When Alice Weidel met in the election campaign with the new AfD supporter Elon Musk in the live stream, the two could not diverge without talking about Hitler. According to the name of National Socialism, he was actually a leftist, a socialist and communist. If you don't believe that, you only have to look at the nationalization policy of companies. The fairy tale of the left Nazis is not new. What is new is that the richest man in the world and the top candidate of the second largest parliamentary group are spreading her before the world public. With the disappearance of the gatekeepers, the story and its interpretation have become free: the extreme right has always known about its meaning, now she sees her hour.
In order to reveal a light on a wide variety of efforts, to reinterpret history, Jens-Christian Wagner and Sybille Steinbacher have published the anthology “Right History Revisionism in Germany”. According to the authors in their introduction, history revisionism is part of the “ideological core” of right -wing extremist thinking. The fact that both of them have some expertise in this field not only shows their academic career, but also their commitment to German memorial culture: Wagner is the head of Steinbach's chairman of the scientific board of trustees of the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora memorial. The crimes of the National Socialists and their places are the aim of the right -wing revisionist attacks, so both explicitly advocate leading this fight out of the memorials.
The Nazis already developed sacrificial myths
The volume sorts the object in three sections, the shapes, fields and the ideology of history revisionism. It is the editor Wagner who, in his introductory text, makes it clear that it was National Socialism itself who sowed the propaganda myths, the other after the war: from the alleged Jewish war debt, to the fictitious attack on the broadcaster Gleiwitz to Goebbel's inclusion of the Morgenthau Plan, the National Socialists developed sacrificial myths, which after the War defeat only gained attractiveness. This also marks what the revisionism is: The present is always busy to form parallel stories of yourself that others take up later.
Revisionism knows many faces, in its extreme form the denial of historical facts. The volume introduces central figures of the Holocaust denier scene, such as the French Communist Paul Rassinier, who himself was imprisoned in Buchenwald and made a career out of it after the war to deny the mass murder in the concentration camps. Or the Hamburg financial lawyer Wilhelm, who is still a central reference point of the scene with his book “The Auschwitz myth” published in 1979. The procedure is always the same, as Wagner emphasizes: “Selective choice of sources, self -referential commentary and the conspiracy ideological claim that important documents are still blocked for research today”.
From the “bird shit” to the “bomb-Holocaust”
If you don't want to go so far, you relativize and interpret: A “bird shit” was National Socialism in terms of long German history, according to Alexander Gauland. The famous saying of the NPD politician Holger Apfel from the “Bomb-Holocaust” also puts something in an equation where it is forbidden. But why the retreat battles? It has long been a project of the new right to free the Germans from what Armin Mohler described as “national masochism”. Maik Thander traces the career of this right concept in his reading and shows how a central project of the new rights has been since the Second World War to scold German memory and processing culture as a form of moral self-flagellation that the Federal Republic is causing to come back to itself.
If you want to know how serious right -wing extremism is, you have to look at Schnellroda occasionally. There, Volker Weiß describes in his essay, the intellectual leader of the right, Götz Kubitschek, held a speech in September 2023 at the Summer Academy of the “Institute for State Policy”, in which he took up the longing for a “second birth”, as she formulated the new rights again and again. A moral debt aisle is sought, but the civil war must be obtained on which Kubitschek sworn in: “A spiritual civil war rages in Germany. It is about predominance in a media, speech and historical field, sovereignty of interpretation about the brand nation.”
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He supports him with significant forces in the AfD, especially Björn Höcke and the Maximilian Krah, who died out in the meantime, but now rehabilitated, who explains young people on Tiktok that their ancestors were not criminals. On him and others it can be observed as an example that with the increasingly louder revisionism, the emphasis on masculinity also gains volume. Or as Krah would say: “Real men are right”. Most of these figures are now their own small media companies, but of course there are also, of course, as the historian Justus H. Ulbricht explains, the classic media that provide revisionist assistance. One of the most traditional is that Young freedom; Publications like Compact or the Germany-courier Complete the picture.
Lack of analytical sharpness in some essays
Anyone who has passed Wagner and Steinbacher's “Right History Revisionism in Germany” will come out with a lexical overview of extreme rights, which is the great earnings of the anthology. Unfortunately, some essays buy the bird's eye view with a lack of analytical sharpness. More courage for the small partial aspect, which is pulled onto the large screen, would have been good for a ribbon, which sometimes sees itself too much as an information brochure. If you want to win the war, including the information war, you will have to throw yourself in battle with a little more View. However, it is good and important that the thrown feud shoe is recorded here.
Gerrit Ter Horst is a literary scholar and historian. He lives in Berlin and is a freelance author.
