The Extreme Gone Mainstream: Commercialization and Far Right Youth Culture in Germany

"Cynthia Miller-Idriss is a sociologist who focuses on education and on the youth. Both are very relevant to any politics and particularly the far right. We know that by and large our political attitudes are formed in our early 20s, and yet the youth are virtually never studied by anyone. This makes the book highly original, which is incredibly hard, because there are so many books and articles about the far right. The book focuses on fashion, which is very close to identity, and far right subculture. We have very few studies on this, and those that we do focus almost exclusively on Nazi skinheads, which were largely a 1980s/early 1990s phenomenon. Nowadays, there is a very broad variety of far-right subcultures and what she shows is that they mainstream that culture. That’s partly because far right themes are now part of the mainstream. So if you are in a suit or some other kind of acceptable outfit, you can fit part of what you believe into that and blend in while still stand out to those in the know. So whereas in the 1980s as soon as you said ‘immigration’ everyone would be shocked, nowadays as long as you don’t Sieg Heil openly you’re just being provocative. “The book is really empowering. It really makes you understand the mechanism of it rather than just describing it.” What she shows is the importance of symbols in subcultures and what I find particularly interesting is that the symbols are constantly changing. We still think of far right symbols as swastikas and perhaps the Celtic cross. But nowadays you have many different ones and the symbols have different functions. On the one hand, you have to avoid the law, which particularly in Germany is very strict. It’s a cat and mouse game. You’re trying to make a symbol that signals to those in the in-crowd ‘I’m far right,’ but isn’t recognizable by the state. It’s fashion too. This is the very visual culture that we’re in today, the meme culture, and the far right is part of that game. The style has just changed significantly. Everyone can recognize a Nazi skinhead, but we will walk past people who are dressed as far right on a day-to-day basis and not recognize them. This is not unique. It’s what football hooligans already did in the 1990s. They have all kinds of expensive brands—like Stone Island—that look normal and are normal. They allow someone in the hooligan subculture to directly recognize who is a hooligan, whereas your average policeman won’t. She’s not such a big fan of that term, because the media is obsessed with it. The Nazi hipsters, the Identitarian movement, get an insane amount of attention. What she is trying to show is how pervasive this culture is within certain circles. She focuses on vocational training schools in Germany. She interviews several of the students. Only some are in the scene, but almost everyone knows about it. They all recognize it, even though their teachers have no clue what is happening. Some of these brands are very expensive. Some you can only get through far-right online stores, but others, like Thor Steinar, have boutique stores. I was in Prague a few years ago and I walked past a very small high-end shopping mall, on one of the most expensive shopping streets. I was just flabbergasted to see a Thor Steinar store there. Two years later it was still there, so they must be doing good business because rents on that street are high. That’s the other part that’s interesting about this book. There’s a lot of money in the far right. Some in this subculture are believers, others are just people who want to make money out of it. I fully agree. Over the weekend our local student newspaper had photos taken before a big football game. There’s this rivalry between Georgia and Florida and all the students meet at the beach. There was a picture of a hunky guy with a girl and he had a tattoo on his left shoulder. It was the symbol of the Three Percenters, which is a far-right militia. The editors of the newspaper didn’t pick up on it, because it’s not a swastika. It reminded me how illiterate the media—but also teachers and law enforcement—are about the ever-shifting symbols of the far right. What Cynthia shows is how important those symbols are as signifiers and signallers within the community. As academics, we spend too little time on them, because we tend to study texts and difficult ideological things. Kids are not busy with that. Few neo-Nazis read Mein Kampf, but all love the Nazi flag. It’s hard. It’s strong. In the street, you’re not going to go around with a swastika because you’ll get pulled over, but instead we have these other markers that still have to look awesome, but are in the grey zone. That insight is important, particularly because what this book shows is that we’re dealing with a different far right. The far right parties are no longer small groups pushing from the outside. Far right supporters are no longer just working class white males. Increasingly, they’re Trump supporters. They’re at my college. They’re groups like Turning Point USA, rich white kids, who are well-educated and well-dressed and who are supporting the far right. We haven’t made that transition yet. When you see a picture of a far right rally in a newspaper, you still see the one skinhead who was at that meeting, because that’s what we think a far-right person is. As long as we do that, as long as we associate the far right with the symbols of yesteryear, we miss what she calls the mainstreaming of these very extreme right views. In her case, the young people she studies are not even radical right: they are pretty much neo-Nazis."