ARD documentary: “Right-wing paradise”: xenophobes abroad

The (literally) dominant discourse of our day has created a very specific image of refugees. And this certainly has different characteristics, but certainly none of someone like Stephan Rebs. As a guy who is definitely Central European, his broad Bavarian may not really fit the right-wing narrative of southern invaders that populists from the CDU to the AfD are spreading. Children and cones also look more native than immigrants. But they aren’t. Not in Hungary.

The small family of the southern German horticultural entrepreneur fled there. A little bit in front of the tax office, he openly admits. But more than that, better: those he describes as the greatest security risk to his old homeland. “Here we are at immigration,” explains Stephan Rebs, explaining why he didn’t leave his wife to Rosenheim alone. In Viktor Orbán’s racially pure empire, however, this is not a problem. Because “here it’s the Hungarian’s turn first.” That’s right, he thinks, together with a growing number of like-minded people, whose trail the ARD media library is following in its “Weltspiegel documentary”.

Nine years after “Weltspiegel” correspondent Anne Tillack reported urgently about Syrian civil war refugees in front of Budapest’s Eastern train station, the BR editor traveled 100 kilometers southwest to Lake Balaton to meet gender-madness and wokeness refugees like the Rebs family in the “dreamland for right-wing conservatives.” to meet. According to the subtitle, a “right-wing paradise” that has become increasingly “Christian, heterosexual” and, above all, “white!” since Orbán’s illiberal time in power. This is how the author describes her report on “Germans in Hungary”, the reasons for their emigration are genuine amazing mental acrobatics succeed.

Ultimately, immigrants justify their emigration to a foreign country, where they are now naturally strangers themselves, with the excess of foreign immigration in their own country. Faced with this adventurous dialectic, a filmmaker could easily lose her composure. But Anne Tillack doesn’t. On the contrary. Alongside her colleague Judith Schacht, she remains on an equal footing with almost all of the protagonists. No matter what color.

A “right-wing paradise” that has become increasingly “Christian, heterosexual” and, above all, “white!” since Orbán’s time in power.

She wants to “hear people’s opinions without commenting on them,” says the journalist, looking into the camera. Even if their opinions may be “incompatible with my worldview.” And so Tillack treats the populism-prone Rebs family with the same warmth as a drag queen in Budapest or two heavily armed citizen militiamen on border patrol. And this despite the fact that the refugees would be shot because – respect, contempt for humanity: “They are not Europeans” for whom “laws or nice words work.” One man’s conclusion: “The only thing that helps is a gun.”

It is all the more irritating how calm Anne Tillack remains in the face of such monstrosities. On the one hand. Because on the other hand, it is precisely this distance that provides them with professional ethics – even if their limits are constantly being tested. For example, in a Hungarian market – completely alienated by Germans – where an emigrated xenophobe first regurgitates the fairy tale of the Peruvian cycle path, financed with his tax money, and then claims to have been sentenced to an 800 euro fine because he did the n*** *-word – which of course he says so often that the direction can hardly keep up with the bleeping over.

In a similar vein, an expatriate real estate agent who accompanies Anne Tillack and sells luxury or junk properties to her compatriots unnecessarily raves about the local butcher’s “gypsy roast.” Provocation as sport. You’re almost relieved when someone a few market stalls away says cautiously, “The whole situation in Germany is no longer good for me.” One view is also made clear by Anne Tillack’s remarkable documentation, which is of course absolutely legitimate.

More legitimate than right-wing regulars’ tables with which the Swiss Ignaz Bearth is currently plastering Hungary. Sounds harmless, but these are places where he ideologically infiltrates German emigrants. According to Tillack’s research, the neo-Nazi opened almost 30 such well-attended “bases” on Lake Balaton alone. The Germans in Orbán’s paradise are not just right-wing migrant refugees and those seeking safety. They are gathering to support the attack by right-wing populists from all over the world on democracy, pluralism and diversity. Stephan Rebs has already brought friends over. And his craft business is also running. A German customer for whom he was repairing the roof also found everything at home terrible. Except the AfD.

Available in the ARD media library