As millions are protesting the far right in Germany, I sought insights from Robert Terrell, Ph.D., assistant professor of history at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. His area of expertise lies prominently in modern Germany and Europe. He shared his comments on the matter below. If you’d like to schedule an interview with him, please reach out to Vanessa Marquette, media relations specialist, at vrmarque@syr.edu.
Dr. Terrell writes:
“On the place of the Nazi past: While Germany has made great efforts to confront its Nazi past, Nazism is not a past that can simply be gotten over or definitively conquered. The politics of memory remain active and contested, as the rhetoric of AfD leaders like Björn Höcke makes clear. It is dangerously self-congratulatory to think that prior memory work inoculates against the dangers of historical reframing and perversion.
On the AfD as an eastern German problem: The article ties the electoral successes of the AfD in eastern Germany to GDR-era narratives of the Nazi past. But they are also a product of the ongoing sense of internal otherness felt by many eastern Germans within their own country since reunification. This is a sentiment often dismissed by western Germans, and one that the AfD strategically capitalizes on. We might fruitfully consider not just the Nazi past then, but the incomplete ways that Germany has confronted its cold war and immediate post-cold war past.
Also on the AfD and the former East Germany: The AfD is not limited to the former East. Protests against the AfD have not been confined to the former West. In the first wave of demonstrations, for example, protests in eastern cities including Jena, Erfurt, and Halle were perhaps even bigger than those in the former West when adjusted for the relative populations.“
