A group of prominent Germans in the field of arts and culture have signed a letter urging parliament not to appoint a member of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party to chair the Bundestag’s culture and media committee. They warn that such a move could jeopardise the country’s “free and diverse cultural and media landscape”.
Signatories include Hermann Parzinger, the president of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation; the film director Jeanine Meerapfel; the director of the Deutsches Theater in Berlin, Ulrich Khuon; the actress Iris Berben; and the conductor Christian Höppner.
“We cannot allow the AfD to inject its nationalist poison into debates in one of the most sensitive and important places in our parliamentary system,” the letter said. It warned that the AfD must be prevented from “downplaying the gruesomeness of the Nazi era by belittling Germany’s culture of remembering the past”.
The populist AfD won 12.6% of the vote in the German election on 24 September, entering the national parliament for the first time. By securing 93 seats, the AfD becoming the third-biggest party in the 709-seat Bundestag (lower house). Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union and its Bavarian sister-party remain the biggest parliamentary group with 246 seats. The chairs of the Bundestag committees are allocated to parties in relation to their strength in parliament. The current chairman of the culture committee is a member of the Social Democratic Party.
Björn Höcke, one of the most extreme AfD officials, caused outrage earlier this year by describing the Holocaust memorial in Berlin as “a monument of shame in the heart of the capital” and railed against what he termed “our mental state of a totally defeated people”.
