Over the summer, such questions have plagued Germany. A showdown between Merkel and Interior Minister Horst Seehofer over immigration policy nearly brought down Germany’s fragile government and highlighted the pressure the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party has put on the country’s traditional parties. Soon after that, the German soccer player Mesut Özil, who is of Turkish descent, quit the national team over what he deemed discriminatory treatment from team members and fans alike. His comments about the everyday racism in Germany directed toward those who don’t look traditionally “German” prompted a wave of national soul-searching about what it actually means to be German. And the photos from Chemnitz forced difficult conversations about whether the country has learned from its past, and about the ways in which major cultural and economic differences in the former Communist East still persist. The situation shows “how nervous everybody is, and how little it takes to get the whole nation into a sense of general hysteria,” Jan Techau, the director of the German Marshall Fund’s Europe program, told me. [...]
Maassen’s comments were also particularly controversial because Germany’s intelligence services have a “problematic” history of being negligent when it comes to the far right, Matthias Quent, the director of the Institute for Democracy and Civil Society in Jena, told me. The Verfassungsschutz was created when the country was still divided and West German officials saw communism as the primary threat. In the years since, it has been criticized for not acting against right-wing extremists with haste. After the AfD won 12.6 percent of the vote in Germany’s federal elections last year, that issue took on an increased urgency. Experts have gotten “the impression that the Verfassungsschutz, [when it comes to] the right, is blind,” Quent told me. “It has in its historical tradition this very special focus on the left, but lets the far right do what the far right is doing.”
After his interview with Bild, Maassen quickly became a hero for supporters of the far right, who viewed him as a brave truth teller willing to defy the so-called lügenpresse (“lying press,” a term that traces its roots back to the Nazi era). At a demonstration in Köthen, a city in the east German state of Saxony-Anhalt, one protester held up a sign saying thank you for the truth, mr. maassen.
