reedom is truly in a bad state in a country where the news that a regularly planned party congress was able to take place, despite massive threats against it from an activist class, is greeted as good news. It is surely also in a bad state if popular cartoonists face cancel culture and threats to their livelihood simply for being too sympathetic to the populist Right.
The cartoonist is Bernd Zeller, whom I met just days before the AfD party congress was set to begin, in Jena, in Germany’s eastern state of Thuringia, a few kilometers from Thuringia’s capital, Erfurt (which hosted the AfD congress).
Yellow vests hanging from window sills and balconies in the small university town caught my attention. What did they mean? “Resistance to the Other Party—the big opposition whose congress they want to stop,” Zeller explained when I asked him.
Zeller is one of Germany’s best-known caricaturists and the author of several satirical books. Highly successful in his field, he has drawn and written for major publications ranging from Titanic and Spiegel Online to the popular “Harald Schmidt Late Night Show,” where he worked as a gag writer from the mid-1990s until 2014.
But the satire business has grown hard in our age of cancel culture.
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