In Germany, a flag re-appears

Perhaps just a historian's itch, but I am always trying to see what is going on in Germany under the surface. In spite of having spent years of my life soaking in their culture, I could never get their language, their food always left me sluggish, and their culture ... well ... just German. The only thing I got from them that stuck was a distinct dislike of bad beer.

In spite of my shortcomings, I have still been trying to keep at least a bit of my time trying to track the German response to the Paris attacks. As others have observed, there is a good chance that real civil unrest against the invasion of military aged men from Syria will break out in the open in Germany first.

With the toxic cocktail that the Merkel led government has created, not a bad bet.

In any event, what I thought was just a bad color exposure on the Norwegian flag for some reason flying in German marches early on in the year, in this article from the DailyMailUK ostensibly about France's Le Pen, they cover a bit about the latest marches in Dresden from the growing German protest party PEGIDA (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the Occident), in German (Patriotische Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes).

Nordic cross in German colors ... wait ... I know that flag ... and then it hit me.

That is the flag of two of my heroes; Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Colonel Claus Philipp Maria Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg.

That is the Josef Wirmer flag. The flag of the German resistance in 1944.

I guess that this is progress for marches of the "far-right" in Germany. No more crypto-nazi or Imperial German flags. No, the flag of the only real German resistance to Hitler in WWII. Led by the only people who resisted him, the old established elite families and the non-Communist/Socialist/SDP center-left like Wirmer.

Meaning? Not sure, but as PEGIDA has in a way adopted it, makes one want to keep a closer eye.

I have some concerns about PEGIDA, but what are the Germans who love their nation and its culture to do? The SDP won't help them, they see all these new people dependent on government handouts as potential voters like all Socialist parties in the West do - including the American Democrat Party. The CDU won't do anything as long as Merkel is in power, and the CSU is in Bavaria. The Greens are as worthless as those musty ex-Communists in Die Linke. Other right to center-right parties? ALFA I don't know much about. AfD is ineffectual, and the party I would have been a member of most of my life if I were German, the FDP - well, it has kind of imploded over the last decade on par with the Walker run for President of the USA.

Germany. Always watch Germany.