The trial of Björn Höcke, the ‘real boss’ of Germany’s far right

In the late 2010s, when I was living in Thuringia, the central German state where Höcke heads the AfD, I heard his name come up all the time. But I didn’t really understand why so many people were worked up about him until one day in May 2019, when I went to see him for myself. State elections were approaching and Höcke was due to address a rally in Apolda, a once-prosperous industrial town about a half-hour drive from the Buchenwald concentration camp memorial. Like many towns in former East Germany, Apolda bears the scars of war, deportations and communism’s collapse. Listless at the best of times, in the rainy weather the streets seemed as if they’d been emptied by a plague. In the old town square, a couple of dozen AfD supporters stood huddled by a food truck, smoking cigarettes and eating sausage. An ageing keyboard duo called Easy Tandem sang Love Is in the Air in heavy accents, occasionally muddied by the jeers of anti-fascist protesters.