How Germany Far-Right Plan to Redefine German Identity

The zombie in the room

Hans-Thomas Tillschneider describes Germany’s Nazi past as a zombie — an undead entity that refuses to stay buried and makes Germans weak. He does not say he wants Germans to forget it. But his ideas, once implemented, would do exactly that by draining the present of its urgency.

Tillschneider, 48, is the AfD’s intellectual architect in Saxony-Anhalt. He drafted the party’s governing manifesto for the state election on September 6. If the AfD wins — and polls suggest it is within striking distance of an outright majority — he will likely run a ministry overseeing schools and cultural funding. That gives him more power over German memory than any far-right figure in the country’s postwar history.

A unlikely revolutionary

He does not look like a man dismantling Germany’s culture of remembrance. Born in Romania during the Cold War to a German-speaking minority, educated in West Germany, he holds a doctorate on Islamic legal hermeneutics and published a book on the subject before turning to politics. At university, he told interviewers he chose Islamic studies because it was foreign and unfamiliar. Later, after moving to eastern Germany, he came to depict Islam as incompatible with German society.

That trajectory — from curious academic to cultural nationalist — is the signature path of the New Right, the network of radical intellectuals who recast extremist ideas in palatable language. Tillschneider was associated with Der Fluegel, the AfD’s most extremist faction, alongside Björn Höcke, who in 2017 called Berlin’s Holocaust memorial a “monument of shame” and demanded a 180-degree turn in memory politics. The faction was formally dissolved in 2020. Its members have only grown more influential.

The blueprint

The governing program Tillschneider authored is unmistakable. It proposes shifting emphasis in history education away from the Nazi era. It calls for cutting funding to “anti-German art.” It advances a “patriotic tourism” strategy for the state. It promises to fund and restore monuments that “honor the sacrifices of soldiers” in both world wars, equally, “without petty political judgments.”

The phrasing “more Bismarck, less Hitler” recently appeared in the program and has since been removed — a tactical retreat, not a change of heart. At an AfD family festival in Querfurt, Tillschneider laid out the logic plainly: the Nazi past should remain in textbooks, but as something distant, studied for its “otherness” rather than felt as a living moral weight.

“Just because something is no longer present,” he said, “doesn’t mean it will be forgotten.”

What he is describing is not forgetting. It is relegation.

The East German fault line

This project takes root in the former East Germany for a reason. While West Germany undertook its halting reckoning with Nazism, the GDR’s official narrative declared that fascism had been vanquished there — and that it was, in any case, a product of Western capitalism. When the Berlin Wall fell, many East Germans experienced Germany’s memory culture as a West German imposition, a form of cultural domination that continued long after reunification.

Tillschneider embraces this grievance. Eastern Germans, he argues, have gained historical perspective through the peaceful revolution and the collapse of their own system. Western Germans, by contrast, have been “stewing in the same soup for 80 years.”

The sentiment is widespread among AfD voters in the region. At the Querfurt festival, one woman told me she had grown tired of being forced to grapple with guilt over crimes she did not commit. Another, a railroad worker in his 50s wearing a shirt that read “Love for the homeland is not a crime,” said anyone expressing pride in Germany is immediately stamped a Nazi. Many attendees cited economic decline, refugee policy, and the government’s refusal to accept cheap Russian gas as their primary reasons for voting AfD. But Tillschneider treats all of these as symptoms of a single disease: a “cracked identity” produced by decades of what he calls anti-German thinking.

Who wins, who loses

If the AfD forms government in Saxony-Anhalt, the winners will be institutions and narratives that reinforce a nationalist, ethnically inflected version of German identity. Fallen-soldier memorials will receive state support. History curricula will be rewritten to foreground German achievement — Bismarck, industrial innovation, medical breakthroughs — over German crime. Cultural funding will flow away from works deemed anti-German.

The Bauhaus, founded in Weimar just kilometers from Querfurt, is the obvious casualty. A UNESCO World Heritage site and the crowning achievement of modernist architecture, the movement was denounced by the Nazi regime as “degenerate” and shut down in 1933. Today it stands as a symbol of cosmopolitan, internationally connected German culture — precisely the kind of cosmopolitanism the far right rejects. Calling it “anti-German art” would be a grotesque inversion, but that is the direction of travel. Any institution that embodies pluralism, modernism, or internationalism is vulnerable under a ministry shaped by Tillschneider’s worldview.

Losing will be the students of Saxony-Anhalt, who will receive a narrower, more mythologized version of their history. Losing will be cultural institutions that cannot or will not perform patriotism. Losing will be Germany’s already fragile consensus that the Nazi past demands an ongoing, intrusive reckoning.

The European signal

What happens in Saxony-Anhalt matters beyond Germany. The AfD’s approach demonstrates a new playbook for Europe’s far right: do not deny atrocities outright. Do not call for the destruction of memorials. Instead, reframe the narrative so thoroughly that remembrance becomes optional, diluted, one thread among many in a tapestry of national pride.

This is how cultural purges succeed without looking like purges. You do not burn the books. You defund the library. You do not ban the museum. You redirect the grants. You hold press conferences celebrating German heritage and let the implications speak for themselves.

Hungary’s Viktor Orbán has practiced this for years. Poland’s government has followed. The AfD’s innovation is doing it inside the country where such a project was once unthinkable — inside Germany itself, where the postwar settlement was built on the conviction that national pride without historical accountability was the very road to catastrophe.

The election that could change everything

Saxony-Anhalt’s September 6 election is not a referendum on democracy. It is a referendum on whose past will govern the country’s future. Ulrich Siegmund, the AfD’s top candidate and potential premier, thanked Tillschneider publicly for spending “hundreds of hours” on the manifesto. “I’ll need him over the next five years,” he said. “We’re making history together.”

The sun rises in the east, Siegmund added. But it will shine over all of Germany.

If that happens, the question will no longer be whether Germans remember the Nazi past. It will be whether they remember it as a warning — or as a chapter closed, buried beneath decades of patriotic celebration.