The Sound of the New Right: Neofolk and the Identitarian Movement
© Ivan Radic
By Fabian Peltsch and Ralf Niemczyk – a report from the ROLLING STONE archive 2017
At the very end of Leipzig's tram line 3, the Knautkleeberg terminus, it looks like a barren Saxon countryside. After about a kilometre's walk you reach the Knauthain Palace Park, a manor house from 1703 that has been rebuilt several times and is now home to a software company and in front of which expensive sports cars are parked. Medieval fire pans point the way to the site at dusk. The Fire & Sun festival is taking place on a walled meadow. Along with Runes & Men, it is one of the central meetings of so-called neofolk. The obscure niche of the Gothic scene has existed since the 1980s, a controversial shadow plant that moves between romantic observation of nature, black esotericism and soldierly fascist fetishism.
HJ undercuts and rune pins
The bands are called Traum'er Leben, Of The Wand & The Moon, Stein and Jännerwein. There is no box office on the evening. Tickets had to be ordered by post weeks in advance. There is a familiar, almost cautious atmosphere. Maybe 200 visitors, almost a third of them women. A lively group of four even in cocktail dresses with pencil skirts and high heels. A few children. Behind the tiny stage in the middle of the area, a young father helps his 12-year-old son to lace up his combat boots. Snappy fraternity members in white shirts with suspenders are milling around in front of it. A few in medieval clothing. Hitler Youth undercuts, flared Bretsches trousers, camouflage pieces, sometimes NVA, sometimes Austrian Federal Army. Some uniform shirts are emblazoned with a rune pin or the stylized sun wheel, which is used equally by neo-pagans, neo-folkers and black metal fans. Full of meaning: The former Obergruppenführer hall of the SS training center Wewelsburg in East Westphalia bears this symbol as a floor ornament. When a short rain shower sets in, black umbrellas open everywhere. Two strong bald men share a cigarette under a tree, while a lady in an SM corset frantically throws her shawl over her head in search of a dry spot. A crazy mix that is reminiscent of the castle party in the Hitler diaries film satire "Schtonk". Conspiratorial meeting of a dangerous right-wing underground or rather Nazi Party Rally cosplay?
Accurate posture, grim look
From the drinks trolley, the red-bearded waiter with the hip bicycle cap leads a short debate about his existence as an agnostic. The sausage stand also serves halloumi. In the back corner, the mobile toilets are strictly eco-friendly; modern pit toilets with sawdust instead of chemical liquid and plastic. T-shirt slogans celebrate the Düsseldorf old-school industrial crew Die Krupps ("True work - true reward"), the neofolk urban band Death In June or the bizarre goth cover band Death In Rome - either with a Marilyn Monroe skull or with an ancient Roman lictor's bundle logo. Between all these people wearing religious shirts and cosplayers in traditional costumes, Götz Kubitschek and his wife, Ellen Kositza, stand in the third row in front of the stage. Black shirt, brown drill trousers. Precise posture, grim look. An alpha male on the colorful Schlossanger. AfD co-founder Bernd Lucke once described Kubitschek's behavior in an internal email to his party colleagues as "a deliberate allusion to the fascist movements in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s." He warned them not to accept someone like him into the AfD under any circumstances. That was in early 2015. Over a year later, the former Bundeswehr lieutenant, who was dismissed because of his political activities, is more than ever considered the central figure of a New Right that wants to overhaul Germany with ethnic, anti-democratic overtones even more holistically than the AfD had planned under the ousted Lucke.
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While the audience let the dark folk band Traum'er Leben from Hanover pass by without any interest, Jännerwein was the first to create something like tension. The quintet from Salzburg used a meter that was meticulously designed to be non-blues and therefore non-rock'n'roll. In impressionism, this was called "tensionless harmony". The polyphonic folk song or the homemade genre reconstruction "Alpine Folk" were the inspiration. On their last album, "Eine Hoffnung", Jännerwein interpreted the poem "To the Moon" by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe with drums and bagpipes. Then they played thought games from Chinese philosophy to the acoustic guitar. Lyrically, at Jännerwein's Knauthain gig, it seemed as though a heavy fog rose over some dark forest every ten minutes ("Don't you see the firs / How they stand upright in defiance?"). Friendship, wine and hiking were also on the agenda in "halls of marble and light". An out-of-date evening of songs, somewhere between a torchlight parade and a Christmas carol. Kubitschek and Kositza listen. Stern expressions accompany the devout playing.
