"To what extent do right-wing radicals have control of the town, to the point that they dictate public life? Can you guarantee my safety? Or must I fear being threatened with physical violence if I stand up for democracy?"
Excerpts from an email sent by a tourist to officials in the municipality of Burg in the Spreewald region south of Berlin.
Burg is a lovely little town in the Spreewald Biosphere Reserve, a charming network of sprawling forests and intricately networked streams that attracts tourists from far and wide. The town is bright, clean, full of half-timbered houses and has no train station. I arrived in a rental car in the middle of a Wednesday in October.
The news stories that brought me here described Hitler salutes in the schoolyard, students calling out "Arbeit macht frei," the slogan the Nazis wrote on a sign at the entry of the Auschwitz concentration camp, in the classroom and restaurants run by violent hooligans. It all reached the public last spring after two teachers at a school in town wrote an open letter decrying the situation. Almost all German media outlets ran stories about it.
The education minister of Brandenburg, the German state in which the Spreewald is located, said that the situation in Burg reminded him of an era "which should actually be far in the past in Germany." From a distance, it looked a lot like right-wing extremists had taken control of the town. Welcome to Naziville.
While heading there in the car, I thought to myself: It can't be that bad.
I parked and got out.
First off, I saw the lampposts, plastered with stickers from the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party and from the neo-Nazi NPD. "Courage for Germany," they read, and "The Greens Are Germany's Ruin." The second thing I saw was the group of boys striding towards me in bomber jackets with lettering in the Fraktur font favored by the Nazis – almost as if the clothing had been copied directly out of a 1990s neo-Nazi documentary and pasted onto their brawny physiques . The third thing I saw was the green T-shirt of a man standing next to the entrance of the school. Like a party promoter on the summertime beaches of Mallorca, he was holding out flyers to the young men. When I approached, I could discern on his back the logo of the III. Weg (Third Way), a tiny neo-Nazi party that seeks the "peaceful restoration of greater Germany" and of the German empire.
Those were my first five minutes in Burg.
I thought to myself: "Holy shit."
First impressions are unreliable. They tend only to show the external and rarely offer clues to what lies deeper inside. After that day in October, I made several more trips to Burg. I went to festivals, attended committee meetings, sat in on classes at school and went to the bar. I spoke with residents who felt that reports about their town were the result of a vast misunderstanding or a vast conspiracy, and with others who are ashamed of what happened in their village, and of what is still happening. Burg is home to 4,264 people. The majority of those I met were very friendly and not at all right-wing extremist.
Which makes it all the more difficult to answer questions as to why neo-Nazis can so openly affix their stickers to lampposts, parade around with right-wing logos on their chests and pass out flyers in front of the schools.
The Neighboring Towns Thought the Letter Referred to Them
In October, during my first visit, a gray-haired man wearing a collared shirt, jeans and glasses emerged from the school after a few minutes. The III. Away promoter was just speaking to a teenager who was waiting for the bus. The gray-haired man approached and spoke to him briefly, a serious yet not unfriendly expression on his face. The neo-Nazi leaned and stuffed his neo-Nazi flyer back into his bag. The gray-haired man went back into the building.
The gray-haired man is named Markus Mandel, 63, and he has been Burg's crisis manager since summer. He is the new director of the Elementary and Secondary School of Burg – the educational facility that made Burg famous around the country.
I visit him in his office two days later. He is drinking out of a cup reading "Good Mood Mug :-)” He is a man who, once you have met him, always has a smile on his face in your memory.
Mandel describes himself as a long-time resident of Burg and speaks in the local dialect. He was once a teacher at the school in Burg, from 1984 to 2011, and his children are students here.
In August, he says, a senior education official came to the school in Cottbus where he was teaching at the time. Mandel didn't know what the official wanted to talk to him about, only that it was important. Because when a senior official says: "No, I'll come to you," it means it's important.
The man wanted to speak with Mandel about the letter that had been written by the teachers in Burg.
An excerpt: “School furniture is defaced with swastikas, right-wing extremist music is heard in the classroom and school halls are filled with anti-democratic chants. (…) There is a feeling of powerlessness and of coerced silence.”
Initially, the letter was written anonymously and Burg wasn't specifically named, only it's region, Spree-Neisse. A teacher who still works at the school in Burg told me several months later that she spoke with teachers from other towns in the region at a seminar.
Almost all of them, she said, thought that the letter described the school where they taught.
