Esther Adaire. German Politics & Society. Volume 37, Issue 4, Winter 2019.

The outbreaks of neo-Nazi aggression against foreigners and asylum-seekers in the eastern German towns of Hoyerswerda in 1991 and Rostock-Lichtenhagen in 1992 were among the most violent demonstrations of far-right extremism in Germany since the end of the Third Reich. In the newly united Federal Republic, whose postwar political culture had been defined by the task of reckoning with the crimes of National Socialism, neoNazi phenomena signified the re-emergence of vehement racist nationalism that had long been considered worked through or historicized in official public narratives about the past. As a 2012 retrospective in Der Spiegel put it: “Da war es wieder, dieses andere Deutschland, das dunkle” (there it was again, this other Germany, the dark one).

Occurrences of neo-Nazi violence and far-right radicalism in Germany always unsettle a precarious politics of memory based on a postwar West German narrative of confrontations with the past. The Alternative for Germany’s (AfD) entrance into mainstream German politics and into the Bundestag, as well as rising antisemitism, Islamophobia, and neo-Nazi protests such as the riots in Chemnitz in August 2018, have caused journalists, historians, and politicians—Foreign Minister Heiko Maas among them— to ask whether Germany’s culture of remembrance is crumbling. And yet, commentators are increasingly also asking whether the German narrative of lesson-learning was ever accurate to begin with. The question may not, in fact, be one of forgetting. Instead, the more urgent question now involves excavating a genealogy of the discourse surrounding West German memory politics and the function of the concept of “memory,” “remembrance,” or “lesson-learning,” in Germany, especially in response to instances of far-right radical violence.

Two areas of inquiry therefore arise in this article: firstly, the memory politics of the Federal Republic, which, while acknowledging in countless yearly ceremonies the lessons regarding ethnic nationalism that may be learned from maintaining a strong historical consciousness, has insufficiently revised its citizenship laws to welcome non-ethnic Germans. Secondly, the fact that much far-right and neo-Nazi violence appears to occur disproportionately in the former East Germany, and that AfD is disproportionately popular in the former East. This must be examined in relation to the German Democratic Republic’s (GDR) failure to work through the National Socialist past, but also in terms of the work that “the East German neo-Nazi” does within the broader discursive context of memory politics in united Germany. The AfD and the Left Party (Linke) both have a strong voter support in the states of the former East, suggesting a deep political polarization in this region representative of a political and mnemonic schism in Germany more broadly. As in the Wende period, the period of cultural turnaround after German unification, discussion of Germany’s past in relation to current events is not necessarily about Vergangenheitsbewältigung (overcoming the past), but Gegenwartsbewältigung—overcoming the present.

Studies of East German memory have tended to be written precisely within the context of neo-Nazi aggression in the postunification period, which is, therefore, often presented as a uniquely “Eastern” phenomenon. Sociologists, political scientists, historians, and even psychologists alike have attributed the emergence of a New Right in the former East to the rhetorical uses of “antifascism” in the GDR and its function in impeding, rather than advancing, substantive knowledge of the Nazi past and the destruction of European Jewry during the Holocaust, the result being that the GDR has not experienced the same process of “working through the past” at either the political, social, or individual level. This article aims to build upon these scholars’ analysis of the “discursive logic and historical determinations” of arguments pertaining to the fractured nature of German memory post 1989. The first half focuses on the riots themselves and the intense political debates that followed. The second half situates these debates within a longer timeline of West German memory politics. What analyzing the events of Rostock and Hoyerswerda within a mnemonic framework reveals is the relative instability of (West) German memory culture when met with a violent challenge from the far-right, especially alongside the added complexities of consolidating the separate, revisionist, memory of the “new states” during the Wende period.

“Deutschland den Deutschen, Ausländer raus”

After the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989, Germany experienced a surge in far-right violence the likes of which had not been seen since the days of Weimar. Throughout 1990, as new waves of guest workers and refugees arrived in Germany, there were frequent attacks against immigrants. These manifestations of a new racist nationalism threatened to challenge the notion, in the eyes of the global media, that Germany had overcome the Nazi past. Yet for West Germans it could not be ignored that this new explosion of neo-Nazi aggression seemed to be situated mostly in the East and seemed therefore to represent a uniquely East German problem—one of angry, disaffected youth emerging from a former Socialist state, but also of an “other Germany” that had not yet confronted the crimes of Nazism.

