All liberal societies have a tendency towards fascism. Their systems of capitalism, accumulation, and redistribution are susceptible to crises and conflicts that can make some want to throw all the incrementalism out the window, shed their concerns, be done with checks and balances, and leap into the “great mobilization of material and moral forces” to “safeguard the moral and material grandeur of the people,” as Mussolini wrote in 1921.
A century that witnessed multiple genocides has passed since. Yet we still lack a definition of fascism that goes beyond the coalescence of a racialized people, brutal action, and a grandiose leader. Like their predecessors, the MAGA movement and, at the other end of the pendulum, Putin, are cruel, inclined to state terrorism, and wont to embrace vague tactics. Liberal democracy has three strategies against the fascist tendency: integration, exclusion, and repression. Let us reflect on how they are functioning or failing in Germany today.
The doctrine of integration was best expressed by the former Bavarian governor Franz Josef Strauss, whose doctrine held that the German Christian Democrats had to be the last stop on the right-wing line. The CDU/CSU alliance thus faced the task of absorbing extreme elements by integrating them into its big tent. From its beginnings in 1949, this was how West Germany dealt with its own inner fascism. Former Nazi functionaries were allowed to hold public office, while the conservatives doled out just enough resentment against the left, migrants, and others to allow a residual sense of the “people” and “moral and material grandeur” for those who needed it.
Of course, the approach came with a serious amount of repression, but the system was stable and, despite episodes of state violence, remained open to shifting power relations and hegemonies. Right-wing parties in parliament sidelined fascistic parties like the Republikaner and the NPD by implementing right-wing policies during key phases of far-right mobilization, such as the rise of neo-Nazi groups and pogroms against immigrants after Reunification and the migrant crisis of the mid-nineties. The CDU spearheaded changes to the constitution that limited the right to asylum and launched a petition drive against dual citizenship, while its politicians ran their electoral campaigns on xenophobic slogans like “children instead of Indians” (“Kinder statt Inder”). It was ugly, but it wasn’t totalitarian.
Since the 2008 financial crisis and the founding of the AfD in 2013, this strategy has faltered. It was no coincidence that the “alternative” was originally established as a nationalist, free-market party that was, if nothing else, “against the euro.” The party’s platform revealed the extent to which West German society had congealed into an exclusivist economic community by the end of the long twentieth century.
Integration into the European Union undermined an identity rooted in the German Mark and an export-driven GDP. By the 2010s, however, the idealized West German entity of the 1980s that many East Germans had wanted to join had ceased to exist. Thus, in the AfD’s early years, centrist parties never entertained notions of integrating them. Their opposition to the Maastricht Treaty, globalization, and intersectional identities was so fundamental that the German government had no leverage to appease them even if it had wanted to, or at least none reconcilable with the dominant (neo-)liberal order.
So instead, they opted for a strategy of exclusion. The political center refused to work with the AfD on all levels of the political system, vowed to never compromise with them, or express any tolerance for them whatsoever. It’s a greater mystery than ever how such exclusionary tactics are supposed to work in the age of the internet. The AfD is winning on TikTok, and since Musk’s takeover, it’s winning on X, too. Campaigns against the AfD continue to use montages that just replay its worst moments from five or seven years ago: Gauland’s comment that Nazism was just a “speck of bird shit” on an otherwise glorious history, Höcke’s call for a “180-degree turn in memory politics,” or his comments on Berlin’s Holocaust memorial as a “monument of shame.”
Anyone who has listened to Martin Sellner talk for more than five minutes knows that the AfD has moved on to entirely new strategies for acquiring power. In the last days of the election, the prominent public television moderator Caren Miosga tried to “expose” Alice Weidel’s true identity for the nth time by challenging her for her use of the word “guilt cult” (Schuldkult). Unfortunately, she also misquoted Weidel, much to the latter’s amusement. Friedrich Merz’s ill-fated attempt to usher a new immigration law through the Bundestag with the AfD’s support just before federal elections has put huge cracks into the fire wall or cordon sanitaire around the ethnonationalist party. The exclusionary tactics had lost their political efficacy long ago, but now they lack all moral credibility.
