Germany's Election Clash Over Nazi Past as AfD Eyes Power in Saxony-Anhalt
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Memory wars: Election clash over Germany's Nazi past as AfD eyes power
A party that wants to defund "anti-German" art and teach children less about Hitler, as part of a "patriotism" agenda, could soon take power in a German state.
The far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is polling way ahead in the eastern region of Saxony-Anhalt before state elections on 6 September. It describes German memory culture, in its manifesto, as a "guilt complex".
This claim is deeply divisive in a country where facing up to Nazi crimes has long been seen as the nation's moral anchor.
At an election rally in Querfurt, 70-year-old Gerd, an AfD supporter, argues that Germany should be remembered as a country of "poets and thinkers."
The AfD wants to change how German history is taught in Saxony-Anhalt, if it wins power. It has also pledged to raise the German flag every weekday at public schools and better preserve war memorials to German soldiers.
Other parties won't go into coalition with the AfD, which is classed as right-wing extremist in several states, including Saxony-Anhalt since 2023. Domestic intelligence found that the local party branch was anti-democratic and its goals permeated by a "racist ideology". The AfD generally dismisses these designations as politicised smears.
It is aiming at winning enough votes to take a parliamentary majority in Saxony-Anhalt: a remarkable feat in German politics.
Polling suggests that is possible but by no means inevitable. If it did pull off that level of victory, the party would take control of services including culture, policing, and education.
It is proposing to change the school history curriculum by placing more emphasis on the century that came before the catastrophic conflicts of World War One and Two.
Hans-Thomas Tillschneider, who masterminded the programme, has said there would "of course" still be teaching on National Socialism "but somewhat less so." Speaking on an ARD programme last year he summed it up as "More Bismarck, less Hitler", referring to Otto von Bismarck, the chief architect of German unification in 1871.
Senior figures within the AfD have previously been accused of seeking to downplay the darkest chapter of German history partly, claim its critics, as a way of appealing to its more extremist supporters.
In 2018, former party co-leader Alexander Gauland likened the Nazi era to a "speck of bird poop." A year before, Björn Höcke, who leads the party in the state of Thuringia, described Berlin's Holocaust Memorial as a "Monument of Shame."
In Saxony-Anhalt, the man who could become the AfD's first ever state premier, Ulrich Siegmund, defended the party's approach, saying that "we don't want to forget the past, but we also don't want to be shackled by it."