Arriving in Dresden, you might be forgiven for thinking that it's like any other German city.
Shiny, well-kept red and yellow trams thread through lines of
German-built cars (there's a luxury Volkswagen factory just outside the
city centre) down the clean, orderly streets.
Walking out of the main train station and into the shopping district
around Prager Strasse, you'll find kebab stands and people of different
ethnic backgrounds whisking by on foot and by bike.
But although the streets around the city centre were filled with people
on Monday, as any other day, there was still a thick pall of
expectation and nerves over the city ahead of the Pegida demonstration
planned for the evening.
Anxious people headed briskly to their destinations, looking around little and saying less.
Groups of heavy-set men who had made the trip from other cities to join the Pegida demo asked for directions.
“The atmosphere in Dresden is very tense,” Eric Hattke, a local student and spokesman for Dresden für alle
(Dresden for all), an alliance of over 100 civil society groups which
has pulled together grassroots efforts to help refugees, told The Local.
“There's a big sense of not knowing where to go, what to do about [the
political situation]. There's a sense in which things are deadlocked.”
"Here, for a long time, people were of the opinion that we were immune
from far-right extremism," Valentin Lippmann, a Saxony state parliament
representative and interior affairs spokesman for the Green Party, told
The Local,
"There was a lack of vigilance against far-right positions... conflicts
have built up to the point where they can no longer be resolved with
democratic means."
An apathetic city
According to Hattke, around 10 percent of Dresdeners – roughly the proportion that voted for the movement's candidate in mayoral elections earlier this year – can be counted as Pegida supporters.
With an equally-sized group aligned against them in the shape of
Dresden für alle and others, that leaves a good 80 percent of the city
who don't know what to think about the openly far-right movement that
has emerged in their town.
“People don't often go out on the street and call for something,” Hattke said. “They'd rather leave it up to someone else.”
"In Dresden, it's difficult to get a sufficient number of people out
onto the street and show a broad social majority," Lippmann agreed.
"There's a fear that all people who protest against the right must be far-left extremists, not serious democrats."
Conversations I had with people around the town confirmed Hattke's sketch of the situation.
For instance, Karsten, my Airbnb host and a cafe owner in the trendy,
largely left-wing Neustadt district, was happy to talk about Pegida and
asked exactly why I had come to the city.
But he himself had never crossed the river to the Altstadt to see what
was going on for himself, never mind join in a counter-demonstration,
and he was vague about his own political feelings.
Apart from a single pub in the Neustadt, there was little sign of anyone else mobilizing against Pegida.
Barricades, bangers and bellowing
Arriving at the Theaterplatz outside the city's Semperoper opera house
as the sun set, the police looked prepared to keep two factions from
descending into street warfare.
A blockade of vans left only a tiny gap, flanked by groups of
fully-armoured riot police, for Pegida demonstrators to enter the
square.
Some of the many TV crews present to cover the event had clearly
decided that it was too dangerous to be among the crowd – mindful of
attacks on journalists in past weeks - and set up their tripods at
vantage points outside the police line.
Others joined the gathering crowd of people around the bottleneck and
joked together nervously as they waited to be let through.
The Pegida crowd itself was made up of a few distinct groups.
A bloc of young men, many bearded and shaven-headed and wearing dark
clothing, clustered together under the yellow banners of the
Identitarian Movement, a far right youth movement.
Large numbers of those present appeared to be ordinary middle-aged
Germans wearing unremarkable clothing – not the much hyped “pinstripe
Nazis” of the early days of the movement, but not conspicuously
badly-off people either.
The most vocal among the crowd, regularly breaking out into chants of
“Widerstand” (resistance) or “Merkel muss weg” (Merkel must go) were
largely men in their 50s and 60s. Many of them were carrying a
bewildering array of flags – from the Saxon state banner, to the
Japanese national flag, via the Confederacy flag of the southern United
States.
Over the thousands-strong crowd, the messages hung from the windows on
the Semperoper facade and displayed on a large projection screen - “For a
Dresden open to the world”/”We won't be a backdrop to intolerance”
seemed far distant.
No violence, just hatred
Pegida founder Lutz Bachmann was greeted with enthusiastic applause as
he took the stage, his image projected onto an enormous display screen
behind him.
Pegida founder Lutz Bachmann takes the stage on October 19th, the one-year anniversary of the movement. Photo: DPA
He announced that he had “goosebumps” to be speaking at the one-year
anniversary of the movement he had launched, and reminded the crowd that
drinking and violence were not on the agenda for the evening.
A burst of exploding fireworks launched from the counter-protesters
outside gave him an opportunity to claim the moral high ground, as he
told the crowd police were protecting them from violent
counter-demonstrators.
And then, off we went.
Speaker after speaker trotted out a catalogue of the far-right hobby
horses that have become familiar across Europe, heard from parties
ranging from UKIP and the National Front in the UK and France to
Greece's Golden Dawn.
Refugees were not refugees at all but fakers coming to live high on the
hog at taxpayers' expense. Muslims were a fifth column planning to
implement both sharia and Marxism at once and subvert the culture and
values of European nations. Immigrants were raping white European women
by the thousand.
Speakers from Italy's Liga Nord, the Czech republic, Poland's own
Pegida offshoot and the English Defence League insisted that ordinary
people must resist cowardly mainstream politicians and defend themselves
against the foreign menace – all while insisting they were not racist
or xenophobic.
The crowd cheered especially wildly for the repeated salvoes against political incumbents like Merkel and her ministers.
They were “cowards” and “traitors”, one speaker from the Pegida organizing team introduced only as 'Horst' snarled.
“Traitors! Traitors!” thousands of people roared back.
'Shame concentration camps aren't in action'
Only one speaker, Akif Pirinçci, whose graphic descriptions of
immigrants' crimes and insistence that all political opponents must be
mentally handicapped grew too repulsive for anyone to bear, was booed
and whistled from the stage.
But that was long minutes after he had made his comment that “it's a
shame the concentration camps aren't up and running” - which had met
with applause and laughter.
The Pegida group, around 20,000 strong, had to make its way through a tiny corridor, squeezed between a line of police vans separating them from the counter-demo and the wall of the cathedral.
"Nazis out! Let us out!" one of the burly men next to me yelled, turning to laugh at his friends.
That's when I ducked away and stood next to the line of riot police protecting cameramen on the cathedral steps.
But given the reports tweeted earlier that a journalist for Ruptly (a part of Russia Today, the Kremlin-owned TV channel in fact beloved of many European far-right leaders) had been badly beaten by Pegida members, I had also been reluctant to take the chance.
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