Liberal democrats are thus left with one last option, which is also the most difficult to put into practice: repression. Only two parties have been banned in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany: in 1952, the openly National-Socialist Socialist Reich Party, and in 1957, in the middle of the Cold War, the Communist Party. The proceedings to ban the neo-Nazi NPD were stopped in 2003 because so many members of the party’s leadership were informants for Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, the Verfassungsschutz, which says a lot not just about the NPD, but about the state security apparatus itself. The lines between right-wing extremists and the Verfassungsschutz are so blurry, the agency’s actions and relationships so opaque, that it’s not quite clear exactly how much defenders of democracy should be worried about the very police force called upon to protect it.
Culture warriors from parties outside the AfD have recently proposed laws that would require the Verfassungsschutz to check that applications for research and arts funding conform with anti-discrimination stipulations guided by Germany’s poorly defined Staatsräson. A well-researched book by Ronen Steinke published in 2023 concluded that “we don’t need the Verfassungsschutz.” The motion to prohibit the AfD supported by multiple parties in the last legislative session may have some valid points, but it is likely too late for it to be implemented against a party that routinely receives twenty percent of votes.
What is to be done? Many texts in this genre end with a kind of grumbling reserve that fails to contribute much to the cause of antifascism because it remains just as vague as the definition of fascism itself—a frustrating situation owed in part to the sheer complexity of the moment and to the desire to retain a modicum of critical distance. Two observations are in order. First, Emmanuel Macron’s gamble of dissolving the National Assembly after his party lost the July 2024 European Parliament election was intended to let the National Rally party enter government while he was still president. For forty-five years, the idiosyncrasies of the French electoral system and a populace often ready to resist in the streets when necessary have constituted their own fire wall against the party of Le Pen. Macron sought to coax it out of the opposition so that it would show its incompetence in government and thus lose the more important presidential election in 2027. Ironically, Macron’s plan failed due to a short-lived, but successful left-wing alliance to mobilize voters.
One might reject Macron’s scheme, but he is a liberal, even if his domestic policy has grown increasingly authoritarian. He wagered that the far-right would eventually accept a political system of changing majorities and alternating political power. Let them win once so that they’ll lose next time when more is at stake—like Trump after his first term, the Austrian FPÖ, or, after a hard fight, the Polish PiS. Unlike France, Germany’s profoundly parliamentary constitution does not have a president who places an additional check on the government. And some changes that hard-right parties make when they come to power are hard to reverse, as the transformation of the Polish courts demonstrates. Nevertheless, as far as Germany is concerned, strategic thinking requires reflection on the circumstances under which some form of collaboration between the CDU and the AfD might harm not just the former, but also the latter. It’s not a prospect to be hoped for, but its possibility can’t be ignored either.
Alongside the fear of external enemies—a seemingly endless source of political power—it looks like the incoming CDU–SPD coalition in Germany will try to deliver a boom in construction and armaments production made possible by increased government debt. For years, policy analysts like Mariana Mazzucato, Isabella Weber, and others have claimed that massive investments in infrastructure and the welfare state would prove to be effective means against fascism. But it seems unlikely that more debt, economic growth, and military spending will reduce culture war posturing and anti-immigrant sentiment. Economists are in a better position to say whether this fire wall of debt doesn’t harbor its own risks in the face of already high inflation. And though it is definitely better than the dallying of the last few years, it doesn’t change the fundamental strategic aporia.
German society, therefore, has to ready itself for a post-liberal era. Minoritized people (and readers of this magazine) know well that international law, the freedom of assembly, academic freedom, and other fundamental rights have a much weaker standing in Germany than many believe, and they have all been chipped away at over the past year without the AfD being in government. We have yet to witness large-scale resistance against this authoritarian course. The center, at any rate, needs to acknowledge the crumbling of liberal dogmas and quit convincing itself that it’s not part of the problem.