Shortly after the letter, even before the two teachers from Burg went public as the authors, a photo turned up. It showed 24 youth next to a soccer field in Cottbus, just 18 kilometers from Burg. They were standing and sitting on a wooden bench and some of them were sitting on the shoulders of others, like a team after an important victory.
Nine of them were showing the Hitler salute. Several are students at the school in Burg.
The school official asked Mandel to take the job of school principal.
"They hope that I'll be able to fix things," says Mandel. "We'll see."
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Hitler salutes next to the sports field: A few of the youth in this photo go to school in Burg.
Photo: Private / BILD
It's not entirely clear what he is supposed to fix. De-Nazify the Burg school? Reestablish harmony among the quarrelling teachers? Apparently, the teachers divided into two camps after the letter went public: Those who supported the move and refer to themselves as "us democrats," and the others who see the two teachers as being snitches.
Most likely, Mandel was expected to produce that which politicians so often yearn for after a scandal: peace and quiet. Somehow.
On the morning that I am sitting in his office, Mandel doesn't have much time. He has an appointment with the father of a student who had been told by a teacher that the black-white-and-red cuff of his T-shirt sleeve could be seen as a reference to the German imperial flag, a symbol frequently used by neo-Nazis. The father, for his part, thought that the teacher had called his son a Nazi.
"So, you try to explain it," says Mandel.
Such things are now part of his job.
He says that a computer science teacher recently wanted to give his class an arithmetic problem, but realized that the solution was 88. H is the eighth letter in the alphabet, and in neo-Nazi circles, 88 is short for "Heil Hitler." The problem was changed, says Mandel.
"You can't be too careful around here at the moment," says Mandel.
How many right-wingers are there at the school? A clique, Mandel says. Those in the picture from the ninth and tenth grades. Maybe 10 or 15 people. Two or three of them are the leaders, charismatic types. And a lot of followers, he says.
But there have been people like that here for decades, he says.
Recently, Mandel says, he ran into a former student of his, who he had seen after graduation standing behind an information stand for the far-right extremist NPD party. Now, he is the father of a first grader at the school. Another father, he relates, once said he has no problem if his child goes along to Auschwitz. It's all "fake" anyway, the father said, just sets from "Schindler's List."
"You don't really know what to say in such moments," says Mandel.
He lists all the things they do now, after the scandal, in addition to the annual trips to Auschwitz that have taken place since the 1990s – mandatory for all students.
Recently, former neo-Nazis who had left the scene visited the school, tough young men from Chemnitz and Dresden. They told the students how bad things were in the scene. And after the summer holidays, the tenth graders visited Jamlitz, a satellite camp of Sachsenhausen where the SS murdered thousands of Jewish prisoners in 1945.
A poster about the life of Anne Frank hangs in a school hallway. "She believed in the equality of all and that it is possible to change society," it reads.
Later, Mandel tells the story of a second grader who had called out "Heil Hitler." They took both him and his mother to the youth welfare office. "He was sobbing the entire time. If he's not traumatized, then I don't know what's going on," says Mandel.
A framed sign hangs above his computer. It reads: "Life's not make-a-wish. It is what it is!"
And then, it's time for him to head off to the meeting with the father about his son's black-red-and-white T-shirt sleeve.
Castle Survives on Tourism
In the center of Burg, there is a monument in front of the church. It looks a bit like a gravestone and reads: "Germany United Fatherland."
There is also a trio of grocery stores, two pharmacies and three bakeries. Rents, say residents, aren't that much lower than in the big city, and it is difficult to find a hot lunch in a restaurant for below 15 euros. Burg survives on tourism and is home to medicinal hot springs. In 2022, more than 165,000 visitors came to Burg, biking through the forests or punting along the numerous canals and streams that crisscross the region. The area is sometimes referred to as the German Everglades or the Amazon of Brandenburg.
It is essentially a populated swamp.
In 2021 parliamentary elections, 30.4 percent of voters in Burg cast their ballots for the AfD.
Hans-Jürgen Dreger, 69, is the kind of mayor of whom people say: "He's the kind of mayor you want to have." He's a tall man with a deep voice, a serious handshake and a fleece jacket. He doesn't belong to a political party. He makes his way around town on a bicycle and doesn't lock it up when he leaves it somewhere.
For 11 years, he ran the kitchen at a farming collective and then spent 13 years operating a cafeteria at an athletes' residence. Now, he's retired – and the volunteer mayor of Burg. He was actually supposed to be the deputy, but when his predecessor resigned in 2020, he went to regional officials and said: "But I don't have a clue about municipal politics." They responded: "You don't need to. You just need to know the people."
