German Right-Wing Nationalism and the Ruin of Memory
Image by Dissmann
BY Petra Rethmann
December 2024
First one victory. Then a second one. And finally a third one. Within the span of three weeks, in September 2024 in the three East German states of Thuringia, Saxony, and Brandenburg, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) garnered staggering victories at the ballot box. In his messages to me, Mr. K., a Russian German migrant from Kazakhstan whom I have known for a long time, was ecstatic.[i] Might this finally be the beginning of the end of Germany’s liberal government? Would German military aid to Ukraine now end, immigration be curbed, and the unloved Gendersternchen(gender star) be eradicated? Would it finally be the case that conservatism –traditional family values, preferential treatment for those who belonged to an imagined German community of national-natural kin (Volksgemeinschaft), and the moral codes of Christian values – triumph over other political ideas? Mr. K. made no secret out of the fact that he certainly hoped so.
While Mr. K. unabashedly delighted in the AfD’s electoral victories, liberal commentators publishing in Germany’s major newspapers and speaking on TV were besides themselves. What had gone wrong and why? Here were the usual suspects, all of them certainly playing a role: rising economic inequities and the decline of real-life wages, the erosion of Germany as an industrial nation and continuous bleak prognosis over its future prosperities, unreflective attachments to the idea of a strong state and a general decline of liberalism in the country but Europe as well. In many commentaries 1989, the year the German-German border fell, was posited as the temporal caesura – an origin point for the dashed aspirations and hopes that, so many analysts said, have contributed to the rise of right-wing nationalism in Germany. But what about, I wondered, the tributaries of historical relativism and nationalist imaginations that have always existed in the democratic polity? What about the dreams of a national revival – condensed in the moniker Tendenzwende – that in the 1980s had gained force with the election of chancellor Helmut Kohl and rise of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU)?[ii] What if the surge in right-wing nationalism was not just an effect of economic inequities, gender struggles, and other culprits, but had some deeper roots in longer trajectories in nationalist conservatism?
The boundaries between conservatism and authoritarianism are often porous and blurred, and –
in fighting an ever-increasing right-wing nationalism, authoritarianism, or totalitarianism – it would behoove us to not only understand what makes right-wing nationalist subjects tick, but also look at how supposedly democratic fabrics themselves have contributed to the spectacular electoral successes of right-wing politicians and parties. One such look here concerns Germany’s memory politics that has been celebrated for its historical sensibilities and redress culture. I briefly highlight some of its undertows.
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THE RUIN OF MEMORY
One of Mr. K.’s most valuable possessions is a book entitled Auf der Suche nach Heimat: Die Rußlanddeutschen (In Search of a Home: The Germans from Russia), published in 1991 by Richard H. Walth with the Laumann publishing house in Dülmen. As if it were a rare ethnographic item, Mr. K. keeps the book in his living room in a cupboard behind glass. When I expressed interest in the title of the book, Mr. K. was happy to hand it to me. Auf der Suche nach Heimatoffers an inventory of German life in Neu-Glückstal, a village in the Ukrainian heartland at the Black Sea. Page after page it lists the names of German residents in rows, while columns record date of birth, church registration, and religion. Auf der Suche nach Heimat charts their farmsteads and maps their alignments, but offers no insights into Neu-Glückstal’s social and cultural life. The document boils down the complexity of one region to one monolithic simplified statistical classification. There are no traces of Ukrainian, Polish, Jewish, or Russian neighbors. The book invites no questions about (fictive) ideas of national cohesion, but rather packs a zone of cultural interdependence and contingency into a standardized notion of the nation. In Auf der Suche nach Heimat, Neu-Glückstal appears as a world of German-ness unto itself.
Along with the German tanks that in 1941 rolled into west-central and southern Ukraine came a class of German professionals and scholars who arrived to set up the new regime. Richard H. Walth was one of a number of historically and ethnographically trained scholars who between 1941 and 1944 assembled so-called Dorfberichte (village reports; documents requested by the Nazis to seek out and identify ethnic Germans in the East) for the Ethnic German Liaison Office (Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle, or VoMi). Under the guidance of Professor Karl Stumpp, head of “special unit” (Sonderkommando) Stumpp, Walth produced ethnographic documents to respond to Nazi interests and secure “living space” (Lebensraum) for Germans. He was a member of the Nazi Party, and saw himself as a fitting documenter for Russian Germans because he was one himself. Born in 1924 in Neu-Glückstal, Walth had studied at Russian German institutes in Odessa and Lutbrandau/Wartheland, and worried that “because of a Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy” Russian German life would be quickly disappearing and that, if no action were taken, not many German families would be left. In 1944 he expressed relief when German troops stepped up the transfer of ethnic German families from hamlets in southern Ukraine to the Reichsgau Wartheland (also called Warthegau), part of Polish territory annexed in 1939 and site of the Chelmno extermination camp. For Walth, though, it constituted a heaven of German-ness.
The back of Auf der Suche nach Heimat features a black and white photograph, taken on October 20, 1981, that shows how Lothar Spaeth, then CDU Minister-President of Baden Württemberg, honors Karl Götz, Sturmbannführer (equivalent to a major) in the SS and the person to whom Walth has dedicated the book, with the Order of Merit of the German Federal Republic (Bundesverdienstkreuz). It stands to reason that Spaeth, who belonged to the right wing of the CDU, knew that both Götz and Walth had collected information for the Nazi, and may have been aware that the award itself recast Walth and Götz’s actions of documenting and collecting themselves as humanitarian action. Spaeth’s awarding of the Federal Republic’s Order of Merit does not simply facilitate silence about these aspects of Germany’s past, but also sidesteps any critical reflection about the fact that the two actions – the promotion of ethnic Germans and the eradication of Slavs and Jews, and the dualism of sub- and superhuman (Unter/Übermensch) – were inseparable. The history that appears to be remembered is one of a racially purified future.
