Someone had sprayed a gallows on the front of his house, along with Herbst's name and the word "Volksverraeter" — traitor to the German people.
"Now we indeed have a new situation," Herbst said in a telephone interview the day after the incident. "You start worrying about your safety and that of your family."
The incident reflects a growing public tension in Germany. While it's the extremists on the far right who are grabbing most of the headlines, mainstream Germans are increasingly being drawn into inflammatory rhetoric — and at times anti-foreigner sentiment. The country's normally staid — some might say dull — political debates have in particular become inflamed with vitriol amid the influx of hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers in recent months.
Nazi comparisons, once considered beyond the pale of polite political discussion in a country still grappling with its genocidal past, have become a common slur. The co-founder of anti-Islam group PEGIDA, Lutz Bachmann, last week likened Germany's justice minister to Nazi demagogue Joseph Goebbels; in response, a senior official in Justice Minister Heiko Maas' party labeled Bachmann a "crazy fascist."
"The situation that we have at the moment is leading to a split in society where people are drifting apart," said Joachim Trebbe, a communications researcher at Berlin's Free University. » | Frank Jordans, Associated Press | Berlin | Saturday, November 14, 2015
