On the 16th of April, 1945, a host of beaming citizens from Weimar, in Eastern Germany, casually made their way up a nearby rise to what is now known as the Buchenwald concentration camp, then referred to as Beech Forest. Between 1937 and 1945, the Nazis incarcerated approximately 280,000 individuals in this camp, with around 56,000 meeting their demise here.
Footage from the April visit depicts the joy on the visitors’ faces disappearing as they come across huts infested with fleas, heaps of human skeletons, and a lampshade crafted from human skin. For the triumphant Allies who had freed the camp just five days earlier, compelling the local populace to visit Buchenwald was equivalent to a mass vaccination programme. The objective was that no one here would ever challenge or trivialise the mass slaughter indicative of German fascism following this event.
A green brochure, which is currently on show at the camp museum, serves as a message to the local populace, instructing them to “recall the crematorium furnaces…recall Block 46, where detainees were used as experimental subjects and contaminated with typhus bacteria”.
Although Typhus no longer ravages Buchenwald, the Eastern state of Thuringia that surrounds the camp, along with neighbouring Saxony, are struggling with a forgetfulness epidemic.
This coming Sunday, when constituents opt for new state parliaments here, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) looks set for victory. Surveys rate its consistent support at above 30 per cent. An impressive feat for the anti-bailout group that, since its establishment in 2013, has switched to anti-immigrant, anti-asylum and Islamophobic rhetoric.
An additional trademark of the AfD is its revisionist perspective of German history. A prior leader trivialised the Nazi era as an insignificant stain of “bird droppings” on an otherwise illustrious German history.
After thirty exhausting years of economic transformations and political letdowns, numerous constituents have withdrawn into post-truth, emotionally-guided, self-validating social media bubbles.
Björn Höcke, leader of Thuringia’s AfD party, advocates for a complete reversal in Germany’s historical perspective. He criticises what he perceives as Germany’s obsession with culpability. The AfD isn’t aiming for overall control in the approaching Sunday elections, but rather a third of the votes in state parliaments in Dresden and Erfurt. This would grant them the ability to sway parliamentary procedures, judiciary nominations, as well as the functioning and financial backing of public museums and memorial sites from an opposition standpoint.
Prof Jens-Christian Wagner, the director of the Buchenwald memorial, has already noted increasing antagonism and disregard towards the legacy of the concentration camp site. Instances of anti-Semitic behavior, such as defaced tyres, Nazi symbols, and offensive gestures directed at the crematorium, have been reported by the guides. Wagner has adapted to this, avoiding sitting near windows at night and inspecting his car for tampering daily. A note that was received recently attached an insult to a newspaper image of him, implying that he is perpetuating guilt.
To Wagner, the anticipated success of AfD in the elections signifies a complicated union of revisionist views of western Germany and eastern Germany’s passive attitudes. The eastern leaders of AfD, such as former history teacher Björn Höcke from Western Germany, deny popular beliefs that the rise of the Nazis was a result of broad societal agreement. They feel very much at home in a region that interprets the Hitler era naturally through the lens of anti-fascist resistance and victimhood, minimizing other narratives.
Wagner contends that this viewpoint essentially exonerates those from Eastern Germany from their fascist history, leaving their own progenitors out of the narrative. In the wake of the predicted populist uprising after the elections, Buchenwald and other memorials in Thuringia and Saxony are preparing to secure themselves from political sway.
The issue of funding remains a major challenge in governmental museums, theatres, and any other institutions that the AfD perceives as having a leftist bias and being opposed to what their election manifesto labels as ‘folk culture’. While trailing Höcke in the election, it becomes evident that his fixation with redesigning Germany’s history isn’t as evident as in his 2018 publication. Within these pages, he pledges to confine ‘modernity to the scrapheap’ in order to bring forth a new era that draws inspiration from the celebrated German past and reaccepts ‘the militaristic assertion of one’s personal interests’.
Although some view this as a fascist strategy, not all AfD critics in the east believe that democracy is under threat in Sunday’s election. For them, the poll is primarily about reclaiming what Germans term as Deutungshoheit, or narrative dominance.