Image by Gerard Marie
CONSERVATIVE MEMORY’S UNDERTOW
The fact that Mr. K. keeps Auf der Suche nach Heimat behind glass may point to his preservationist tendencies, but when we talked about why the book mattered to him it was the suffering that Germans had endured in the East that most occupied him. Mr. K. is not from Neu-Glückstal or even Ukraine, but from Rudny in Kazakhstan. When in the late 1980s Kazakhstan’s then-President Nursultan Nazarbayev started to speak of the desirable return of Kazakhstan’s German, Polish, Ukrainian, and Russian communities to their historic homelands, and Kohl’s CDU government immediately granted him citizenship not because he was born in a German place, but could prove a lineage of German blood, Mr. K. decided to pack his bags. In 1991 he arrived in Germany full of certainties that the all-powerful paradigm and standardizing convention of nation would make space for Russian-speaking ethnic Germans leaving the post-Soviet world for Germany.
It didn’t quite work out. Today, Mr. K. feels betrayed by Christian Democratic Union. Especially since in 2015 Angela Merkel opened German borders to Syrian refugees have hierarchies of suffering shifted. First, he says, there has been the murder of Germany’s Jewish citizens and the Holocaust, and then the suffering of ethnic Germans and the loss of their lands in the “German East.” Now it is all about the plight of migrants and refugees. Mr. K. talks about the fact that in 1983 Kohl cited the 1950 Stuttgart Charter of the Association of German Expellees – mostly ethnic Germans who were either expelled or fled after World War II from parts of Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, and the Soviet Union, and other area of Eastern Europe – to praise the Association’s renouncement of revenge. He knows that in 1985 Kohl met with the Landsmannschaft of Sudeten Germans, ethnic Germans from today’s Czech Republic and Slovakia, acknowledging the importance of these voters and agreeing with them on the significance of the loss of the “German East.” He says that he cannot quite understand German public upset when in 1985 Kohl invited US President Ronald Reagan to lay a wreath at the Bitburg military cemetery, where SS (Schutzstaffel; the organization most responsible for organizing the Holocaust) soldiers were buried, to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of Germany’s surrender. Wasn’t it the case that the Federal Republic had achieved decades-long stability, and thus earned the right to honor its war dead like other democratic nations. Never mind that Kohl refused to make any connections between World War atrocities committed in the name of the German nation and the expulsions of Germans, effectively placing the expulsions in a historical vacuum. Germany, Mr. K. said, was for Germans. In not so many words, at the end of the 1980s he had been told by German government officials that Germany was a homogenous nation-space. As four decades before, cultural, religious, and ethnic diversity was elided.
Unless this gets lost: My point here is not to cast Mr. K. as an reactionary extremist, an exemplary or particularly heinous example of a right-wing nationalist, or even to put on his shoulders the burden of blame. Rather, my goal has been to point out that some of the historical and national lines that run through democratic fabrics point up a historical relativism that tends to hum quietly under a political radar. In Germany the lines between conservatism and right-wing nationalism have always been porous, but now they seem to increasingly fray. In 2020 in the state of Thuringia both CDU and AfD politicians voted together to lift a liberal candidate into power to prevent Left Party politician Bodo Ramelow to become the state’s Minister-President and enter into a coalition with the Social Democratic and Green party. They have voted together for cuts in social benefits paid to asylum seekers, and after the 2024 elections in Saxony, Thuringia, and Brandenburg there has emerged some talk to actively work together, at least on the municipal level. From a conservative perspective, this willingness for coordination often presents itself as a sign of pragmatic politics, but of course it also signifies the normalization of right-wing parties, potentially paving their way for further gains. Is there a way for us to acknowledge memory’s debris while simultaneously comprising histories that may be assets for more equitable futures?
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[i] The term “Russian German” marks a complex identity that stretches across at least four distinct political entities: Imperial Germany, Tsarist Russia, Soviet Russia, and the Federal Republic of Germany. In the reports that I’ve readstart their narrative at the end of the eighteenth century when Russian Empress Catherine II invited settlers from largely southern Germany to colonize the lands along the southern Volga and near the Black Sea. Equipped with the promise that they would not have to participate in military services, German peasants arrived as colonists. . With the 1941 invasion of the German army of Soviet Union, the Soviet Union’s German population was branded as a community of potential traitors and spies. In the name of national identities and Soviet fears of potential Russian German aggression entire communities were uprooted and moved to the steppe in Kazakhstan, where they joined Soviet modernizing efforts.
[ii] The term Tendenzwende may not be widely known, but was part of Helmut Kohl’s 1982 election strategy. Most pronouncedly it resets mnemonic practices, emphasizing forms of memory that would diminish the culpability of German nationalism in producing abject suffering in this world.
Image by Marija R
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Petra Rethmann is Professor of Anthropology at McMaster University, the President of the Society for Humanistic Anthropology, and currently a Fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies. Her research interests include the politics of right-wing nationalism, democracy, and liberalism, as well as creative and public anthropologies. Apart from her academic work that has appeared in book form and journals, she is has also written creative non-fiction – including the award-winning short story “The Election” – and multi-modal and op-ed pieces that have appeared in Allegra, The Conversation, Edgeeffects, Humanism and Anthropology, and Focaal. She is currently in the process of writing a book on the futures of liberalism, and completing a genre-bending memoir preliminarily entitled Way-Making.