Strategy work instead of baseball bats
The couple live a good hour from Leipzig on a manor in the village of Schnellroda in Saxony-Anhalt. This is where Kubitschek's "Institute for State Policy" is based, a think tank and cadre factory for the New Right, and his publishing house Antaios, which publishes books on "foreign violence", the Battle of Verdun and the "Way of Men"; as well as the magazine "Sezession", which is widely read in right-wing circles. Their house is a model idyll of a parallel society. Seven children, homemade cheese. They address each other formally like in the good old days. Their lifestyle may be strictly anti-modern, but the right-wing thinker from Ravensburg is very interested in young people. Seminars are held on his manor where young activists can acquire Greenpeace-like verve and formerly left-wing communication guerrilla tactics. Strategy work instead of baseball bats.
Recently, Kubitschek's name has been cropping up more and more in connection with the Identitarian Movement. The pan-European group, which was founded in France around 2011, wants to present ethnic ideology in a contemporary and cool way. A development that has the political right switching to "youth movement mode," says extremism researcher Alexander Häusler. The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution is alarmed.
The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution is alarmed
If you look closely, you can also find the "IBsters", as they half-ironically call themselves, between the beer stand, stage and merch tent of the Leipzig neofolk meeting. -A small group of young men who stand out among the black-clad scene people mainly because of their normal clothing. They wear contemporary vector graphic T-shirts from "Phalanx Europa", the identity house brand that sells T-shirts with Ernst Jünger and "NietzChe" prints on its website, but also posters with combative quotes from Martin Heidegger or Samuel Huntington. A somewhat shy-looking, skinny young man with long hair and an undercut, who looks a bit like the blond version of Skrillex, sits off to the side next to his overweight friend, who, with his wet gelled top hair, is reminiscent of the YouTube star Hans Entertainment. The long-haired man's "Phalanx" shirt bears the sacred image of Austria's patron saint, Leo-pold III, who is holding the lambda symbol, the identifying symbol of the Identitarians, in front of his chest like an orb. Above it is written in medieval minuscule script: "Restore Europe. Remove Kebab".
On their numerous Instagram and Facebook accounts, the Identitarians portray themselves as fighters in the weight room, model sons-in-law or pepper-spray-distributing honorary saviors of German women – whose role is best described under the hashtag #identitariangirls Or on the Instagram account of model girl Alina von Rauheneck, whose real name is Wychera and who sometimes presents herself as a sexy activist and sometimes as Mary rocking a baby on her home soil. Evil world meets perfect world, the roles are clearly assigned. For the young movement, identity means above all love of homeland and patriotism. Under the slogan "ethnopluralism", the "ethnic continuity" of Europe is to be defended against streams of migrants. Otherwise, the "great replacement" threatens - a prophecy of the downfall of the West coined by the French author Renaud Camus.
“Why I don’t eat kebab”
For a long time, the Identitarian Movement was considered merely an internet phenomenon. In February 2013, Kubitschek wrote in a rather picky and fatherly guide on “Sezession” that the movement was doomed to failure if it did not soon find a face and a “center for its own idea.”
In the wake of a shift to the right that can be seen across Europe, the movement now seems to have found its centre in Vienna, and in 27-year-old Martin Sellner it has also found a face. The strictly parted philosophy and law student, who lived on Kubitschek's estate for a few weeks, tackles such diverse topics in his video blog and in texts for "Sezession" as "Heidegger's resistant thinking", "gender madness" and "Why I don't eat kebabs". He is at the forefront of media-effective actions such as the fake blood attack on Elfriede Jelinek's refugee play "The Protected" or demonstrations in Austria and Germany.
