn is going to pass by the police in going there, meaning the brand name [of Golden Dawn] is very effective …'

Greece has a massive and conspicuous problem with illegal migration. The centres of many cities are—or were, until the summer of 2012—full of young male migrants from Afghanistan, Somalia, Sudan and increasingly Syria. Many Greeks do fear them, and perceive them as a threat to social order and a traditional lifestyle. This is a country that never had any colonies, and therefore did not experience high ethnic diversity until recently.

The new policy, known as ‘Hospitable Zeus', is to round migrants up and put them in camps: police in plain clothes or uniforms visibly stopping every person of colour on the street, checking their papers, and if the papers are not in order processing them ultimately to a migrant detention camp. Even as human rights groups raise the alarm, demanding access to the camps, Golden Dawn has protested outside them on the grounds that conditions are too good there, and that deportations are not fast enough (about six thousand have been detained, with maybe three thousand deported). And even as the police round up the migrants, Golden Dawn's policy is to terrorize them off the streets, and mount a legal campaign against companies who employ them.

The Greek media, meanwhile, has taken its cue to reinforce the association of migrants with crime. For those seeking an alternative view there are only the newspapers of the far left, since the main liberal news-paper—
Eleftherotypia,
an equivalent to the
Guardian
—went bust and closed down.

Just after the June election I met a senior politician from New Democracy, the conservative party. When I asked what his party was going to do about Golden Dawn, the answer was: ‘Get an immigration policy. There hasn't been one. All this Golden Dawn stuff is the product of that.'