Volker Weiß – Cultural struggle of the new right: rewrite, rewrite, re -lying

Anyone who controls the past controls the future; Anyone who controls the present controls the past, ”says George Orwell’s dystopian novel“ 1984 ”, in which a dictatorship is told whose regime is constantly busy manipulating the memory of the population: People should forget what exactly what has done or said, especially if they questioned something or in question. Or better: people should remember incorrectly, i.e. a past that has never existed, but is useful to the regime. They should remember a contradictory, subsequently beautiful past.

The Orwell sentence cited at the beginning is a sentence that also applies to our political present: rewriting the continued, reversing and reversing of German Nazi past is a central interest of the AfD. The long-term goal is to “toast all work results of dealing with the (Nazi) past,” emphasizes Volker Weiß. The AfD wants to smash historical knowledge, establish a new image of history in which the German men’s man is without mistake and blame. She is busy working on the “continuous destruction of historical judgment,” warns the historian.

Anyone who reverses Hitler and Goebbels to “Left”, as the AfD officials did, no longer have to put the Nazi crimes into perspective, but-reliably accompanied by the permanent clatter of the conservative leaves and the compliant, for every new twist and every new “debate” grateful boulevard media-in the end even claim that “the left” is responsible for the Holocaust, and so on perfidious Kind of political rights rehabilitation.

In a chapter of his new book «The German Democratic Empire. Like the extreme right story and democracy, Volker Weiß, for example, researched a Goebbels quote that has been successfully distributed for years (provided with the date and specifying the newspaper from which the alleged quote should come from). According to this, the Nazi propaganda minister is said to have described the NSDAP as “the German left”. With the alleged Goebbels statement, the AfD and other extreme rights still try to create politically confusion and to present Hitler’s NSDAP as a “left” movement.

But the quote is wrong. Volker Weiß, who has been dealing with theory and practice of the new rights for many years and who has researched archives and libraries, suggests meticulously over many book pages that neither the author nor the place of publication nor the specified date are correct: “Neither it was completely reproduced, nor does it come from Goebbels, and it has also not been published at the alleged place.” But this type of misleading and demagogy, which is not only evident in the spread of false quotes, is, as white, “Exemplary for the method with which the AfD (not only) (not only) designs its history policy”.

In his book, he also shows that the National Socialists were already working with the method of “overwriting the opponents’ terms with new importance” and “reinterpretation and appropriation of political categories”. For example, the Nazis, for example, were often suitable for the term “socialism” used in the Weimar period and were completely suitable for the opposite. Goebbels wrote in 1932 in the Nazi Fooling Blade “The Attack”: “Socialism does not mean equalization. He has neither the slightest to do with pacifism nor internationality (…) National Socialist socialism closes the classes, making the people to do with an insoluble bluelessness. » Goebbels therefore wanted to be understood under “Socialism”, above all, a “combat community of the breed and the state” (white), in which there is no longer no class conflict.

The AfD wants to smash historical knowledge, establish a new image of history in which the German men’s man is without mistake and blame.

The Nazis were similar with the formerly socialist rhetoric and symbolism: the rhetoric was cleaned by original content and charged ethnic. The word “revolution” suddenly no longer meant what it actually means, but was suddenly mutated into a term that aimed to restore the “true German nation”. There was a “decay of class awareness through racial awareness”, as white writes. Even “the concept of the people was not a social one, he was decidedly racial” and “implied the excretion of the heterogeneous”.

Symbols were hijacked, their meaning was robbed and used for pure advertising purposes. Hitler wrote in “Mein Kampf” (1934): “We chose the red color of our posters after careful and thorough consideration in order to irritate the left side, to bring it to the outrage and to tempt them to come to our meetings.” Because with the symbols the left should also be stolen their electorate.

White describes precisely how the Nazis managed to use the Nazis with such concepts, distortions and new definitions, “central terms of the left, which had shaped the political discussion since the 19th century”. And it shows how the AfD today operates its way of “farmer catching” with similar linguistic tricks.

Just as the historical agitation of the AfD “shifts the character of National Socialism”, also play a role in the instrumentalization of the GDR, as operated by the AfD for reasons of expansion of power, the repeated methods of re -lying, reinterpretation and the conscious twisting of historical events and facts. It can be assumed very well that the explicitly anti-communist and fascism glossing over the political legacy and the history of the GDR that actually occurred as a socialist-international and antifascist is hated. And in fact that is the case. But here, of all things, the AfD’s historical defenders become active with their tricks: the “socialism” of the GDR and thus everything that hung in the advanced and left ideology of it (social emancipation, ownership, anti -fascism, etc.), is disposed of in the memory hole. There is no longer any mention of the fact that the GDR could historically be classified “left”.

Instead, right-wing extremists use the anti-Americanism, which has been successfully practiced by parts of the GDR population in the decades of real socialism, and the partly deep resentment against a permissive society for their purposes. The special petty bourgeois socialism of the cultural and geographically wasolated GDR offered ideal conditions in order to now be exploited and exploited by the AfD in terms of historical politics: here – in the somewhat subsequently depoliticized and “” adjusted “order”, here, here the homogeneous (once “socialist”, today “east German”) Glorified, and “the foreigner” was a small minority with which one hardly came into contact in everyday life.

At the center of this “anti-communist transfiguration of the GDR” practiced by the AfD, as this is known, is “not social, but orders and cultural issues”. The extreme right party today interprets the hated state socialism cheekily around the “homely, identity -creating community in which law and order prevailed”. So it is the same extremely right -wing milieu that the GDR once demonized as a political system and today, in order to keep political hegemony in this region, “shamelessly exploits the anti -liberal legacies of the SED,” analyzes.

In the right one pacts today with the nationalist autocrat Putin and defines the GDR as the German Germany, whose citizens have not been “taken away”. While in a not inconsiderable part of the left in this country, unfortunately, “it has not yet become clear that in Putin’s Russia by the Soviet Union only the imperial and authoritarian element is left”.

Volker knows: The German Democratic Empire. How the extreme right story and democracy destroys. Klett-Cotta, 288 pages, born, 25 €.