Sellner is a jovial, somewhat vain, buddy type who loves the camera. He also readily gives information to ROLLING STONE. "Do you know the song by Tocotronic 'I want to be part of a youth movement'?" he begins the Skype conversation with a grin. Pop culture is an important element in the movement, says the Viennese, who openly admits that until seven years ago he was a genuine Nazi and a fan of relevant right-wing rock bands like Landser. "I was in this scene for several years and found that there was a sense of desperation, with many depressed, bitter people, which is also reflected in the music and the attitude to life." It is hard to believe that the man with the mischievous smile and three-day beard has a Nazi past.
Old-right twitches
Today, Sellner raves on Identitaere-Generation.info, the scene's most important German-language information portal, about the "sad European spirit" Marco Wanda, whose band unfortunately also "goes with the mainstream of left-wing cultural chic". In interviews, he repeatedly emphasizes that his Identitarians are open to all types of music, from the patriotic German rock of Frei.Wild to the trendy cloud rap of Yung Hurn. Sellner also likes to intersperse his videos with songs by left-wing bands such as Egotronic or 4-to-the-floor techno, which sometimes causes fundamental discussions in the home-loving scene. "This disco music: isn't that just another attempt to pander to this uniformity, all the pseudo-modernity that has actually uprooted people in recent decades?" writes user Quovadis under a bass-heavy promo video for the Identitarian Movement. "Such voices are widely represented on YouTube and Facebook, but are not representative of our movement," says Sellner. "These are old-right twitches. The young people who come to our demonstrations are much more colorful, much more relaxed - a good-humored bunch."
In order not to become too arbitrary and probably also to evoke a "scene feeling" that Kubitschek describes as essential, the youth-led right-wingers euphorically celebrate neofolk on their website. All core members of the German-speaking Identitarians can agree on the pompous acoustic music; Internet videos show the Austrian group around Sellner and Wychera at celebratory song evenings, moist eyes to candlelight and wine. Neofolk is "the wood that keeps the flaming heart of an activist burning," they write in a January wine review.
Holocaust as a “Gothic Novel”
The roots of the dark neofolk subculture go back to industrial bands like Throbbing Gristle and Current 93, who often had an almost adolescent passion for disturbing and provocative topics: Satanism, sadomasochism, madness, genocide. In the mid-eighties, David Tibet, the well-read head of Current 93, turned to darkly romantic acoustic music, which fans dubbed "apocalyptic folk" and which gave the decisive impetus to the formation of neofolk. The other big band in the primordial soup is Death In June, whose albums "Brown Book" and "But What Ends When The Symbols Shatter?" are considered classics of the genre, rides to ruin carried by minor chords, rolling marching drums and male vocals. The English band around the openly homosexual Douglas Pearce provoked early on with fascist aesthetics, victory runes and SS skull designs. Sometimes a few bars of the Horst Wessel song are sampled, sometimes gracious references to the writing convict and late RAF admirer Jean Genet are dropped. Death In June stylizes the Holocaust and Nazi era into a sexually connotated "Gothic novel," said pop critic Martin Büsser, who had repeatedly dealt intensively with the phenomenon until his death in 2010.
The uncoolest music on the planet
Certainly due to strong hostility from the left wing, many neofolk bands from Germany took politically less controversial paths. Groups like Forseti, Orplid and Darkwood sought inner emigration in nature, literature and mythology, which was reflected in archaic German and kitschy verses. If you've always wondered what the opposite of funk is, or want to show off at a party that you've discovered the uncoolest music on the planet, you'll find what you're looking for in neofolk.
What almost all bands have in common is a glorified anti-modernism and the unspoken question of what folk music would sound like if American pop history had never existed. The place of longing is a "secret Europe" that is located somewhere between Hölderlin's romantically inspired meadows and the Strength Through Joy communities of the 1930s. In a similar way to how the Identitarian Movement is able to create a kind of hinge function between new right-wing movements, neofolk connects listeners from different subcultures such as industrial, gothic, black metal or dark ambient. The genre is also a melting pot for nerds and oddballs who, in their search for their own identity, feel drawn to the first thing that is offered as "German" in school books and at the same time triggers shivers around the world: the fascinatingly evil aesthetics of the fascists. Overall, however, neofolk is more interested in the crazy neo-pagan esotericism of Heinrich Himmler than in Nazi realpolitik. Very few of this niche scene would consider themselves to be politically right-wing or even political at all.
