On Saturday evening, a day before the Alternative for Germany (AfD) scored its first passport to power, I went to the cinema to clear my head – and failed spectacularly.
Lying around in the foyer were flyers from a special screening for the actors and creative team of the final series of Babylon Berlin, a popular television show about the end of German democracy and the rise of fascism.
Inside the cinema, one of the trailers was for Heimsuchung (Visitation), the new film by celebrated German film director Volker Schlöndorff. It uses lakeside summer cottage – and its changing owners over the decades – to retell Germany’s dramatic 20th century. (And will be shown next week at Leitrim’s Adaptation film festival).
Finally came the main feature: Vaterland (Fatherland), a monochrome masterpiece about the 1949 return visit of exiled writer Thomas Mann to the ruins of his now divided homeland. As the opening credits began to roll, I wondered: “Without its past, would Germany even have a film industry?”
A day later, the past came crashing into the present when nearly 600,000 voters, in a state two hours southwest of Berlin, backed the AfD.
The party is many things to many people, morphing from a single-issue anti-bailout party on its foundation in 2013 to a strident anti-Islam migration voice in the subsequent refugee crisis. In its current iteration, it is a broad-based nativist populist party with an authoritarian approach and nativist world view. It flirts with Trump, spouts pro-Russian narratives and rails against progressive family models and climate “madness”. This is not a Nazi Party 2.0, as many claim, yet 44 per cent of voters in Saxony-Anhalt backed a party that wants to end decades-long efforts to understand Nazi crimes.
In the AfD world view, grappling with Germany’s fascist past is a “guilt cult”. In power, it has promised to reorganise schools and memorials to prevent successive generations being “taken hostage” by history.
This is why Germany’s remaining Holocaust survivors are as alarmed by Sunday’s AfD victory as the operators of the Buchenwald concentration camp memorial. It warned on Monday: “For the first time since 1945, a right-wing extremist party might be government, one that defames confrontation with National Socialist crimes, has announced a historical pivot on this front and would have the power and resources to enforce it.”
It’s important to remember that the AfD, on 28 per cent support nationally, is a pan-German political project. Many of its key leaders and ideologues were born and raised in the old West Germany. But they saw in the soil of the former East Germany – authoritarian politics, post-industrial trauma – the perfect pH level for their project.
A people who remember a cradle-to-grave welfare state, and have forgotten the high price they paid for it, are doubly sensitive to the uncertain polycrisis of modern life.
A people who have been mocked as deplorables for 30 years, meanwhile, are particularly open to the AfD’s new suffering-to-salvation narrative, where those who vote for them are part of a new political avant-garde.
Two further conditions are key to complete this wounded pride-for-votes transaction.
First: take for granted the hugely positive elements of the post-unification transformation. Second: embrace scapegoating for your current woes, but also for the worst crimes of the past.
Today’s Saxony-Anhalt is located in the vanished socialist East Germany that, for 40 years until 1989, adopted an anti-fascist state narrative. With a wave of its magic wand, East Berlin declared that all surviving Nazis were in West Germany because – according to this wonky logic – it is impossible to have fascists in an anti-fascist state.
Unification
Not all East Germans embraced this sleight of hand, but enough of them did. But after unification in 1990, many struggled with a new and very different approach to history: an us-not-them framing, imported along with the Deutschmark from West Germany.
This approach, only formalised in the 1980s, views coming to terms with the past not as a one-off task but a permanent practice. The terms and conditions of being German today, it argues, should include a moral responsibility to inform oneself about the circumstances that made Nazi-era crimes possible. It is not a guilt cult where blame is passed on in perpetuity to each successive generation.
Many Germans – east and west – continue to honour this approach. But after 36 awkward years, however, others are delighted to embrace what the AfD offers: a historical off-ramp. The tension arises because they know everyone is watching what they are up to.
As German writer Siegfried Lenz once noted: the past is never past, it interrogates us in the present.
In his most famous book, The German Lesson (1968), a character in Nazi Germany implores another to wake up and “look around” at the proud strut of their fascist friends and neighbours: “What many considered impossible, those people are doing it now – and dare to do it.”
Sunday was another step in the impossible becoming one again possible. And the impossible is already reality for millions of Germans – in particular its vulnerable minorities.
Jewish friends, even the Israel-critical ones, say the ongoing tragedy in Gaza is the perfect alibi for violent anti-Semites to come for them. Germany’s Turkish community has already appealed to the state for extra funding for security. Meanwhile Berlin’s LGBT community, still reeling from July’s Pride parade attacks in the Tiergarten park, has had a double blow in the weeks since.
First, unknown attackers demolished a memorial park bench, painted in rainbow colours. Days later, a memorial tree planted near the attack site was ripped up.
Like a school of sorcerers’ apprentices, 44 per cent of voters in Saxony-Anhalt have summoned spirits of the past that promise a better future by sidelining Germany in the present.
With perfect timing, the fifth and final series of Babylon Berlin, set in the fateful year of 1933, will be released in Germany on Thursday.
“This isn’t a dance on the volcano any more,” observes one character, “we’re at the heart of the volcano.”
Almost a century on, Germany is climbing a different volcano – but things are heating up.