somebody pulled the Pride memorial tree out of the ground. the next day the AfD won a German state.

via France 24 and AFP, Al Jazeera and TheColu.mn.

the attack, and the tree

On the night of July 25 a man drove a van into the crowd at Berlin's Pride march, on a footpath through the Tiergarten called the Ahornsteig, then got out with a machete. A 65-year-old woman from Poland was killed. About thirty people were hurt. The van hit a tree hard enough that the tree had to be felled.

Ahornsteig means maple path. So in August the Mitte district planted a maple.

They put it back in the same ground, with a metal grate around the base so people could leave cards and photographs and flowers without wrecking the roots, and they set a bench beside it painted in rainbow stripes. District mayor Stefanie Remlinger said it mattered to give the site a dignified presence. It is about as small and as decent as public grief gets.

the bench, then the tree

Last week somebody tore the wooden slats off that bench. Police said it took "considerable physical violence." Every other bench on that stretch was left alone. Whoever did it walked past them to get there.

Then, on the eve of Sunday's state election in Saxony-Anhalt, somebody came back and pulled the tree out of the ground.

We are not going to tell you the same hands did both, or that anyone has connected either to a party. Nobody has. What we will say is that a person in Berlin looked at a calendar, picked that weekend, and went and got a shovel.

the afd won saxony-anhalt

On Sunday night the AfD won Saxony-Anhalt. Exit polls for the broadcaster ARD put the far-right party at 44.5 percent against 18.5 for the governing CDU. It narrowly missed an outright majority in the state parliament, and every other party still refuses to govern with it, so what actually happens in Magdeburg is unsettled. The number is not unsettled. It is the strongest result a far-right party has posted in a German state since the war.

Ulrich Siegmund, who led the ticket there: "We have achieved exactly what we wanted to achieve. We have made history in this state."

He was not coy about what he was selling. The AfD's hundred-day program for the state includes banning rainbow flags from public schools and flying the German one instead. On queer policy his line was that Saxony-Anhalt has "a tenfold increase in cases where children do not know what gender they are," that "this cannot be normal," and that "we want to abolish it. We want children to remain children." Nationally the party wants to repeal the law letting trans people correct their legal gender and scrap the federal commissioner for queer rights.

Susan Sziborra-Seidlitz, the Green candidate in the state, said it at normal volume: "This is a real danger for a minority in the country, for a group that isn't as small as many think."

Back at the hole in the Tiergarten, Werner Graf, who heads the Greens in Berlin's parliament, said nothing at all to the person who dug it. He said this to everyone else: "I say to all the queer people in this city: you are not alone." And then: "We will replant this tree, as often as necessary."

The Mitte district council says the bench is getting replaced too, because it "stands for our freedom and for solidarity with the queer community."

the arithmetic of replanting

Which leaves the arithmetic, and the arithmetic is the only cheerful thing here. Killing the tree takes one angry person and one night. Replanting it takes a district office, a budget line, a work order, a truck and four people who get paid to show up, and Berlin has already committed to doing that for as long as this goes on. One of those operations gets tired. It is not the one with the truck.

Somebody in that city is going to spend the rest of their life driving past a maple they cannot get rid of.