Abstract
This chapter examines how the German right-wing populist movement PEGIDA appropriated the memory of the East German democratic opposition of 1989 and claimed to represent the German people through the use of the slogan Wir sind das Volk—We are the People. PEGIDA used this slogan alongside other mnemonic appropriations in an initial bid to create a ‘reputational shield’ that could deflect from its far-right, xenophobic and Islamophobic elements. Although this tactic proved relatively successful on Facebook, through an empirical analysis of over 1000 tweets, this chapter shows that PEGIDA’s use of the slogan was quickly met with resistance not only in the streets but also on Twitter, where social media users expressed anti-PEGIDA views and challenged the movement’s claims to represent the Volk.
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Notes
- 1.
The Kurdistan Workers’ Party is a far-left political and militant organisation considered a terrorist group by the German government.
- 2.
Researchers spoke to 1800 demonstrators on 12 January 2015 from a crowd that was estimated to have had between 17,000 and 25,000 demonstrators. Six hundred and seventy accepted a handout, and of that, 123 filled out an online survey.
- 3.
In total, 1805 surveys were distributed during the demonstration on 30 November 2015, which was estimated to have had approximately 3500–5000 participants.
- 4.
The NPD, formed in 1964, was the first far-right party permitted in West Germany after the Second World War because it explicitly accepted parliamentary democracy. In 1952, the Socialist Reich Party (Sozialistische Reichspartei Deutschlands) was the first neo-Nazi party to be banned as a threat to the democratic order.
- 5.
Parallels might be discerned between reputational shields and the frames and frame alignment processes studied by social movement scholars (see Snow, Rochford, Worden, & Benford, 1986).
- 6.
Stauffenberg himself has been adopted as an icon by the AfD, to the consternation of his descendants (Kitzmann, 2018).
- 7.
The original PEGIDAFacebook group disappeared in July 2016 before a new one was created.
- 8.
Similar tactics are used by populists in Poland and Hungary, where 1989 is used as a symbol of a revolution that still needs to be completed (Mark, Blaive, Hudek, Saunders, & Tyszka, 2015).
- 9.
The slogan has been used by other protesters since 1989, including a movement against a new urban development project in Stuttgart known as Stuttgart 21.
- 10.
This search was conducted on 12 December 2018.
- 11.
Further results were likely missed when the slogan was used in compounded form.
- 12.
At the time of writing this video was still available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvqoRfmfBEw&list=FLlJ7XLDS37RY-X6zqLnXasw&index=78 and had received around 47,000 views.
- 13.
NOPEGIDA’s Facebook page was created on 2 December 2014.
- 14.
The full poem (in German) can be read in Maier (2014).
- 15.
This event can partly explain the increase in PEGIDA Wir sind das Volk tweets that month just as it did the increase in PEGIDA demonstration participants.
- 16.
The ‘turn’ that Wilders referred to were the events concerning the end of SED rule in East Germany, known popularly in German as: ‘Die Wende’.
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Acknowledgements
Ned Richardson-Little’s contribution to this chapter was funded by a Leverhulme Trust project entitled ‘1989 after 1989. Rethinking the Fall of State Socialism’ (RL-2012-053).
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Richardson-Little, N., Merrill, S. (2020). Who Is the Volk? PEGIDA and the Contested Memory of 1989 on Social Media. In: Merrill, S., Keightley, E., Daphi, P. (eds) Social Movements, Cultural Memory and Digital Media. Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32827-6_3
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