Berlin: Germany's most notorious far-right politician, Bjorn Hocke, a man who has called the Holocaust memorial in Berlin "a monument of shame", was furious when he woke up one morning to find a section of the memorial built to scale outside his bedroom window.
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It was November 2017. Hocke sued the artist who had secretly rented the neighbouring property and prepared the stunt over many months. He tried to have him evicted. He even launched criminal proceedings against him. But to no avail. The rental lease is open-ended.
And the replica of the Holocaust memorial remains.
But where civil and criminal proceedings have failed, a state prosecutor has stepped in, it emerged on Wednesday. The prosecutor's office in Hocke's eastern home state, Thuringia, is investigating the artist, Philipp Ruch, on suspicion of "forming a criminal association", a legal provision known as Paragraph 129, which gives the state far-reaching surveillance rights and is normally applied to criminal groups and suspected extremists.
The investigation, which was revealed in the answer to a routine parliamentary question, is now raising questions about whether the law is being leveraged by far-right sympathisers to crack down on their opponents. Hocke's party, the far-right Alternative for Germany, the country's third-largest party in Parliament, is particularly strong in the former communist East of the country.
"We have to ask the question: Is there a political intention that overlaid the judicial intention?" said Steffen Dittes, the lawmaker of the Left Party who made the parliamentary request to see a list of all those who were being investigated under Paragraph 129.
In the reply he was sent, there were a dozen investigations listed in two tables. In one table, designated for terrorist suspects, groups like the Islamic State and al-Shabab came up repeatedly; the other table included were a group of Holocaust deniers, a few far-right and far-left extremists — and then: "a group of action artists."
"It sends a devastating political signal," Dittes said.
Dittes noted that the investigation of Ruch was opened in November 2017, a week after he had unveiled the replica memorial and just a couple of days after Hocke had publicly accused Ruch and his artist collective of being "a terrorist association".
Dittes also said the prosecutor in charge of the investigation had built a reputation for being soft on far-right offenders, for example letting it slide when a notorious German song about "a subway to Auschwitz" was sung at an Alternative for Germany election rally in 2017.
"This does not look like a mistake or an exception," Dittes said.
Martin Zschachner, the prosecutor in Thuringia in charge of the investigation, denied that it was politically motivated. In a telephone interview, Zschachner said he was investigating Ruch because he was suspected of illegally "spying" on Hocke.
"On their internet page they said they wanted to spy on him, so the question is whether that happened or was planned," Zschachner said. Sixteen months later, he said, the investigation was continuing.
Meanwhile, the domestic intelligence service of Thuringia concluded long ago that neither Ruch nor his artist collective, the Berlin-based Centre for Political Beauty, was extremist. "It's political art, not extremism," said Stephan Kramer, who heads the agency.
Ruch aims to offend. He has been sued countless times over his art, but so far he has never lost a case. And never before has anyone raised any suspicions of him being a criminal or involved in extremist activity, he said.
"That is the scary part," Ruch said on Wednesday. "They could be observing me, tapping my phone, following me around because they don't like my art and my politics." He plans legal action against Zschachner.
The idea of making a replica memorial outside of Hocke's house came to Ruch in January 2017. That month, Hocke spoke at a rally in Dresden and questioned the guiding precept of modern Germany — the country's culpability in World War II and the Holocaust — calling on Germans to make a "180 degree" turn in the way they viewed their history.
Germans were "the only people in the world to plant a monument of shame in the heart of their capital", he had said, referring to the Holocaust memorial in Berlin.
In addition to building the replica memorial, Ruch and his colleagues pretended to monitor Hocke's family home from a fake spy room with old electronic equipment that was also open to visitors.
Sometimes, the artists would dress up as spies in trench coats and filmed Hocke's house. Once, they even rifled through his trash to get a DNA sample to determine Hocke's own racial purity. (It turned out he has Polish and Portuguese ancestry.)
Another time, they offered €5,000 (about $A7,900) to anyone willing to provide a witness statement that Hocke has written under a pseudonym for a newsletter associated with a convicted neo-Nazi who lives two villages away.
Ruch defended these measures as stunts aimed at raising awareness about how extremist Hocke's views were in his opinion.
Two years later, Germany's domestic intelligence office has in fact put Hocke and a number of other prominent members of the Alternative for Germany under observation for suspected extremism.
"What we did as fiction the state is now doing in reality," Ruch said.
Ruch has known since February that he was the subject of some investigation because a government-sponsored organisation that had invited him to speak at a conference abruptly uninvited him on February 12.
In a letter, the organisation said it had been informed by the Interior Ministry about a criminal investigation regarding his person.
Ruch himself had not been informed that he was under investigation. It was only when Dittes contacted him last month that he began to make inquiries. But when he requested to see his file, he was denied access "because the investigations are still ongoing".
The New York Times
