“And the skinhead will be gay, the guy with dreads will be a white-supremacist, and the guy in the windcheater will be a vicious-fighting anti-fa. “You can see a skinhead, a normal looking guy with a bike and a Jack Wolfskin windcheater, and someone with dreads,” says Henning, one of our translators, later. 'Nipsters' is one coinage ('Nazi hipsters') who make online vegan cooking videos and wear Converse instead of steel cap boots. The Fourth Reich stylings were pushing away too many potential recruits, so they’ve civilianised and gone low-key. The German far-right has become lighter on the symbolism, part of an organic rebrand. Behind a flag with a snarling wolf standard on it, the anti-fas seemed to be only just restraining themselves from rushing the rival attendees. The anti-migrant protestors have to run their gauntlet, very close to a front line of faces covered with mufflers. The flags and placards and the indistinct energy that comes with thousands of people heading to the same place makes it feel like a football game, with the anti-fascists the away fans.ĭresden's “anti-fas” have a reputation as brawlers Black Bloc types who see physically intimidating skinheads and hooligans as part of their job. We are funnelled through a small number of entrances, where counter-demonstrators have set themselves at close range. This metal ring has turned the central Theaterplatz into a kind of stadium. Their dozens of empty vans can be lined up, bumper-to-bumper, to act as barricades, fencing off the centre of Dresden. The police are silent in the middle of shouting crowds, but audible because there are so many of them.
Violence in a crowd has a way of being hard to pick out, so this sound, this rumble, becomes something to avoid. It clicks and rubs whenever the cops start running, the first portent of trouble. It’s all-black, real dystopian sci-fi chic, somewhere between sports apparel and medieval armour, with articulated knee pads and visors.