Soundtrack of a right feeling
For the Identitarian Movement, which, like most new right ideologies, does not follow National Socialist dogmas but rather a right-wing conservative path into the mainstream of society, the genre nevertheless offers an ideal docking station. Precisely because it is so nebulous and ambiguously readable. "For me, neofolk is a type of music that has been a right-wing alternative from the very beginning. It is no wonder that neofolk is extremely popular with the Identitarians," says Sellner, who played in a black metal band as a teenager. For the new right missionary, the solemn music functions less as a carrier of political messages than as a supplier of an emotional foundation that goes far beyond that, as a soundtrack to a right-wing feeling.
As an Identitarian Neofolk fan, you can distance yourself from an "old right", crudely right-wing extremist subculture (as many Neofolk protagonists have done for years) and still retain many core ideas: patriotism, tradition, anti-modernism and a tribal longing, not unlike the "tribalism" that the Identitarians accuse Islamic cultures of. Identitarians and Neofolkers also find common ground in the hero worship of conservative ideologues. The beetle-collecting war euphoric Ernst Jünger, the suicidal Yukio Mishima loyal to the Kaiser, the biologically motivated cultural pessimist Julius Evola or the cultural historian Oswald Spengler, who stoked fears of the "decline of the West" as early as 1918: all of them can be found in the songs of the most famous Neofolk bands, but also on the T-shirts and posters of "Phalanx Europa". The Identitarians also learned the balancing act between provocation and indexing from so-called neofolk.
From Thronstahl or Kreuzweg Ost
The pompous unplugged music, however, does not really fit with the movement's tidy hipster image. On the "Phalanx Europa" website, which has a decidedly modern design, under "Music" you will find CDs by martial bands such as Von Thronstahl or Kreuzweg Ost, who are warlike and yet somewhat depressed. Is this the true face of the IBsters, who are only superficially presentable? "Neofolk has a melancholic, martial touch, that's true," replies Sellner, when asked about the music's lack of majority appeal. "But I think this mood is justified when you look at everything that is happening in the world today with our culture, our identity and our tradition."
Martin Lichtmesz, another important source of ideas for the New Right alongside Götz Kubitschek and himself a long-time neofolk scene-goer, describes the neofolk attitude to life in his essay "From Ruffled Shirt to Uniform" as "negation, sadness and unease in culture", whereby the music "flirts with 'fascist' iconography and of course also hits a specific ethnopsychological nerve". Unfortunately, his heyday and the possibility of a "right-wing movement" growing out of neofolk failed not least because of pressure from the left, says Lichtmesz, who also lives in Vienna, in his review published in 2010. His friend Martin Sellner, who is 13 years younger, sees things more optimistically from today's perspective. "I believe that our movement has enormously popularized music like neofolk and authors like Jünger and Mishima. What were previously niche phenomena are becoming present again through our political actions."
Hitting the nerve of ethnopsychology
Sellner recommends the Salzburg band Jännerwein as an “easy-listening neofolk to get you started”. On the Identitarians’ website, the comrades are particularly recommended to listen to the song “Kämpfe”. “Fight, my friend, defend yourself against the snakes/ Banish the false glow of their lights/ Fight, my friend, and don’t spare yourself/ And know that you are not fighting alone,” sings the frontman, wearing lederhosen, in a solemn, toneless voice, just as the last light in Knauthain disappears behind the treetops of the adjacent forest. The music to the combative lyrics is light years away from the thrashing with which the British Oi-punk band Skrewdriver, for example, has shaped hundreds of right-wing rock bands since the early eighties. The Goethe fans also do their headliner job in Leipzig without sweat or aggression.
On their Facebook page, Jännerwein announced their temporary departure before the Leipzig Neofolk Festival, after nine years in Tannenduft. Their renaissance as a showcase band for the new right identitarians: they may not even notice it anymore.