On February 13th, the most German Germans went for a walk in Dresden, their favorite pastime.

This time, for a change, it wasn't about the supposed Corona dictatorship (it's surprising how many demonstrations you can register online, by phone, in writing with the regulatory office while you're actually in a dictatorship), and Pegida's birthday was already over last October.

This time, as every year, it was about the victim myth of the bombing of Dresden.

Accompanied by Wagner, neo-Nazis dressed in black (it's a day of mourning) ran through picturesque Dresden, laid wreaths, barked the usual Nazi stuff into the microphone and carried out historical revisionism with banners such as "Bomb Holocaust.

You call it liberation, we call it mass murder."

You've been looking at it for years, neo-Nazi gaffes of all kinds: verbal (bird shit, shooting at children, mouse slipped), pseudo-intellectual (Schnellroda says hello) and from the fascist-but-make-it-fashion faction (nipsters and identitarians) with their attempts to infuse a bit more lifestyle into the same ole Nazi candies.

This is as expected as the plot of a third-rate dime novel.

You're almost bored because of the well-known misanthropy that you want to shout from the back row: boring.

You mean business

The AfD has been in the Bundestag for four and a half years.

And always the same game.

Someone says something inhuman, historical revisionist, racist, anti-Semitic and feels like a really great pike.

And when the wave of indignation swept through social media, as if he were almost in the resistance.

Yes, you really showed them, Alexander.

Only Alexander is no longer a pimply teenager, but an old man, and the contempt for human beings is not just an embarrassing provocation.

He's serious.

So this policy of pinpricks for four and a half years, except that it's not a pinprick.

Sometimes the figures change, Bernd Lucke resigns, then Frauke Petry.

Jörg Meuthen is leaving and is now playing the role of the great anti-fascist, while just a few months ago he was ranting about the population exchange.

And Erika Steinbach becomes – who would have thought it – a member after all.

Over the last few years, one could watch how signs of fatigue crept in in parliaments and society, how some things were then nodded off or at least kept silent.

This is also known as the development of tolerance or the habituation effect.

A brown mustiness that gets up your nose all the time and that you eventually stop noticing.

One could also call this the insidious poisoning of liberal democracy.

When another local politician resigns from office because he and his family are being threatened by the Nazis.

When right-wing threatening letters end up in the mailbox again, a right-wing extremist network including a weapons cache is uncovered.

When the most German Germans walk through inner cities with torches.

When there is talk of "disposing of female politicians in Anatolia",

Putting homosexuals in prison and pride "in the achievements of German soldiers in two world wars".

All shocking but predictable, because what did you actually expect from Nazis?

A position paper on how to achieve the goals of the Paris climate agreement?

A serious proposal for pension reform?

Contempt and German Angst

But what now?

They play along with their misanthropic games, ritualized, indignantly repeating the same phrases over and over again: not a foot's breadth, clear edge and the like. Or they ignore them and hope the Allies will come back.

Incidentally, one can wait until the end of the world for the right-wingers to unmask themselves.

Because let's be honest: It was never about politics, but always only about ideology, never about arguments and content, always just about feelings.

A feeling of superiority coupled with the feeling of being the eternal victim.

A contempt coupled with irrational German fear.

One could now shake one's head at all the right-wingers with all their buffoonery and mindless megalomania.

But a Nazi, no matter how ridiculous, is a Nazi and still a Nazi.

So if someone slips on the mouse again.

When a seventeen-year-old in Berlin is insulted and beaten up as a “dirty foreigner”.

When February 19 marks the second anniversary of the racist terrorist attack in Hanau.

When a fire wall is torn down again, a red line is crossed that has long since ceased to exist.

Now, if we want to continue living in this country, you and I and all our other fellow citizens, what then?