Shortly before the passengers on a flight to London leave Germany at the beginning of January, they receive a strange gift. In the queue in front of the baggage check at the small Lübeck-Blankensee airport, an employee offers a CD to take with you, free of charge. There’s a laughing one on the cover white A woman in a dirndl can be seen in a cornfield, title: “No beautiful country – songs that touch the heart”. It is a collection released in 2010 by the record company Deutsche Grammophon/Universal.
There is a whole stack of shrink-wrapped CDs on the counter in front of the employee. I’m on the way to an internship abroad and I’m not the only one in line taking a CD with me. I ask the employee why he is giving them out and where they come from. They come from the owner, he says. He doesn’t know why and smiles a bit pained.
Why are CDs with old German songs distributed to very international passengers before an international flight? The question doesn’t leave me alone, even though I’ve been in Great Britain for a long time.
Maybe because the owner of the airport is not just anyone, but the AfD-affiliated entrepreneur Winfried Stöcker. The 78-year-old bought the small airport in 2016. He became rich with his laboratory diagnostics company Euroimmun, which he founded in Lübeck in 1987 and which he sold in 2017.
Racist and anti-feminist
Winfried Stöcker has been attracting attention for years with vulgar, racist and anti-feminist statements. As early as 2014, he spoke in an interview about the threat of “Islamization of Germany”. subsequently defended the use of the N-word several timesand made deeply misogynistic comments about MeToo in 2017. He did this during the corona pandemic Headlines because he inoculated a self-developed vaccine without approval.
Stöcker has already donated a lot of money to the AfD: 50,000 euros last December, 20,000 euros in 2019 and just before the federal election a whopping 1.5 million – At the time, it was the highest single donation in the party’s history.
Before the election, Stöcker also had letters distributed in Lübeck and the surrounding area and near Görlitz (where he owns a department store). These promote voting for the AfD – with the logo of its airport. It was discussed whether this was an impermissible party donation. Stöcker confirmed to NDR at the time that the letter came from him. The airport, on the other hand, distanced itself briefly: “As an airport, we see ourselves as politically neutral, we look forward to seeing our passengers.”
Songs that sound in the oak ground
The airport now responds similarly tight-lipped to the taz inquiry about who arranged for the CDs to be distributed and why they do such a thing at all. They “do not want to provide any information,” said a spokesman. A few days later, Winfried Stöcker himself wrote, which I wrote about his “Stöcker laboratory” reached: “I’ve already let you know that it’s none of your business.”
Because he doesn’t want to say anything about it, we can only speculate whether and, if so, why Stöcker decided to give away “No Beautiful Land” of all things.
What kind of CD is that anyway? The eponymous first track “No Beautiful Land in This Time” was first published in 1840. The text is not explicitly about Germany, but about linden trees in the evening, about songs that sound in the oaks, and about God. The song can be found in numerous German-language songbooks, including those of Hitler Youth and des Federal German girls.
I’ve already let you know that it’s none of your business
Airport owner Winfried Stöcker in an email to the taz
Covered by Heino and Nena
But in 2011 also the German weekly newspaper The time included the song in his “folk songs” collection.
“No Beautiful Land” has been covered many times, including by Heino and Nena. In the 2015 film about his life, communist resistance fighter Georg Elser hums the song as he is interrogated by the Nazis for the first time. The CD features a version by Peter Schreier, a tenor born in Meißen in 1935.
Other songs featured on the CD are: “Walking is the miller’s pleasure” and “There were two royal children”. Other performers include the Dutch soprano Elly Ameling, the Regensburger Domspatzen and the Vienna Boys’ Choir.
Dusty and cheap
Roughly summarized, they are more or less well-known German songs, interpreted by respectable musicians who were at the peak of their careers between the 1960s and 80s and are not exactly suspected of being right-wing radicals.
It’s not a right-wing rock CD like the ones neo-Nazis would distribute in schoolyards. It’s a somewhat dusty and somewhat cheap-looking compilation of German songs.
And yet. A version of the theme song has recently been found on YouTube, where it was uploaded a few days ago with an AI-generated cover: One white Laughing heterosexual family in traditional costumes singing “No Beautiful Country” on a meadow with a German flag. The platform has been full of similar content for some time now, titles in Fraktur script – songs from Germany.