The Unremarkable Face of the Monday March

PEGIDA—Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the Occident—started holding Monday marches in Dresden in late 2014, and one of the more unsettling things about it was how relentlessly ordinary its representatives looked. Kathrin Oertel, who became one of its public faces after appearing on Günther Jauch’s prime-time talk show, could have been anyone’s neighbor. That was sort of the whole political project: to present ethnic nationalism with a middle-management face, to insist on being just a normal concerned citizen rather than what the placards actually said.

A makeup artist named Toyah Diebel made a tutorial demonstrating precisely how to achieve that look—the specific beige ordinariness of someone who swears she isn’t a radical. The satire is almost too precise to land as a joke. There’s something genuinely unnerving about how little distance exists between the look of a PEGIDA spokesperson and the look of someone you’d pass in a supermarket queue without a second thought.

It’s always easier when the people doing ugly things look the part. When they look like your dentist’s receptionist, you have to sit with something more uncomfortable about where the ugliness actually lives—not in some identifiable otherness, but in the perfectly unremarkable face staring back from the bathroom mirror every morning.