"That's how it is," says Dreger. He knows the people.
As we are walking through town together, a man thanks him for a new street sign that has been put up. A woman greets him across her fence, saying: "Hey, Jürgen!" Dreger says that he attends every milestone birthday in town. For the handful of Ukrainian refugees who have been living in Burg for the last year-and-a-half, he sang "Where Have All the Flowers Gone" in church in front of the entire village. He helped one of the Ukrainians move, carrying furniture in exchange for a case of beer. "These are things you just gotta do," says Dreger.
When he walks into a café, a cycling group made up of older women calls out: "Jürgen, buy a round!" So Dreger heads to the counter and orders six advocates: Five for the women and one for himself.
That's how it is.
Dreger says he had actually decided to no longer speak with journalists. He was on a trip to the Polish lakes district of Masuria with a local sports club when someone in the bus called out: "Hey, Burg is in
Bild
," referring to Germany's largest tabloid. Dreger didn't want to look at first, but then curiosity got the better of him. "Entire Village Sinks into a Brown Swamp," the
Bild
wrote.
After that, a lot of journalists showed up, walking into stores with their cameras, shoving people aside. At least that's how they describe it in Burg.
Once the letter from the teachers hit the headlines, a number of Burg residents gave interviews about it to some media outlet or another, and many of them regretted doing so afterwards. Dreger gave one to a television broadcaster – 15 minutes, he says. In the end, only a single sentence made the cut.
He feels he has been treated unfairly – as do a lot of people here. And many of them blame the two teachers who wrote the letter.
Why, they wonder, didn't they address the problems internally? With school administrators? With education officials? With the mayor?
It Didn't Start with the School
At a party in November with disco lights and patio heaters, a DJ is pumping out songs by Britney Spears and the Austrian rock star Andreas Gabalier as locals in quilted jackets dance the sirtaki. Someone mumbles at me: "All this right-wing crap being written about Burg is totally exaggerated." Shortly afterwards, a drunk woman topples over into a bush.
On the main street of Burg is a terracotta-colored house, the "Deutsches Haus" as green lettering proclaims. It is a traditional restaurant, serving local delicacies like giant currywurst and homemade pork knuckle jelly. A condom machine hangs from the wall out front.
The building's history says a lot about how the people of Burg dealt with the right-wing problem long before Germany started talking about their school.
The Deutsches Haus was purchased in 2020 by a man about whom the people of Burg could read in many newspapers. The new owner, the articles noted, was a member of the neo-Nazei scene in Cottbus, from a group of bouncers and hooligans. He apparently had a prior conviction for criminal assault, among other things. The papers also published photos of the new restaurant owner in neo-Nazi clothing at neo-Nazi concerts. The man also leases a hotel in Burg. It looked as though he was interested in building up a small empire in the town.
At the party, a local tells me that she once spoke with the man at length and that he is actually just fine. He gives people jobs, she says, including some from Poland – and he's never done anything bad in Burg. All he wants, she insists, is to run a restaurant. Everyone deserves a chance.
Quite a few people in Burg take a similar view. Others, though, say that after he took over the Deutsches Haus, they never went back.
After the man bought the Deutsches Haus in 2020, German security officials with the domestic intelligence agency and municipal representatives came to the local council, says Mayor Dreger. They warned him that the restaurant could become a meeting point for the neo-Nazi scene.
Dreger says he told them: "Now I've got a problem. When I get home, I have to tell my wife that we can't go to my cousin's 60th birthday party next week."
"Why?" the security official wanted to know.
"Well, because he is holding his party in the Deutsches Haus," Dreger responded.
Dreger says he once spoke with the restaurant owner. They sat down at a table and Dreger said: "I can't have anything against you yet, because I don't yet know what is going to happen. But if you do anything in our town that's not nice, then you'll get to know me."
Later, the people of Burg were again able to read about the Deutsches Haus in the newspaper. Officials had "taken note of a meeting there attended by numerous neo-Nazis, who participated and listened to right-wing extremist music." Right-wing publishing houses held presentations and a podium discussion in the hall. And last year, the AfD hosted a town meeting there.
The Deutsches Haus has been closed since the end of October. Nobody in Burg seems to know – or wants to say – exactly why.
Once, says Dreger, he rode past the Deutsches Haus on his bicycle and thought he heard chants of "Sieg Heil!"
"But I have to say, on men's day, at the beer stand, they also chant stuff like that," Dreger says, citing the annual tradition in some parts of Germany. "It's just the booze. They don't even think. It doesn't matter what you do."
