The man leading the charge to make Germany proud again won’t say he wants his fellow Germans to “forget” the Nazi past, but that is where his ideas invariably lead. Hans-Thomas Tillschneider, a 48-year-old lawmaker for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, was until recently little known beyond his largely rural constituency. But he may soon be in a position to help realize one of the greatest ambitions of the party’s most extreme faction: remaking his country’s postwar identity and steering Germans toward leaving behind the Nazi past.
That history “remains present in a peculiar way — yes, like a zombie,” Tillschneider told POLITICO in July on the sidelines of an AfD conference in the eastern city of Magdeburg. That is not good.” Germany’s much-vaunted Erinnerungskultur, or culture of remembrance, is central to its self-conception — and long served as an existential imperative. Though halting, West Germany’s reckoning with Nazi crimes and the Holocaust in the decades after the end of World War II served to help restore the country’s standing among democratic nations, making possible its membership in Western alliances.
The country’s constitution was shaped in repudiation of Nazism, with safeguards intended to prevent its resurgence. But for the AfD’s most extreme leaders — many now concentrated in rural areas of the former East Germany — the culture of remembrance has merely perpetuated what some, including Tillschneider, call a “guilt cult” designed to instill self-loathing in the German Volk, a term for “people” which is imbued with near-mystical significance on the far right. Without openly denying Nazi crimes, they argue the cultural and political reckoning with them has damaged the Volk’s identity, leaving Germans weak, atomized, and vulnerable to “globalist” forces such as the EU and the U.S., long viewed by the far-right as a corrosive force due to the homogenizing influence of its individualist, consumerist culture — at least until U.S.
President Donald Trump’s arrival. Tillschneider’s ideas aren’t new. The backlash against Germany’s culture of remembrance is as old as the effort to reckon with the past itself.
But as the intellectual architect of the party’s blueprint for governing in Saxony-Anhalt ahead of a Sept. 6 election in the state — where the AfD is so far ahead in the polls it’s within striking distance of an outright majority in parliament — he could soon wield more tangible power than any other far-right figure in Germany’s postwar history to turn those ideas into reality. Tillschneider, currently the AfD’s spokesperson for culture and education policy in the state parliament, is a leading candidate to become the head of a future ministry that would oversee school curricula and cultural funding in the state. Celebrate the fact that you’re German.” This did not mean, he added, that the AfD would eliminate school lessons on Nazi crimes.
Rather, it would “shift the emphasis,” he said, so the Nazi past loses its contemporary urgency. Good history classes convey a sense of the otherness of the past.” In some ways, Tillschneider, a bearded, bespectacled former university lecturer, seems an unlikely figure to advance the revolution in German identity the far-right has long sought. Born in Romania during the Cold War, Tillschneider grew up in a German-speaking minority community whose roots in the region stretched back to Habsburg rule.
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