Silence on the express train to Munich until Laura plops down opposite.
Nursing a bottle of beer, which the 21-year-old says is her second, she talks about her destination – an evening with old college friends in the Bavarian capital – and her life status: single, on a work placement with a major state company in Berlin.
Laura jokes that she is very chatty for a German train passenger as she talks on.
Her favourite book is Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, followed closely by Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. She is from a small town outside Erfurt, the capital of the eastern state of Thuringia. And, smile fading and voice dropping, she admits she is “very, very afraid”.
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Slowly, then quickly, the far-right Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) has surged to 40 per cent support in her home state. It’s at 41 per cent in polls next door in Saxony-Anhalt, possibly enough support for an absolute majority in September’s state election and its first shot at power.
When Laura goes home for the weekend, after four years away at college and now her Berlin internship, she senses a new edge when neighbours describe her as a “foreigner”.
But she is most worried for her 51-year-old mother. She grew up in the village, her politics have always been activist left and – going against the East German norm – always encouraged her children to have outspoken, informed political views.
But small-town dynamics – and the need to get on with neighbours who, for the most part, are AfD supporters – have damned her mother into fearful silence.
“The longer you stay silent the worse it gets, but speaking out and challenging people – who does that?” she says.
“The AfD is the new norm and it’s so scary. I am so afraid.”
Hours earlier, the news broke that a new pop song written precisely for people such as Laura had just been banned by German public broadcaster ZDF. No Fear by rapper Danger Dan, real name Daniel Pongratz, was booked as the musical act for the 100th anniversary of self-regarding television cabaret show Die Anstalt (The Institution). Until it wasn’t.
ZDF announced it had unbooked Danger Dan because his song “could be interpreted as a primer for political extremism ... propagates vigilante justice while not ruling out illegal acts and violence”.
The controversy has done wonders for the singer and his song. With millions of additional streams and YouTube views since Friday, the seven-minute track makes up for its modest musical ambition and rudimentary rhymes with radical political messaging.
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Rather than feel powerless and afraid towards the AfD, Pongratz urges listeners to ditch their phone, join forces with trusted friends, organise fundraisers, spray anti-fascist slogans around their town.
They should track down right-wing extremists to their homes and workplaces, raid their rubbish, chat them up using fake dating platform profiles, out them to their friends, colleagues, neighbours.
“Nobody will want a Nazi pig neighbour,” he sings, warning them to cover their tracks online and never trust the German police, “where there are just as many faschos”.
“History shows that it will only be worse if we do nothing and remain silent,” he says, concluding his song with “greetings to Lina, Gucci, Maja and Nanuk”. According to ZDF these names tally with those of four convicted left-wing activists, a final black mark against the song.
In the 100th episode of Die Anstalt, already filmed and online and set to air on Tuesday, the three presenters defy their own station by reading out the entire lyric – to loud applause from the studio audience.
So far the 43-year-old singer-songwriter has declined offers to appear on ZDF to discuss the controversy. To Der Spiegel magazine, he said: “It’s a terrible sign when the director general of ZDF starts censoring anti-fascist songs.”
In a weekend ZDF special dedicated to the controversy, the station’s entertainment chief Oliver Heidemann said the broadcaster’s statute forbade it airing anything “with an incitement effect”.
He was countered by cabaretist Florian Schroeder, who called the song an “important contribution to public debate” on how to respond to AfD’s surge in opinion polls.
Danger Dan is no stranger to controversy, writing songs his fans put in a long line of political artists from Bertolt Brecht to Wolf Biermann.
His 2021 song Covered by Artistic Freedom used provisions open to artists under German law to accuse named German extreme-right leaders of being anti-Semites, fascists and Nazis.
Back on the train, now stuck somewhere between Nuremberg and Munich, Laura says she loves discussing challenging art such as Lolita with people “because you learn so much about them from their reaction to it”.
As for art about challenging politics? It’s complicated. Taking a last sip from her beer, she says: “People who live in big cities say you should stand up, resist, but that is not how small towns work.”