That, though, is the question in Burg: What can you do? And what do they even want to do?
Keeping a low profile
In summer, after the scandal at the school, they did the following: A few residents joined the municipality in organizing a walk through the town during which they scraped many of the right-wing stickers off the lampposts. Buttons for tolerance and respect were handed out at the Heimat Festival and the state's democracy-mobile was there. At the library, they set up a table for democracy books.
And they recorded a video statement called "#WIRsindBurg,” or We Are Burg. In the four minute and 26 second video, 11 people from Burg, including Dreger, say that they are opposed to "discrimination, racism and extremism," that they stand up "for diversity" and that they "sharply condemn" what happened at the school.
Eleven out of 4,264.
Later, several more people joined the statement, including the volunteer fire department, the beekeeping club and the small animal breeding association, although not by video, just by signature.
When the neo-Nazi arrived from Cottbus and took over the Deutsches Haus restaurant, there were no protests in Burg. When the letter from the teachers was made public, there were no protests in Burg. When people across Germany protested against right-wing extremism in January, there were no protests in Burg.
It is easy to condemn the situation if you don't live in Burg. It is much more difficult to stand up to neo-Nazis when there are neo-Nazis in the neighborhood and you have to face them. At the mass protests in Berlin, Cologne and Hamburg, there were no neo-Nazis, just hundreds of thousands of people who were against right-wing extremists. There were also no demonstrations in the towns near Burg in January. Only in Cottbus. And in Spremberg, 40 kilometers away. Three hundred people turned up for that one. The organizers were more than satisfied, since they had only been expecting 50.
Maybe people in the Spreewald had been afraid of openly taking to the streets against right-wing extremism. But maybe it simply wasn't important enough to them.
Life is more peaceful if you keep a low profile.
One resident says that he initially agreed to participate in the video statement. "But then I thought about it and said: Nah, maybe I'd rather not," he says. "Because you can interpret it however you want. If you stand up and say you are open to people all over the world, then there is always someone who puts it in a different light."
During one of my visits, I am sitting with a woman in her mid-30s who grew up in Burg. Speaking about her youth, she says: "People who say it didn't happen here are lying. Especially when you were at a party in the evening, there was always the guy who, after two beers ..." She raises her right arm, or at least hints at it.
And then?
"I always distanced myself from it."
How so?
"I'd just go somewhere else."
Castle isn't very big. There aren't too many places-elses you can go.
Enlarge image
Martin Libutzki is head of the local sports association and runs an ice cream parlor in town.
Photo: Sebastian Wells / DER SPIEGEL
There is a sports association in town called SG Burg. The head of the association is openly gay. He runs an ice cream parlor in the center of town and organized the party with the disco lights and sirtaki dance. He says he's never had any problems in Burg. Three years ago, SG Burg posted a photo with the rainbow flag on its Instagram account along with the slogan: "Together against Racism." It received 46 likes.
There is also a bar in town called "Bruno's Bar," but everyone just calls it At Bruno. At Bruno is a rebuilt barn where gray-haired men wearing earrings play five-pin billiards, smoke cigarillos and talk about their professions, all of which sound like they all should have died out since the turn of the millennium. Stonecutter, ferryman, railroad worker. Bruno himself talks about playing in what was perhaps the only reggae band in East Germany and how they had to get their lyrics officially approved. The wall next to the bar has anti-Nazi stickers on it, and one reading: "I take racism personally."
But there are also those in Burg who, after a couple of beers, talk about people with immigrant backgrounds as "whatever else is wandering around." Or those who, right in the middle of the main street, hang a black-white-and-red sign from their door reading in Fraktur font: "Don't lie, don't cheat, don't steal – the government doesn't "Don't like competition!"
On one evening in November, the Committee for Culture, Tourism and Social Affairs has gathered in the community center: men in glasses, women in blouses. There are a total of 15 of them, and they all have paper name signs in front of them, even though they have known each other for years. Mayor Dreger is on hand, shaking hands and saying things like: "You're here and not in Hollywood?" They talk about the Christmas party for the elderly, about the sports club party that "got a little out of control from a volume point of view," and about the lack of a handrail in the mortuary.
But first, the heads of daycare facilities in the town have a word. They were recently evaluated by a Berlin foundation at the behest of the state of Brandenburg, and the resulting appraisal wasn't particularly positive. The reasons given in the report: They still read Grimm's fairy tales with the children, which glorify violence; the meals they serve contain too much meat; and they don't celebrate the Festival of Sweets at the end of Ramadan.
