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Bavarian Prime Minister Markus Söder with a beer mug at the CSU's political Ash Wednesday in February 2023
Photo: Peter Kneffel / dpa
In the 1990s, I had a distant acquaintance in my hometown of Würzburg who wore his hair shoulder-length; like me, he was a psychology student. He came from another city and regularly traveled home by train on weekends. The man had severe health fears and therefore stayed away from any kind of drugs.
That didn't change the fact that he regularly had the same experience at the Würzburg train station: While crossing the station hall, he was stopped by patrol police officers there, asked for his ID, searched and asked to also make his luggage available for search.
There were also free health tips. A police officer unpromptedly explained to my acquaintance, who was, as always, completely drug-free, while his colleague was rummaging through his backpack: “Smoking weed makes you stupid. The brain cells burst.” As a psychology student, my friend knew much better than the officer, but wisely kept quiet. Long hair and a big mouth are a particularly dangerous combination at Bavarian train stations.
Schnauzers and leather jackets
In the other direction, the clichés were of greater practical relevance: At the time, it was still an open secret among Bavarian clubbers, shared with much hilarity, that Bavarian plainclothes police officers could often be recognized in the nightlife by their double-decker look with a mustache and leather jacket.
All of this happened at a time when many German cities had long since smelled like grass as a matter of course, when ecstasy was consumed like Smarties not only in Berlin techno clubs, and hairstyles were no longer a reliable indication in most civilized nations political opinions or consumer behavior were interpreted. But we were in Bavaria.
First an alcohol accident, then transport minister
The country whose former interior minister once explained that if you drink slowly enough, you can still drive a car after two pints of beer (referring to Günther Beckstein, CSU). The country in which you (in this case Otto Wiesheu, CSU) could first kill someone with a blood alcohol level of 1.99 and then still become transport minister. Incidentally, 80 percent of all personal injury accidents caused by alcohol occur in men.
In this very country, phrases like “irresponsible,” “political fall from grace,” “danger to the population,” and “harmful” are currently being used to describe this other intoxicating substance – cannabis. But it's not about facts, it's about Bavaria.
Many people who grew up in this state know stories like the one above or have experienced them themselves. The extent and effort with which the repression against the much more harmless substance was and is carried out in the country of culturally anchored beer tent intoxication is remarkable. This extent and the associated penetrance of instruction ("the brain cells burst") cannot be explained by the actual danger of the material.
More stoners than the national average
By the way, the whole thing hasn't been very successful to date: nationwide, 8.8 percent of adults aged 18 to 64 have consumed cannabis products in the past 12 months - in Bavaria it was 9.1 percent. What could the hard-working but at the same time so unsuccessful Bavarian police do with the resources they put into persecuting a tenth of their own population! Bavaria will “certainly not be a cozy place to smoke weed,” said Söder’s health minister recently. Judith Gerlach is right: it has long been one.
“Long-haired stoners” is of course a cliché that has fallen out of date, and it was already the case in the 1990s. It's not just in Bavaria that insurance brokers, doctors, craftsmen and human resources staff occasionally smoke weed. We are not dealing with reality here, but with an echo.
The echo of the era in which Franz-Josef-Strauss ruled Bavaria for what felt like decades as prime minister with an absolutist habitus. Strauss, who liked to come home “drunk” (according to his own wife). It's as if in some people's minds time stood still around 1969, when "long-haired bums" were viewed as a serious threat to Western civilization, but an alcohol-related total crash was part of the male after-work repertoire (of course, in some places this is still the case today).
Yesterday “gambler”, today “left-green”
The “gamer” clichés are apparently still very much alive, for example in the head of Markus Söder. And with the AfD, because it is precisely this association that the cliché bomb “left-green filthy” that has unfortunately now been adopted by some in the CDU/CSU is intended to evoke. Even if she doesn't want to fit in with correctly dressed and coiffed people like Cem Özdemir, Robert Habeck or Annalena Baerbock. Söder, Hubert Aiwanger, Friedrich Merz (“Kreuzberg is not Germany”), in short: everyone who is currently trying to shift the political discourse further to the right is doing so by relying on this cliché, this straw man. The civil horror of the seventies, but as virtual reality.
Like the grotesque, totalitarian-seeming “ban” on including both genders in schools, universities and authorities, these clichés are an element of the perceived Bavarian identity that Markus Söder in particular seems to be constantly groping for. It's tiring to watch him. “Markus Söder no longer surprises, he’s boring,” said Robert Pausch a few weeks ago in a much-noticed text in “Zeit”.
50 plus X? That was once
The days of Strauss, in which “50 percent plus X” and the CSU's corresponding statements of dominance were still justified, are long gone. But Söder obviously still sees it as opportune to pursue identity politics instead of politics. What the long-haired bums were back then, the Greens are today (they're probably the same people!): culture-destroyers, cross-talkers who need to be punished with suspicion, who allow smoking weed and want to talk differently than you do. An attack on the perceived Bavarian identity back then as today. Of course, this is as wrong today as it was then.
Seen through this lens, the Bavarian "gender ban" and the attempt to somehow overturn cannabis legalization, at least to do nothing to change the climate of fear among Bavarian stoners, seem no less hypocritical, but logical: Söder is obviously trying to use the anti- For once, his party's grass furor seems to be even more reactionary than the Free Voters. Because their federal program is open to release. We want to ban even more than that! The populist Söder is trying to be more populist than the populist Aiwanger, who is pressuring him from the right.
“Freedom” to switch on and off
In reality, the CSU, which likes to call the Greens a “prohibition party,” is of course the real prohibition party: cannabis ban, gender ban, dancing ban. It is sheer mockery that Söder, of all people, constantly talks about “freedom” and that “Germans are grown up enough” to “decide for themselves what they want to eat or how they want to speak” (Söder 2023). Many Bavarians will no longer have this freedom in the future. This has nothing to do with logic, but with Bavarian identity politics.
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Söder is also not concerned with rationality: alcohol, unlike cannabis, kills tens of thousands every year. And yet the Prime Minister is constantly photographed with beer mugs in his hand. It's never about any principles, because principles are incompatible with Söder's style. For him, as for Friedrich Merz, “freedom” is just a phrase, an assertion without consequence that can be turned on or off at any time as it suits the moment.
It's always about identity as a substitute for real politics. And this identity is that of an older, grumpy man at the regulars' table who no longer understands the world and is increasingly disgusted by it. The identity of the people to whom Hubert Aiwanger speaks in his shouted speeches full of nonsense, the identity of the “As long as you stick your feet under my table” patriarch.
Unfortunately, the identity political fight against the echo of a cliché that is over 50 years old is not even partially suitable as a guide for sensible politics in the complicated present.