It is unclear whether Germany’s current political system will be able to deliver results, let alone to survive, in an age of AI-driven technofeudalism. Musk and MAGA have been raising the stakes and the tempo. No one knows, at this stage, what German and European liberals will be able or willing to oppose to the hard-right chainsaw. For the time being, the right has defeated the liberals by correctly analyzing weaponizing their weaknesses. The left and liberals must do the same and come up with something better, something that works.
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It is not just the private that’s political. Nowadays, everything is. This might be a defining feature of the current slide into fascism. It is, at any rate, an ineluctable condition of our magazine of books and ideas. Perhaps for this very reason, most texts in our Reader 3 confront the political indirectly, describing an art work or a cultural phenomenon first before situating it within its political context. “There are certain authors that one reads because they define a standard,” Miriam Stoney writes in her review of Sally Rooney and Rachel Cusk.
One of these authors is Victor Heringer, who died by suicide in Rio de Janeiro shortly before his thirtieth birthday in 2018. He bequeathed to us an incredible body of work whose geopolitical catachreses describe our reality much better than the mainstream middlebrow memory theater that is just as dominant in Brazil as it is in Germany. Ricardo Domeneck offers an introduction to his compatriot’s life and art and reflects on how well readers in the Global North will be able to deal with a writer from the Global South who refuses to serve up the usual brew of violence, superstition, and other stereotypes.
Miriam Stoney, too, critiques international hierarchies of reading, but from the Anglophone perspective. Few have made their mark on the contemporary novel as Sally Rooney and Rachel Cusk have, which explains why their latest books need not be overwhelming in order to have significance. Florian Fuchs and Clara Miranda Scherffig write on two filmmakers who are an indelible part of twentieth-century German cultural history, yet couldn’t be more different: Harun Farocki and Leni Riefenstahl. Paul B. Preciado’s scathing criticism of Jacques Audiard’s reproduction of colonialist binaries in Emilia Pérez reminds us that sometimes reviewers have to ditch the hermeneutic niceties and reach straight for the sledge hammer. Diedrich Diederichsen’s dissection of the newfound alliances between nativists and libertarians needs little further contextualization beyond our unhinged newscycle.
Featuring stories by Samanta Schweblin, Karosh Taha, and Ulrich Peltzer, this new Reader focuses more than past ones on literary imagination and its ability to attune our senses to what’s important. Photographs by Anne Lass scrape us off our screens, lift the omnipresent facades, and invite us into the uncanny inner worlds of Berlin’s forgotten gambling halls and casinos. Fatin Abbas’s illuminating essay that opens our Reader engages with the border between Sudan and South Sudan. Like in her novel Ghost Season, she describes the brutal history of wars over resources, self-determination, and ethnic domination into which numerous militias, with significant support from outside powers, have plunged Sudan for decades. The systematic violence against women in these conflicts can be traced back to the era of the trans-Saharan slave trade and has left traumatic traces in Abbas’s own family history.
“The present is a vanishing relationship”, post-colonial theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak reminds us, a maxim that hasn’t lost any of its relevance. Most texts in this reader might seem far away from the daily concerns of Germany and Western Europe, but they are not (and they wouldn’t be any less significant if they were). The binary distinction between self and other has always been an illusion, but in few places can this be better observed today than in Berlin, where it reveals both its irredeemable falsity and unrelenting force. It can only be contended with through diasporic reason, of which Elad Lapidot offers a critique in his “Defense of Judith Butler”. Aria Aber’s novel Good Girl is a poignant result of the diasporic condition—a term coined by Ghassan Hage, who, in being banished from the Max Planck Institute in Halle last year, stands as symbol for the many brilliant intellectuals who have been made unwelcome in Germany today. Maxi Wallenhorst reviews Aber’s translation of her own novel from English to German. It might come as little surprise that the German-Afghan protagonist Nila leaves Berlin at the end. After all, since the summer of squatting in 1990, the city hasn’t ceased ceasing to be itself. But it still seems wrong not to look back. We shouldn’t let ourselves be bedazzled by the myths of Berlin. To make sure we don’t, well, that’s why this magazine exists.