On April 16th, 1945, crowds of smiling residents of Weimar, in Germany’s east, strolled up a nearby hill to Beech Forest – better known today as the Buchenwald concentration camp.
From 1937 to 1945, the Nazis imprisoned about 280,000 people here and some 56,000 died.
Newsreel footage from the April outing shows the visitors’ smiles fading as they inspect flea-filled huts, piles of human bones and a lampshade made of human skin.
For the victorious Allies, who had liberated the camp five days earlier, forcing locals to visit Buchenwald was a mass inoculation programme. After this, so the hope was, no one here would ever question, or qualify, the genocidal horrors of German fascism.
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A green brochure, displayed in today’s camp museum, tells locals to “remember the ovens of the crematorium… remember Block 46, where prisoners were used as guinea pigs and infected with typhus bacteria”.
Typhus is no longer rampant in Buchenwald, but the surrounding eastern state of Thuringia – and neighbouring Saxony – are grappling with an amnesia epidemic.
On Sunday, when voters here choose new state parliaments, victory looms for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD). Polls give it steady 30 per cent-plus support. It’s a remarkable achievement for an anti-bailout party that, since its foundation in 2013, has pivoted towards anti-immigrant, anti-asylum and Islamophobic rhetoric.
Another trademark of the AfD is its revisionist view of German history. A former leader dismissed the Nazi era as an insignificant speck of “birdshit” on Germany’s otherwise glorious past.
After three exhausting decades of economic reforms and political disappointments, many voters have drifted off into post-factual, emotion-steered, self-confirming social media bubbles
Thuringia’s AfD leader, Björn Höcke, hoping to top the poll on Sunday, has called for a “180-degree shift” in how Germany remembers its past. The party’s chief ideologue has taken aim at what he calls Germany’s “guilt cult”.
With no obvious coalition allies in Thuringia or Saxony, the AfD’s goal on Sunday is not power – not yet – but a one-third blocking minority on state parliaments in Dresden and Erfurt.
That would allow them, from the opposition benches, to influence parliamentary work, judicial appointments – and the operations and funding of state-run museums and memorial sites.
In the Buchenwald memorial, alarm bells are ringing. Even ahead of Sunday’s elections, director Prof Jens-Christian Wagner has encountered rising hostility and impunity towards the camp and what it stands for.
Guides report slashed tyres on their cars, swastika graffiti, Hitler salutes at the crematorium. Wagner avoids sitting at windows in the evening and checks his car for interference each morning.
Recently he received a letter containing a newspaper picture of him with an appended speech bubble: “I am a disgusting piece of Jewish shit and am running a guilt cult.”
For Wagner, Sunday’s likely AfD victory is an east-west marriage of western German revisionists and eastern bystanders.
Many AfD eastern leaders are western Germans, like former history teacher Björn Höcke, who reject the mainstream idea that the Nazis and their horrors were enabled by a broad societal consensus.
Höcke and his allies are now at home, physically and mentally, in a region where the official East German framing of the Hitler era – even at the Buchenwald memorial – highlighted anti-fascist resistance and victimhood, played down other groups and insisted that the Nazis moved west in 1945.
“This was exonerating narrative for easterners that, even today, excludes their own parents from the fascist past,” argues Wagner.
Fearing a populist surge after Sunday, Buchenwald and other memorials in Thuringia and Saxony have raced to copper-fasten their structures and mandates from political influence.
Funding remains as much an Achilles’ heel here as in state-run museums, theatres and anything else the AfD views as “stinking of lefties” and hostile to what its election programme calls “Volkskultur” or people’s culture.
Follow Höcke on the election trail and his obsessions with reframing Germany’s past are not as apparent as in a 2018 book. In it, he promises to consign “modernity to the rubbish heap… to usher in a new era” that draws on the proud German past and embraces once more “the martial assertion of one’s own interests”.
While some see this as a fascist blueprint, not all eastern AfD critics think democracy is in danger on Sunday. For them, Sunday’s elections are more about taking back what Germans call the Deutungshoheit: control of the narrative.
Some 34 years after unification, a flood of new books, documentaries and exhibitions – by easterners – are offering fresh assessments of what happened with German unification in 1990 and why.
