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Hardly exceptional in Germany tbh
It seems weird to try and keep it quiet though.
Like, sure. He’s German and Opa was a Nazi. Hardly exceptional in Germany.
It’s not exactly surprising and if he just owned it, explicitly disowned it really, then what political attack can you really make? “Opa was a genocidal fool and this is the family history that Germany must reconcile.” Done.
All it takes to disarm this political grenade is to just say “being a Nazi is bad.”
But to seek to obscure it? That means he’s not disowning it. He’s instead relying on respect for patriarchal loyalty. He’s leaning into conservativism or even nativism to create a shield.
And even worse, his political success is directly linked to Opa being a Brownshirt because that’s what drove Opa’s political career, that’s what began the political dynasty.
from what I know from my family, my grandfather was an impressive personality and a successful mayor
Yikes
And even worse, his political success is directly linked to Opa being a Brownshirt because that’s what drove Opa’s political career, that’s what began the political dynasty.
No, Josef Sauvigny began his career as a mayor for the reactionary, deeply Catholic Zentrum party in 1917. He became a Brownshirt and then a full NSDAP party member later on and kept his office until his retirement in 1937. He had been an established politician for 16 years when the Hitlerists seized power, just as Merz has been firmly established way before the AfD was even founded.
I am making that admittedly nitpicky distinction because it is important to understand what Merz himself is doing and what his position in the neofash transformation of Germany is. Like his Hitlerist Opa, he is a conservative willing to fully surrender to fascism, but only once it fully and openly seizes political power. He is an enabler of fascism, a nazi roader, a door opener who wears the (in his case very ill-fitting) mask of respectability to pave the way for the new nazi party. Just as the Zentrum surrendered and sunk into irrelevancy to make way for the NSDAP, he wants to make sure that the CDU/CSU surrenders and sinks into irrelevancy once he has done his share to normalize the AfD and break the last vestiges of bourgeois concerns over their ability to govern, has brushed aside the last objections from petitboug civility liberals and has criminalized any resistance to the left of that. That’s his playbook.
reactionary, deeply Catholic
full NSDAP party member
Yikes
My grandmother wasn’t a nazi, but still a hardcore antisemite, misogynist, and racist who regularly used slurs in public, much to our embarrassment. It’s not hard for me to say she was a piece of shit, so I don’t know why it’s so hard for people to call their nazi relatives pieces of shit.
Yeah, we still have some of Grandma’s stuff she gave to us. That doesn’t undo the harm of her yelling the n-word at our white waitress because her food was different than she thought it would be.
Merz sucks so much. Bigoted, uncharismatic, unintelligent, ugly, whiny, corrupt piece of shit. Not even his own party of conservative geriatrics can stand him because he’s just that unlikable. He has literally zero redeeming qualities. He’s proof that the only qualification you need to succeed under capitalism is complete subservience to capital. As long as you’re willing to sell out everyone else to the 1%, there is no limit to what you can achieve, even if you’re an incompetent, antiquated moron like Friedrich fucking Merz. He even looks like a Nazi official.
wrong spectre dammit
Merz also apparently tried his own mini January 6 coup, in the same town his Nazi grandfather was a mayor.
The file also states that Merz’s grand-daddy “worked diligently“ as an SA storm-trooper (read: street thug, bullies and political killers). In short, he supported the Nazi party “as much as possible”.
Meanwhile, Josef Paul Sauvigny [Merz’s grandfather] featured as mayor of the North Rhine-Westphalia town of Brilon from 1917 to 1937 – Hitler’s coup to power was in 1933.
In 2004 and long before becoming chancellor, Sauvigny’s grandson – Friedrich Merz – was the vice-president of Germany’s conservative party, the CDU.
In the year before that (in 2003), Merz did what his reactionary friends call, “the storming of the red town hall.” It was to eliminate a democratically elected progressive town hall – of Brilon.
With his anti-democratic battle cry of attacking the elected assembly in his local city, Merz had crossed the line. Ever since this anti-democratic incident, Merz has lost every single mayoral election in Brilon.
To his personal infuriation, Merz was never able to repeat what his Nazi Opa had done: become the mayor of Brilon.
Merz’s assault on the town hall was done by specifically alluding to the Nazi grandfather. Hitler’s SA or Sturmabteilung were not called storm troopers for no reason. In 2003, Merz and his troupe wanted to follow Hitler’s SA – implicitly or not.
