East German History and the Crisis of Liberal Democracy

Abstract

On September 25, 2017, Germany awoke to the horrifying reality that the Alternative for Germany (AfD), a far-right party founded in 2013, had romped to third place in the previous day's federal election. With 12.6% of the vote, the party became not only the official face of the opposition to Angela Merkel's not-so-grand coalition with the Social Democratic Party (SPD), but also the first far-right party to enter the Bundestag since the 1950s. Election watchers soon noticed that the AfD had racked up stunning margins in the states that once made up the German Democratic Republic (GDR), coming in first on the second ballot (Zweitstimme) in Saxony and second in Brandenburg, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Saxony-Anhalt, and Thuringia.1 That the AfD, a racist and xenophobic party that campaigns against European integration and immigration, should do so well in once-socialist states bespoke East Germany's strange resonances in German culture and memory nearly thirty years after its dissolution.