Father of the genre is Dirk Oschmann, a Leipzig university professor who struck a nerve last year with his best-selling polemic The East: a West German Invention.
It frames unification and its effects as an insidious form of colonialisation, where western companies, politicians and intellectuals moved in to control eastern means of production and power – and decry as inferior, or dangers, eastern deviations from western norms.
At sold-out readings, Oschmann says many easterners have embraced his book as a blueprint “to approach things in a more confident way and defend things better”.
Höcke and his allies are now at home, physically and mentally, in a region where the official East German framing of the Hitler era highlighted anti-fascist resistance and victimhood, played down other groups and insisted that the Nazis moved west in 1945
“You can see a shift, too, in media reporting on the East,” he thinks. “It’s fairer, more respectful and differentiated.”
Many newspapers made an effort to report how, in recent European elections, AfD support in Saxony and Thuringia ranged from 14 to 40 per cent.
This time around, pre-election opinion polls throw up shifting easterner perceptions of their circumstances – and some curiosities, too. Asked if easterners in general feel like second-class citizens in Germany, 59 per cent of easterners agreed – but only 32 per cent said they felt that way themselves.
Sunday’s elections, eastern sociologist Steffen Mau suggests, mark “the end of the illusion we cobbled together that east would become more like the west and create one unit”.
“But even things that grow closer together don’t necessarily become homogenous,” he argues.
Historical and emotional gaps in east-west Germany are underpinned by economic realities.
“Just 2 per cent of the total German inheritance tax is paid in eastern Germany,” he says.
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While Mau views German unification in 1990 as a missed opportunity, or “thwarted democratisation”, others see their fellow easterners as hypocrites: claiming to feel excluded now from a democratic civil society that never interested them before.
In his hard-hitting book Freedom Shock, eastern historian Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk argues that the collective identity crisis caused by mass layoffs in the 1990s saw many easterners retreat into the same passive private sphere they occupied in East German days.
“Democracy is about getting stuck in, participating, becoming active and taking responsibility for one’s life,” he writes. “But many chose the paternalism that was offered them.”
After three exhausting decades of economic reforms and political disappointments, many voters have drifted off into post-factual, emotion-steered, self-confirming social media bubbles.
Anxious to counter this, the writers’ organisation Pen Berlin is staging a series of public discussions across Saxony and Thuringia.
On a sunny Thursday evening, about100 people are gathered in the cultural centre in the small Saxon town of Hoyerswerda, an hour outside Dresden.
After a short podium discussion about freedom of expression and its limits, the audience debates calmly – and with no prompting – the same issues that have been captured and emotionalised by the AfD and its populist rivals. These people are worried about growing societal gaps – rich and poor, rural and urban – as well as failing schools.
“This is a civil democracy that isn’t working,” says one older man. “It’s not enough any more to just slap down the AfD, the other parties have to say how they plan to do things better – and they’re not.”
There is a large consensus in the room that Germany’s party political system – imported in 1990 along with currency and constitution – has outlived its usefulness.
But when an older man suggests that some views are being silenced, he is interrupted sharply – but politely – by a middle-aged man across the room.
“People here scream now that freedom of opinion is being curtailed,” he adds. “I wasn’t afraid to open my mouth in public in East Germany, I just made sure that what I said could be backed up with facts.”
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For Pen Berlin president Deniz Yücel, a prominent German-Turkish journalist and co-organiser of the talks, the eastern audiences have been a revelation: they are able to discuss controversial subjects calmly without sliding into “the ‘how can you possibly think that?’ moral outrage that often poisons western German discussions”.
“Even with 30 per cent, Höcke doesn’t speak for all of Thuringia,” said Yücel, after nearly 5,000km on the road. “We have seen another – democratic – society that needs our support.”
Back in the Buchenwald memorial, Jens-Christian Wagner agrees – but remains alert. Saxony and Thuringia make up just 7 per cent of the German population, but Sunday’s election could send a signal on how, in future, Germany chooses to remember its past.
“What’s important now is to not be intimidated,” he says. “That is what the AfD is pushing hardest now: intimidation, lies and hate.”
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