“Make Them Dumb Again” in Wedding

Wedding’s schools are already running on emergency fumes, which is exactly why the AfD loves them: nothing flatters a puny authoritarian fantasy like a corridor full of exhausted adults pretending the ceiling stain is temporary. In this neighborhood, the daily curriculum is not Bildung, it is containment. Broken staff rosters. Overcrowded classes. Children arriving with missed sleep, missed meals, missed everything. The party’s promise to make the state “smaller” sounds tidy only if you enjoy watching public life get stripped naked and then blamed for being underdressed.

At a primary school near Leopoldplatz, where Turkish families, new arrivals, and old Berlin households share the same fluorescent humiliation, one administrator described the work as “damage control with no lifeguards and a district office that keeps sending thoughts instead of staff.” She asked not to be named, because she is employed by the state and therefore expected to absorb its failures with professional grace, like a hotel maid cleaning up after men who call themselves investors. “We are already at the edge,” she said. “If they cut more, they are not reforming education. They are handing the classroom to the loudest idiot with a slogan and a voter card.”

That is the local charm of the AfD’s school politics: they dress up deprivation as virtue. They talk about standards, order, performance, and the old disinfected fantasy of a classroom where every child sits upright, silent, and grateful to be managed by someone with a laminated opinion. In reality, their program is a strip tease for the state: remove the support staff, remove the money, remove the slack, then stand there with a straight face while the building sweats through its shirt. And naturally the private vultures appear next, all polished shoes and philanthropic grins, ready to sell tutoring, “coaching,” and selective escape routes to anyone who can pay for salvation in installments.

Parents in Wedding already know the ritual. They are comparing transfer rules the way broke people compare pharmacy receipts. They swap rumors in schoolyards, stairwells, and parent WhatsApp chats with the fervor of evacuees mapping a floodplain. One mother near Seestraße said the whole thing felt obscene: “They keep talking about values, but they vote for people who make the system harder to use and easier to game. Then the same people complain about disorder while outsourcing their children’s future to whoever can afford a cleaner address. It is very German. Bureaucracy as foreplay, then no one finishes.”

The type of AfD voter who finds this persuasive is easy to spot: the little landlord in a blazer that fits his resentment; the man with a spreadsheet for a conscience; the self-appointed neighborhood realist who says “I’m not racist, I’m practical” while demanding other people’s children be disciplined into invisibility. He wants the school to be strict, the district office to be efficient, the migrants to be grateful, and the bill to land somewhere else. That is the whole erotic engine of the thing: order as a fetish, austerity as a flirtation, and public service expected to perform like a desperate intern after midnight.

The district office, to its credit, continues speaking in the dialect of managed embarrassment. It says it is “monitoring staffing levels” and “responding to enrollment pressure,” which in administrative English means: we have noticed the fire and would like you to admire our clipboard. The education administration offers its standard lullaby about support “within existing resources,” a phrase so hollow it could be used to store coats. Every sentence sounds like a polite refusal dressed up as concern, which is exactly how the system keeps its hands clean while everyone else gets dirty.

And that is the real political obscenity: the loudest people demanding order are usually the first to outsource the mess. They want exhausted teachers to absorb social collapse, underpaid administrators to smile through the bruises, and migrant families to behave like grateful guests in a building the state forgot to maintain. Then they turn around and call the resulting chaos proof that public institutions don’t work. No, darling. They work exactly as instructed: underfed, overmanaged, and positioned to fail in public so somebody with a private entrance can profit from the wreckage.

In Wedding, the joke is never subtle. The system is stripped bare, and the people applauding the undressing are the ones least likely to stay for cleanup. The rest of the neighborhood gets the backlog, the forms, the false promises, and the intimate lesson that “discipline” in the mouth of a petty authoritarian usually means everyone else should suffer quietly while he pretends to be hard.