There is a fair amount of disbelief as to what the people in Berlin imagine life to be like in Burg. There are no Muslim children in town.
The discussion is essentially over when a man from the committee suddenly says: "I'm happy that things here aren't like they are in Berlin, with the Festival of Sweets and all that stuff. And that such things hopefully won't come here one day. They are things that we don't need, and that Germany doesn't need either. It's becoming clear that it doesn't work. I don't even know what the Festival of Sweets is – a kind of Islamic custom or something.”
After the meeting, we all mill about out on the sidewalk.
One person says: "The word Nazi is also mixed up with people who are just a bit dissatisfied with how some foreigners act here. But that doesn't make them Nazis.2
Another counters: "But you can't really be dissatisfied here. There's no contact with foreigners here."
It's the same man who decided not to take part in the video statement about tolerance because he was worried about being misunderstood by other people in town.
Just Like the Clichés
The Elementary and Secondary School of Burg also has a second name, that of Mina Witkojc. She was a poet who wrote in Lower Sorbian, the language of the local Slavic minority in this corner of Germany, and a native of Burg. During the Nazi period, however, she was forced to leave her home and the Nazis also forbade her from continuing to write. In fact, Hitler's lackeys didn't just oppress Witkojc, they also targeted all members of the Sorb and Wend minorities, who have called the Spreewald region home for centuries. They were hardly able to speak their native languages and some of them were hauled away to concentration camps. They were the ancestors of those who now live in Burg.
Today, the 503 students in the Elementary and Secondary School of Burg are once again allowed to learn Sorbian.
Enlarge image
Teacher Jette Schega teaches a politics class to eighth graders.
Photo: Sebastian Wells / DER SPIEGEL
It is a modern school with smartboards in the classrooms and an organizational app for the teachers. The façade is covered with large windows, with a rainbow flag hanging from the one belonging to one of the teachers' rooms. Not long ago, unknown perpetrators cut the flag off and stapled a German flag to what was left. Mandel, the school principal, called the police and had them drive into the schoolyard, with the officers then searching for clues.
Since then, nobody else has tried to steal the flag.
At 10 am on a Thursday in January, 25 eighth graders are sitting in one of the classrooms. The girls are wearing artificial nails and black hoodies; the boys have parted hair and wear white sneakers. It smells like teenage sweat and sweet deodorant. A list of anti-bullying rules hangs on the wall.
The kids say things like "you jackass" and "give me my shit back." Plenty of slang. They all have extremely German names.
Up front is the teacher, Jette Schega, preparing for a double period of politics, a subject on the Burg curriculum. Today, the focus is on the German constitution.
Schega passes out worksheets that the students turned in during the previous class and which she has now corrected. In one exercise, students were asked to classify certain terms as being "pro human rights" or "against human rights."
Schega says: "A few things caught my eye. A couple times there was a term that was listed in the wrong category. The term is extremism. Some of you included it in the pro human rights category. Could someone who did so please let me know?"
A boy raises his hand.
Schega: "What was your reasoning?"
The boy: "Because extreme … to be honest, I just guessed."
The other students laugh.
Later, Schega asks what the right to equal rights means.
A girl says: "That people aren’t treated like garbage because of small things like skin color or background."
At the school in Burg, there are very few young people who are immediately recognizable as right-wing. But there are a lot of stories.
There is the story of the teacher who, after discussing the Hitler Youth over several lessons asked the class: "So, who would still join them now?" Almost 10 hands shot into the air.
There there’s the music teacher who says that at least one student each year asks him if it is OK to hold a presentation on a right-wing extremist rock band.
And there are the two girls who would blend in completely at any school in Berlin. They have long hair, off-shoulder tops, braces and nose piercings. They think Nazis are stupid. The right-wing boys, they say trip them in the hallways and call them "leftist cunts." Sometimes, they are afraid to ride the bus when they see one of the boys, the girls say.
If you ask around about the kind of teens who landed the Burg school in the headlines, you start hearing stories about fathers in prison and big brothers who are neo-Nazis. They sound a lot like clichés in circulation about right-wing youth in Eastern Germany. The underlying causes have been examined in countless studies, discussed by countless working groups and countless politicians have claimed to take the issue seriously.
But hardly anything seems to have changed.
"Even during East German times, we had families where grandpa made all the decisions," says school director Mandel. "Families where even today, the parents say that dictatorship is a great thing. It’s passed on here in the villages."
