School Reunion
What are my right-wing classmates from the 1990s up to today? A Biographical Experiment
Do you remember your classmates?
To be honest, I only remember those I antagonized. So, most of them. I went to grammar school in suburban Hamburg/Germany in the early 1990s when suddenly everything became political. It was a minefield. But first things first.
The school, unromantically named after the main street it was built on, had a clientele recruited from the ranks of professional-managerial dads and very few mums – doctors, lawyers, teachers, university professors, scientists. As kids, we were told we were “better off” than the poorer kids going to lesser schools, who could not afford Benetton sweaters, Chipie jeans, and Reeboks for the feet. We were a “musical” school where each kid played a classical instrument and was either in musical youth competitions, had joined a volleyball club, or took painting classes. Group pressure makes you do crazy things: I took viola lessons with a Russian dissident who in his heyday played with the Moscow Symphonic Orchestra and whose favourite composer, much to my chagrin, was Shostakovich.
I loved English as a school subject and read Emily Brontë. I also loved pop music, and when an older girl who stayed at our house introduced me to The Smiths’ The Queen is Dead album in 1990, my world was changed forever.
Around that time, too, politics entered my life. The Eastern bloc got dissolved. Ethnic and nationalist tensions in Yugoslavia, my scientist mother’s home country, built up. As though that alone wasn’t enough for a 14-year-old pathologically self-conscious wannabe rebel, there always was a dissident atmosphere at our house when I grew up. My mother, an outspoken Communist and former party member, married my German dad in 1973, at a time when Germany was probably at its historical best: Willy Brandt, the good conscience of the Left, was chancellor, people were largely tolerant, living the Fordist lifestyle, and all reactionary forces seemed at bay. This increasingly changed over the Schmidt, but then certainly over the Kohl reign when neoliberalism became the official ideology, and with it, a crude “we are back again!” – “wir sind wieder wer!” – nationalism. Mother wasn’t amused and perhaps rightfully saw the rise of a new normalization of nationalism with Kohl, a “pull” towards the right (Rechtsruck), a relativization of Germany’s totalitarian past (Vergangenheitsbewältigung), hordes of organized neo-Nazis burning down refugee homes and killing dozens of people, and a New World Order in which the US wanted to stabilize its ties with a reunified Germany and basically destroy what was left of the ex-Soviet Union, now Russia.
Germany’s reunification, made possible by Michail Gorbatchev who was for some reason revered by my Russophile parents and endlessly mourned after his political self-destruction, was the topic that led to several clashes between me and my classmates over the course of a few years. Maybe the fallout would not have been quite as harsh had I not found ways to antagonize everyone around me not only with my homebred political views, but also my more general styles and tastes. Musical taste was as important as political taste back then.
If you’re a Gen Xer, you know what I’m talking about.
I may have been a Smiths and Stone Roses fan in 1990, but my classmates certainly weren’t. Their liking was more to Dire Straits, Chris Rea and German rock singers like Marius Müller-Westernhagen, tenderly named “Marius”, whose songs were played in the assembly hall at full volume, leading to Hooliganesque scenes of football choirs among the students. I can’t count the times I rolled my eyes and mumbled some dismissive remarks whenever someone felt the need to put on Genesis’ “I Can’t Dance” at a party. In turn, there was no party at which I wasn’t told to “stay the fuck off the stereo”, what with my Babes in Toyland records in hand. Also, my style and clothes were a separate issue. My hair was cut short, and I put on what looked like Robert Smith's worn trousers and jumpers, sometimes exchanging it for a self-made tie dye shirt bearing “My Bloody Valentine” or some other obscure Brit pop band’s name on the front. Looking back, I was a normal weirdo, whereas everyone else was pathologically streamlined. A classroom filled with jeans jackets, polo shirts, and college shoes, a look that made me want to puke.
