The return of Nazism, called by its proper name

Let us call a spade a spade. In the fateful land of dukes and margraves along the Elbe, at the heart of imperial Germany and later of reunified Germany – having weathered the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the Soviet-style German Democratic Republic – the resurgence of Nazism is taking root in forms that are now boldly possible. Meloni has nothing to do with it; they regard her as an enemy, a conservative hostile to the reactionary spirit. What does have anything to do with it, however, is the fact – to be understood as a phenomenon described in a good history book by Stefano Cappellini, fresh off the shelves, on the ‘red-browns’ – that people do smile, yes; women do marry one another, yes; and they have children with a smile of hope on their lips; they do imitate the way of life of Western or liberal democracies, yes; they dress casually when not in völkisch attire, yet they play with swastikas – and not just as children; they attack the modernism of the Bauhaus school a few decades after the ‘Degenerate Art’ exhibition; they fight to forcibly expel, on ethnic-racial grounds, foreigners (remigration!) and homosexuals, the pro-Semitic and anti-racist legacy of the unpopular ruling classes in the constitutional and liberated country – whose history is rejected in its entirety – is regarded as a cult of guilt and a shameful renunciation of the Germanic soul; and here, whilst war rages in Ukraine, we are staunch supporters of the great denazifier, the Führer of the Russians and of the tanks in Europe, Vladimir Putin. 

All this amidst innocent beer mugs and home fragrances for men and women (the business specialism of the man whom Der Spiegel considers to be Germany’s most dangerous man, Ulrich Siegmund).

Until recently, historians in Italy were vilified for agreeing with the equation, first proposed by Orwell, between right-wing nationalist and left-wing class-based totalitarianism: the Führerprinzip and the dictatorship of the proletariat. Ideological censorship kicks in if, even today, one speaks out against the old monsters of the twentieth century, equating them – perhaps not in place of a declaration of anti-fascism but in support of it. It could be said that, in practice, the debate or controversy is now a thing of the past. The new Nazism, which for the time being is hinting at an increasingly less timid experiment in electoral power in a couple of not exactly peripheral Länder such as Saxony-Anhalt and Pomerania, springs from the very fabric of the old GDR; it stems from the gloom of the tower blocks, from state culture, from the Stasi files, from nostalgia for the Trabant, from mistrust of the freedom that has been both witnessed and or rather, a freedom that has been monumentalised, in that part of post-war Germany that remained on the other side of the Berlin Wall, where the Vopos fired just as readily at striking workers as at ordinary folk fleeing communism for the free world. The Weimar-esque nature of the ruling classes that the new wave threatens to sweep away is striking. They fight – or try to fight – and promise to keep state secrets confidential and not disclose them to any potential new masters of the Free State of Saxony, but for the most part their red line once again is the defence of democracy without the sword. Groups that ought to be dissolved under the Constitution – a document that cost millions of lives in Europe – operate largely undisturbed and unquestioningly claim the electoral monopoly on anti-system and anti-liberal protest as thus conceived. They claim it in the name of the democratic resentment of the masses, the bitterness of the so-called excluded, and the linguistic and memorial chaos created by the new framework of political communication. Parts are breaking away from Die Linke, the Left, such as Sarah Wagenknecht’s party, which closes the circle of betrayal by proposing an alliance – once again in the spirit of Putinism – with the neo-Nazis on the threshold of power.