Ten years of PEGIDA: a reflection on “deutsche Zustände”

Ten years after the beginning of the PEGIDA protests in Dresden, the German far right is making one breakthrough after another in the electoral arena. The starting point for this reflection is the notion of deutsche Zustände (“German conditions”), which took on renewed relevance amid the emergence of PEGIDA: both in reference to Heitmayer’s studies on far-right attitudes in German society (Deutsche Zustände) and Marx’s famous notion that Germany lagged behind the flow of history with its lack of a bourgeois revolution (“Krieg den deutschen Zuständen!”). Indeed, in the context of the post-2010/11 global protest wave that saw the “movements of the squares” emerge around anti-austerity and/or democratizing demands, Germany presented a striking anomaly with large protest rallies of ordinary “concerned citizens” on public squares around a far-right, anti-egalitarian agenda. In reading the emergence of PEGIDA within this protest conjuncture, I argue that this seeming paradox of the “German condition” was born not least out of the failure of a square movement of the left in the form of the Blockupy protests in Frankfurt starting in 2012 and their reliance on the methods of the late 1990s alter-globalization protests in challenging the German-led Eurozone crisis management regime from within.