In “ethics” class, we discussed the fall of the Berlin Wall what felt like two hundred times. With a weird sentimental passion in their eyes, my classmates looked like they were on drugs. Though of course they were kids who said no to drugs and whose idea of fun was holding up a lighter to a German rock ballad. But we exchanged the arguments we heard our parents make at home: I said what my mum or dad said, they said what their respective mums and dads said. Coming from a Communist/old school Soc Dem family didn’t exactly make it easy among the Christian Democratic and Liberal dominant clan who were a high-resolution photo short of putting up a Helmut Kohl poster in the classroom. But they did bring the BILD Zeitung, the biggest selling German tabloid to school, Germany’s Daily Mirror if you will. I countered with my dad’s issues of “Vorwärts”, the Social Democrat party organ (my dad was a member of the SPD until the SPD/Green government decided to bomb Belgrade in 1999). When Germany’s Wiedervereinigung was discussed in class, I once remarked that it’d probably lead to extreme unemployment and poverty in the East, because my left-wing parents reasoned so at home (they were right, ultimately). I’d add that it wasn’t in the interest of world peace. I positively abhorred George Bush and his NWO crackpot bullshit and even went to the US consulate in early 1991 to join other, cooler people than my schoolmates, to protest the Iraq War. My classmates were in turn abhorred by me. The more streamlined girls or boys whose final destination would be bank accountant or state bureaucrat, turned away from me in shock and terror. But these were the relatively harmless ones – they would simply ignore me as I ignored them. More unsettling were the open neo-Nazi vibes I received from a few others. They included walking up to me close and breathing insults and threats into my face, writing “shut up, bitch, or we’ll get you!” into my schoolbooks, or simply putting on the Goebbels’s Sportpalast speech on full volume on the ghetto blaster during breaks. I also learned a few antisemitic jokes which were both objectively funny and non-reproducible. The teachers were either too scared to stand up to these bullies – never mind there were only three or four of them – or secretly sympathized with their views (I think it was the latter). In all, while the political orientation was generally conservative, (neo-) liberal mainstream PMC, there were a few actual Nazis. A factor certainly contributing to the right-wing attitude of the school was our insanely popular history teacher, Dr. Jürgen Mirow. He was the author of “The German Naval Battle in World War One” and spoke like a Freie Deutsche Jugend trainer preparing us for the track-and-field championships. Authoritarianism was very en vogue with my classmates then. It was strange, but Dr. Mirow did not hate me. He taught us the history of Marxism and was surprisingly impartial. Maybe I’m being sentimental, but because unlike anybody else in my class, I could tell Rosa Luxemburg’s writings apart from Karl Kautsky’s, he gave me a good grade.
All tensions nonwithstanding, back in the 1990s, the political divide was clear. The right-wing was nationalist, conservative in a backwards-kind-of-way, pro-War, economically neoliberal, racist, and antisemitic to the core. Make no mistake, they were pretty awful, and looked like shit, too. The left wasn’t more attractive per se, and there is an argument to be made for polo shirts and college shoes today, but we would talk about class and economic justice, unemployment, the contradictions in the capitalist mode of production and be generally class conscious, anti-War, and interested in helping disadvantaged people.
Fast forward 28 years and an authoritarian left-wing handling of a manufactured social crisis (the Covid pandemic) later. I’ve received an invitation to a class reunion from our Abitur (A-levels) class, the class of 1995. If I go, I’d be face to face with the 1990s Nazi front and seersucker shirt-wearing bureaucrats again, but also some of the harmless boys and girls who were never particularly political. My thoughts about school have been negative through the years, and during my musical career in the 2000s, I even recorded a couple of songs reflecting the suffocating, dead end atmosphere of my school days (among them the not very subtly titled “Never going back to school”)[1]. But hey. The times have become politically bizarre, to say the least, and sometimes you just must give in to curiosity. Going to the school reunion would be a biographical experiment living up to its name.
Will the right-wingers of olden days have become Green party supporters now? Wrong question, because (to my surprise at the time), one of the more hard-core rightists told me that he voted the Green party already in the 90s: a general hatred of mankind and an irrational love for the Deutscher Wald was certainly a feature always shared between the German Greens and Nazis. What’s more interesting, to me anyway, is the reaction to the pandemic. Will the left pretense to care about “vulnerable populations” be seen for the massive psy-op that it was? Or will my ex-classmates be RWINOs (right-wing in name only) and embraced the totalitarian biopolitical restructuring in the name of a “virus”, i.e. simply continued their fascination with authoritarianism and the erosion of democratic rights like most good, conformist (Western) Germans did during the pandemic? Will they have become SPD voters and Lauterbach fans now? Or will they have stuck to their conservative liberalism and values – not a small amount of them having been members of the FDP? One thing is sure: the left and the right have completely traded places. “Neoliberal” has become a swear word on the right, directed against the left establishment (as recently seen with Tucker Carlson and GB News). Leftist ideology has become the ideology of the ruling class. Socialism has become code for fascism.
Nonetheless: the terms “left” and “right” belong to the dustbin of history, as some of us have said for a long time. The Covid hysteria should have made it clear to everyone that “left” and “right” have no meaning in the face of The People’s confrontation with power. It is not “left” or “right”, but the relation to power that should be the marker for one’s political convictions. If you’re with Pfizer, Justin Trudeau, Rheinmetall, or Katrin Göring-Eckhardt, you’re with Power. It’s really not that difficult.
I do not expect that my ex-classmates will have become dissidents, even if being a dissident is the only strictly political position one can assume today. I expect them to have become state functionaries (school or University teachers), Yacht owners, or postmen today, with most of them rather apolitical or even apathic. Some will maybe have turned out fine. And on risking sounding sentimental again, I only hope they are happy with their lives.
Even the Nazi dipshits.
Not sure how you feel about it anymore, but that song is an absolute banger.
My own 30-year Abitur class reunion is only a few days away. I remember the 1990s (final three years at school ("Oberstufe"), civil service ("Zivildienst"), and then university) as rather apolitical, relaxed, and fun. Maybe this is why I am so annoyed by the mess we are in today.