The Right-Wing Organic Farmers of Germany

As the afternoon sun slanted into the farmhouse at the edge of the forest in this idyllic rural corner of northeast Germany, Helmut Ernst poured two glasses of cloudy apple juice and started talking. The forty-five-year-old organic corn farmer and sometime activist is against genetically-engineered crops, industrial soy farms in South America, and imported butter’s carbon footprint. Petite, blue-eyed, and engaging, Ernst does not belong to the Green Party. Rather, he says that he is a former member of the National Democratic Party (N.P.D.), which, for most Germans, is pretty much the same as announcing that you are a virulent neo-Nazi. Ernst said that he left the N.P.D. because “too many people were nostalgic for National Socialism,” but that many elements of the ultra-right political platform (drastically reducing immigration, cutting off Israel) still appeal to him. “I am not a Nazi,” he said. “But ask your Native Americans what they think of multiculturalism.”

Every fifth German buys organically-grown foods on a regular basis. Most simply assume that their pesticide-free carrots and still-dirty locally-grown potatoes come from ideologically progressive left-leaning farms. But “Brown Environmentalists,” a book published a year ago by the Heinrich Böll Stiftung, the Green Party’s political foundation, highlighted another phenomenon: right-wing extremists championing environmental causes and engaging in organic farming, particularly in the depopulated, rural former east. “What we’re seeing is a stable right-wing movement in Eastern Germany,” said Hubertus Buchstein, who is a political science professor at the University of Greifswald and one of the book’s authors. “Some of them have started organic farming—it seems to fit the right wing. Now, instead of being militant, a new strategy is to live in the country and sell organic apples. Some are vegan, very strict.”

As the Böll foundation’s book points out, environmentalism in Germany—an issue that today, while mainstream, is still strongly identified with the left—has deep right-wing roots. Late nineteenth-century “blood and soil” narratives celebrated a racist, often anti-Semitic and socially-Darwinistic picture of the German countryside. The Nazis, who adopted the “blood and soil” idea, were proponents of a quasi-mystical connection between the land and ethnic identity. “Today, neo-Nazis still like to point out that Hitler’s environmental protection laws stayed on the books until the 1970s,” writes the journalist Toralf Staud in “Brown Environmentalists.” Even the Green Party had an extreme right-wing contingent at its founding in 1980 (the left prevailed, and the party thrived). Counterintuitive as it may be, the extremists’ glossy environmental magazine Umwelt & Aktiv (“Environment & Active”), which slips xenophobic tracts on Islamic religious practices in along with articles about harmful pesticides, is not historically inaccurate with its slogan, “Environmental Protection Isn’t Green.”

In a country of “organic mamas” that is also deeply sensitive to any signs of a re-ascendency of the ideas of “the man with the mustache” (as one organic farmer referred to Hitler), the story has caught on. In the year since “Brown Environmentalists” came out, it’s been picked up by most major German papers (“Idyll in Green-Brown”; “What Color is Organic?”). The number of actual right-wing organic farmers, however, appears to be quite small. “For the most part, the organic-farming movement comes out of a progressive, leftist movement, not a conservative one,” said Alexander Gerber, the head of BÖLW, the German league of organic food producers. “The ‘blood and soil’ idea is in no way dominant. It’s just a few cases.” Just to be clear, though, this summer BÖLW issued a resolution stating that organic farming stands for “a respectful relationship with nature, animals and people,” and is in no way compatible with ideologies that are “contemptuous of humanity.”

Günther Hoffmann, a sanguine outdoorsman with stained teeth, gray hair to his shoulders, and a big Eurasian dog, is an expert on right-wing extremism; recently, he served as a consultant to a large organic label looking to draft a similar “no neo-Nazis” addendum. We met at noon in a cozy, rundown, G.D.R.-time-capsule of a tavern in the tiny town of Bugewitz, about an hour from the Polish border. “These [organic] organizations are in the process of self-examination, of asking themselves, ‘what are our values?’” said Hoffmann, whose German is inflected with French terms like degoutant, the word he applies, with feeling, to the N.P.D. In certain realms, the distinction between left and right can be murky: “At a place like Demeter”—an international organic label, whose certification standards are based on Rudolf Steiner’s teachings—“with its anthroposophic philosophy, an esoteric strain of Nazi thought can find a place, without calling attention to itself,” he said. “They had this problem, and they hadn’t noticed it.”

Still, the Böll report notwithstanding, neo-Nazi organic farmers are a marginal phenomena, stressed Hoffmann. “You have to understand, it’s a very small part of a bigger picture.” A recent study found that nearly sixteen per cent of people living in the former East Germany hold extreme right-wing attitudes; this heterogeneous group includes well-organized, aggressive young men, barflies, lawyers, women, volunteer firemen, and the sect-like back-to-the-land colonies of right-wing families, some of them second and third generation Nazis, whose women wear ankle-length skirts and whose affinity for Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, with its gently rolling fields and hauntingly beautiful lakes, has earned the region a reputation in recent years as a “Tuscany for neo-Nazis.” Indeed, when Hoffmann moved here with his family shortly after the Wall fell, he wasn’t expecting to become an expert on the right-wing scene. Originally from Munich, he had simply fallen in love with the area’s moody, romantic landscape. Then a high-ranking right-wing extremist moved in down the road.

The N.P.D., which only gets about one and a half per cent of the vote in the country as a whole, has done well in the east: with between five and six per cent of the vote, they now have seats in the state legislatures in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Saxony. One softer tactic they employ is acting as “helpers,” assisting with unemployment bureaucracy, organizing kids’ parties, and taking old people to the doctor (a strategy known as “the nice Nazi from next door”). Another is to champion popular environmental causes, often with xenophobic undertones: they are against “nuclear death from Poland,” genetically-altered crops made by American companies, and giant pig farms. Hoffmann’s phone rang: an official announcement had been made that some of the funding for an N.S.U. terror cell had come from this area; he would be available later that day to for media comments. He hung up, rubbed his eyes and rolled a cigarette. “Buying an apple once in a while from Mr. Ernst,” he said, “it’s not the same as putting up a swastika.”

Original Article
Source: new yorker
Author: Sally McGrane