"Fucking Vermin! You Traitor!”
On another day, I’m walking up the steps together with Mandel. A boy says: "Look Mr. Mandel, I have a balloon." In his hand, he's holding an inflated condom. Mandel takes it away from him and says: "At least I now know what else you can do with it." Then it pops.
The boy is one of the students seen in the photo giving the Hitler salute. On this day, he's wearing a T-shirt that reads "GERMAN FIGHTER" on the back. He, too, has a very German name. For this article, we’ll call him Heinrich.
Heinrich’s next class is astronomy, which is also its own subject here at the school in Burg.
I sit down at the back of the classroom.
Before the period starts, some boys, who aren’t part of the class, wander in wearing bomber jackets and try to look at me in a very intimidating manner.
Fifteen-year-olds in bomber jackets who think they look a lot scarier than they actually do.
Fifteen-year-olds for whom only a couple of years and a couple of bad decisions are necessary before they, when you run into them on the street, really do scare you because they might punch you in the face.
The lesson starts.
The students throw coins and folders at each other, make monkey noises and hit each other’s heads with their books.
A girl calls over to Heinrich: "Heinrich, Dennis is gay, and he likes you." Heinrich grins and says: "I know."
In the middle of the period, the teacher sends him out. The bomber-jacket boys are out in the hall and they roar in amusement. The teacher asks them, "don’t you have class?" and drags Heinrich back into the room. Before long, the 45 minutes are up.
It’s not that the teacher, an older gentleman, has no authority. He's simply unable to get his students to listen to him for more than 10 seconds at a time.
Indeed, in this moment, it is extremely difficult to imagine how he or any other teacher would even be able to lead a serious discussion with these teenagers about tolerance or racism.
On one occasion, a teacher tells me after class that she feels like everyone in Burg just want things to be "fine." That normality would return after that letter.
The two teachers who wrote it, Max Teske and Laura Nickel, gave a lot of interviews in the weeks after publishing their letter and held a speech at a rally in front of the education authority in Cottbus. They received prizes for their display of civil courage. And they are now gone, having left the school last summer.
On a Thursday in February, Teske is sitting in a café not far from Potsdam. He asks that the exact location not be revealed, and when he starts talking about what his life was like after the letter, it becomes clear why.
Teske says that he and his colleague came up with the idea of writing an open letter after the old school principal didn’t report a Hitler salute during gym class to the school authorities in Cottbus.
He and several other teachers talked about what they could do. Teske was just packing his bag when Nickel came into the teachers’ room and asked him: "Max, should we write a letter and send it to the media?" Two days later, they ate a döner plate together, wrote up the letter in the car and sent it to two local media outlets, an online portal and the public broadcaster RBB.
"We actually thought that it would just be a small letter to the editor," Teske says.
In the months that followed, German security authorities visited them at home to see if they were safe. And on the internet, it was open season on him and Nickel. Stickers with their faces were plastered to the lampposts in Burg, reading: "Fuck off to Berlin."
And then there was the time when he was buying breakfast rolls one weekend. Teske says a group of men ran up to him. "Fucking vermin! You traitor!" He was holding the hand of his four-year-old daughter, who broke out in tears.
"It almost got violent," Teske says. He stops for a bit. "After that, I said: OK, I have to get out of here."
That was in Cottbus, where Teske was living at the time.
In Burg, Teske says, he was once standing together with Nickel in a parking lot when an older woman stopped her car next to them. She was in her mid or late 60s. He says she asked them: "Hey, aren't you those two teachers?" She then said: "I wanted to thank you. It's so important. Finally, someone here said something." Teske says that parents also came up to him on his last day of school in Burg to thank him. "There are really good people in Burg. We had more support than hostility from people in town. There were a lot of people who said: 'I would love to get loud and speak up. But I know that if I do, I'd have to move away.'"
Not many things are obvious in Burg.
When we leave the café after one-and-a-half hours and climb into Teske's car, the song "Schrei nach Liebe" (Scream for Love) by Die Ärtzte is playing, the band's anti-Nazi song about the romantic hope that Nazis would let go of their hate if only people showed them enough love.
German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier said in July that he hoped that the departure of Teske and Nickel from Burg didn't mean that the right-wing extremists had won. But people at the school say that other teachers who supported the letter from Teske and Nickle are now thinking of leaving town.
As I'm standing with the teacher at the lecture, she asks me at some point, "did you see that in the doorframe?"
I turn around.
"It must be relatively new," she says.
Someone has carved a swastika into it.