The Tote Bag Said Yogurt
In January 2014, roughly 700 neo-Nazis marched through Magdeburg—the capital of Saxony-Anhalt in eastern Germany—to mark the anniversary of the Allied bombing of the city in 1945. This happens every year in various German cities; it’s a reliable calendar date for the far-right. What made this particular march worth discussing wasn’t the ideology, which was the same as always, but the aesthetic.
Gauged ears. Uncontrolled beards. Canvas tote bags. Converse sneakers. One demonstrator’s bag read, in German, "Please don’t push me, I have yogurt in the bag"—a joke that had been circulating for years as a piece of self-aware hipster signaling, a way of performing harmlessness and low-stakes living. On a neo-Nazi march through a German city, it reads differently.
Photographer Jesko Wrede documented the march. Looking at his images without context, you’d place these people in a Berlin neighborhood without a second thought—Neukölln, Prenzlauer Berg, somewhere with good flat whites and expensive vintage. The visual grammar is borrowed wholesale from a subculture that considers itself the antithesis of everything these people represent.
Which is exactly the problem, and it’s an uncomfortable one. Hipster aesthetics—the studied eclecticism, the ironic distance, the mixing of surface elements from any tradition that appeals without any obligation to actually inhabit those traditions—turns out to be ideologically hollow enough to be available to anyone. Including fascists. A culture of irony provides perfect cover for people who’d prefer not to be legible.
About 1,500 counter-protesters were also in Magdeburg that day, which at least gets the numbers pointing the right way. But I keep thinking about the tote bag. "I have yogurt in the bag." The joke almost still works. That’s what’s unsettling.