For reasons that I hope I don’t need to go into in any depth, displays of patriotism in Germany are viewed with deep suspicion by progressives and the various state and national government agencies. Even doing something like displaying the German national flag in any context other than a football match can draw official condemnation:
Many readers may not know about the German Stolzmonat, but I promise the backstory is worth it, so please bear with me.
As all of you do know, via some opaque imperial decree, every June across the Western world has become the monstrosity known as “Pride Month”. It is an occasion for the raucous celebration of every sexual minority and deviant proclivity imaginable. There are rainbow flags, lewd street parades, bizarre political speeches and all manner of astroturfed queer activism. I’m told that the festivities were massively scaled back this year in the Anglosphere, perhaps because they are awkward for elections, but on the Continent all such trends arrive very late and we had nothing but the usual excesses.
The eager flying of the rainbow colours is especially obnoxious in Germany, where the display of one’s national flag – except perhaps in a sports context – is discouraged and politically suspect. Some Germans have therefore responded to the perennial irritation of Pride Month by declaring June to be “Stolzmonat” instead. “Stolzmonat” is merely the German translation of “Pride Month”, but our clever cultural hackers have appropriated the term to indicate not gay but national pride. Those who celebrate Stolzmonat do not conduct any lavish public events and they give no speeches. Most of them simply change their social media profile pictures to present the colours black, red and gold. Now and again they also tweet the hashtag #Stolzmonat.
It’s primarily a German act of social media protest, but anybody can participate:
Enough people observe Stolzmonat to cause the corresponding hashtag to rise to the top of Twitter trends now and again. This has given the Rainbow Brigade indigestion, and as there is precious little division between the Rainbow Brigade and the German state, the domestic intelligence services of Lower Saxony have decided it is time to issue an ex cathedra condemnation of Stolzmonat – eight days after it ended. […] Below I translate this ridiculous woman’s statement. As you read, please remember that this is not just some random trans activist, but a functionary of the Lower Saxony Office for the Protection of the Constitution – an agency endowed with considerable powers to surveil and harass ordinary Germans for their alleged intellectual offences against “democracy” and the constitution:
Stop scrolling! We’re here to tell you all you need to know about the new right-wing campaign “Stolzmonat“. “Stolzmonat” is actually just the German translation of “Pride Month”. That’s what members of our queer community [1] say; they want to make the term “Stolzmonat” into what it should actually be – an expression of diversity, tolerance and strengthening of the rights of queer people.
Last year, the hashtag Stolzmonat temporarily landed at number one in the X-Trends – albeit as a polemical term of the extreme right wing. This year, the New Right in particular called for participation in Stolzmonat. The LGBTQIA+ community [2] is among the archetypal enemies of the right-wing extremist scene. In addition to discrimination against queer people, nationalism – that is to say, exaggerated national pride with simultaneous devaluation of other nations and the rejection of the values of liberal democracy – are core elements of Stolzmonat. They appropriate the German flag as a symbol for this campaign and associate it with the aforementioned elements. The new right use Queer hostility to associate themselves with existing prejudices in society and to activate ideologically like-minded people to participate in Stolzmonat. This is intended to create the impression of a large counter-movement to Pride Month. They use the hashtag and the German flag instead of the rainbow flag in their profile pictures. One of their messages: queer people are not a part of Germany. Right-wing extremists are thus pursuing a metapolitical approach [3] to exert influence on the pre-political sphere [4] and thus lay the foundation for anti-democratic positions.
There are so many dumb statements floating in this verbal morass that I don’t know where to begin. So just briefly: 1) The alphabet soup community is not “among the archetypal enemies of the right-wing extremist scene”. Pride Month has, however, became a deeply ridiculous and shallow cultural celebration of a great many things that are wrong with our society and a lot of people are extremely tired of it. 2) “Nationalism” in no way entails the “devaluation of other nations”, nor does it require the “rejection of the values of liberal democracy”. Liberal democracy grew up alongside nationalism, after all, and the Stolzmonat organisers explicitly encourage non-Germans to display their own national colours during Stolzmonat. 3) It is obviously not the point of Stolzmonat to argue that “queer people are not a part of Germany”.