Over three decades post unification, there’s an influx of new books, documentaries and exhibitions, which are largely by easterners, providing novel evaluations of the 1990 German unification and its reasons. Lauded as the trendsetter in this genre is Dirk Oschmann, a university professor in Leipzig, who last year stirred controversy with his provocative bestseller, ‘The East: a West German Invention’.
Oschmann portrays unification and its aftermath as a covert form of colonialism, whereby western organisations, politicians and scholars swooped in to seize control of eastern resources and authority, and denigrated or labelled as risks, any deviations from western standards.
His book readings, which are often at full capacity, have seen many people from the east embrace his work as a guide ‘to tackle issues in a more assertive way and to better protect their values’. Höcke and his associates have now comfortably adapted, both physically and mentally, to a region where the official East German perspective of the Hitler era emphasised anti-fascist resistance and victimhood, glossed over other groups and asserted that the Nazis relocated to the west in 1945.
He believes that a clear shift is also visible in media coverage of the East, which, in his views, has become more balanced, respectful and nuanced. A number of newspapers have made concerted efforts to report that AfD support in Saxony and Thuringia in recent European elections ranged from 14 to 40 percent.
Pre-election surveys indicate a fluctuating understanding of eastern Germans about their status – with some peculiarities. When questioned whether eastern Germans generally perceive themselves as second-rate citizens, 59% concurred – yet a mere 32% personally felt this way.
These polls, according to eastern sociologist Steffen Mau, point to “the demise of the misapprehension that east would emulate the west and form a unified entity”. He emphasizes that proximity doesn’t equate to uniformity.
The disparity between east and west Germany is deep-rooted in history, emotions, as well as economic facts. Mau points out that a paltry 2% of overall German inheritance tax comes from eastern Germany.
While he regards the 1990 German reunification as a wasted chance or “suppressed democratisation”, others perceive their eastern counterparts as duplicitous, alleging their alienation from a democratic society that previously held no appeal for them.
Eastern historian Iliko-Sascha Kowalczuk, in his thought-provoking book ‘Freedom Shock’, posits that a shared identity crisis triggered by mass redundancies in the 1990s drove numerous eastern Germans back to their former dormant private sphere. He says “democracy is about commitment, participation, activation, and taking control of one’s existence”, however, many opted for the paternity offered to them.
With 30 arduous years of economic reforms and political disillusionments, many voters have retreated into fact-averse, emotion-driven, self-affirmative social media cocoons.
Desperate to dispel this, Pen Berlin, a writers’ group, is organizing a string of public debates throughout Saxony and Thuringia. On a bright Thursday night, around 100 individuals convene at the cultural heart of the small Saxon town of Hoyerswerda, an hour away from Dresden.
After an initial talk about the freedom and constraints of expression, the crowd calmly debate – unprompted – the very issues that have been seized and dramatised by the AfD and its populist competition. The group expresses concern over widening societal chasms – wealthy and impoverished, rural and urban – and deteriorating educational institutions.
One mature gentleman remarks that the troubled state of the civil democracy is beyond being rectified merely by suppressing the AfD; he adds the other political parties must outline better plans. The room largely agrees that Germany’s party system, which was incorporated in 1990 along with the constitution and currency, has outlasted its relevance. However, when an old man brings forward the matter of some opinions being suppressed, a middle-aged man in the room refutes him – courteously yet forcefully.
The person says that locals now loudly argue that their freedom of speech is under threat. He admits that he never hesitated to express his opinions publicly during the East German era; he only made certain they were verifiable facts.
Deniz Yücel, a well-known German-Turkish journalist and one of the co-organisers of the discussions, and also the president of Pen Berlin, reveals that the audiences from the east have surprised him. They can calmly debate sensitive topics without getting drawn into the moral outrage that usually taints discussions held in West Germany. Yücel, after travelling almost 5,000 km, says that even though Björn Höcke got 30 per cent of the vote, he does not represent all of Thuringia. He has witnessed another democratic society that deserves support.
At the Buchenwald memorial, Jens-Christian Wagner concurs, but remains cautious. While Saxony and Thuringia represent just 7 per cent of the German populace, the impending Sunday’s election may set a precedent about the way Germany will, moving forward, commemorate its past. Wagner’s key message is not to let oneself be cowed. He observes that the AfD is primarily promoting intimidation, lies, and hatred.