Although outbreaks of violence against foreigners were occurring throughout both the East and the West, the magnitude of the riots in the East German towns of Hoyerswerda in 1991 and Rostock-Lichtenhagen in 1992 cemented the notion within public discourse of the former East as a region uniquely hostile towards foreigners. From17 to 23 September 1991, in the run-up to the one-year anniversary of official German unification, more than twenty towns across Germany—many of them in the former East—experienced waves of violence led by neo-Nazi youths directed at immigrants. Starting in Hoyerswerda in the northeast of the state of Saxony, mobs of right-wing extremists attacked Vietnamese market stall owners (who had been resident in the region since the days of the GDR) and besieged two housing estates for asylum-seekers on the Thomas-MüntzerStraße, armed with petrol bombs. The violence lasted almost a week, with police making eighty-three arrests and struggling to contain the violence. The crowds were joined by jeering onlookers, and as the frightened residents of the housing project were bussed to safety, citizens of Hoyerswerda appeared on television triumphantly declaring their town “ausländerfrei” (foreigner-free).

Almost one year later on 22 August 1992, in the Lichtenhagen district of the north-eastern city of Rostock in the state of Mecklenburg-West Pomerania, hundreds of neo-Nazis descended upon the Sunflower House, a hostel for asylum-seekers, setting the building ablaze with Molotov cocktails and attacking residents in a riot that lasted several days. As in Hoyerswerda, many curious spectators joined the riots in Rostock-Lichtenhagen, which grew to a crowd of an estimated 3,000. As they hurled their molis through the windows of the hostel, the predominantly male skinhead youths chanted “Deutschland den Deutschen, Ausländer raus!” (Germany for the Germans, foreigners out) voicing a desire for an “ethnically German” national identity not expressed in Germany with such vehemence since the 1940s.

Anxiety about the resurgence of an “other” Germany, a “dark” Germany, abounds in the media reports surrounding Hoyerswerda and Rostock, betraying a sense that a past loudly claimed by politicians, historians, and German citizens alike to be precisely that—past—in fact still persisted uncomfortably in public memory. Within West German postwar intellectual and public discourse, however, the notion of an “other” Germany had come to signify not only the National Socialist past, but also East Germany. In the particular moment of the early 1990s, unification posed a dilemma for collective German national memory/identity in that a Germany long considered “other”—a Germany viewed, from the West, as the continuation of totalitarianism and dictatorship; a Germany which had its own Erinnerungskultur (memory culture) based on a narrative of “antifascism”—now had to be incorporated into the narrative of the Federal Republic.

Whereas in West Germany by 1989, the memory of National Socialism had largely been consolidated into commemorative practices which acknowledged the Holocaust as the central tragedy of the Nazi era, in the GDR a state-sanctioned “antifascism” had circumscribed the way in which fascism was remembered. Shaped by a Marxist interpretation of the origins of fascism based on economics and class consciousness rather than the centrality of racist antisemitism, the official East German narrative of National Socialism celebrated a communist victory over fascism and left no room for the working through, or confrontation with, racial hatred and xenophobia—which were taken to be wholly Western phenomena. Post 1989, western German and critical eastern German intellectuals alike posited that state-sanctioned “antifascism” had therefore become a mask for pent-up aggression and the type of classical right-wing extremism that was now occurring throughout unified Germany. Psychologist HansJoachim Maaz argued in response to the violence in Hoyerswerda and Rostock that in East Germany the denazification process had only ever occurred at the political and legal level, not the psychosocial, with the result that fascist tendencies had been repressed under the “mask” of socialism in the GDR and were now at risk of emerging in unified Germany. Maaz’s psychological hypothesis was that “antifascism” expressed “a psychic defense and projection process” designed to forget the Holocaust by replacing Nazi rule with Stalinist principles. By claiming the humanist ideals of socialism, the GDR was able to perhaps “appease” guilt but never profess it in the manner done by the Federal Republic.

The importance of this separate and repressive GDR memory notwithstanding, the duplicity of “antifascism” as a discursive signifier was often appropriated to a questionable degree in the fervent outpouring of articles and op-eds following outbreaks of reactionary violence in the former East. In 1993, reflecting not only on Hoyerswerda and Rostock but on the countless other outbreaks of neo-Nazi violence occurring in the former East, Klaus Rainer Röhl, former editor of far-left magazine konkret (and ex-husband of Red Army Faction ringleader Ulrike Meinhof), now a fierce critic of communism and leftism, published a scathing exposé on what he called the Lebenslüge (roughly, “lifelong lie” or grand delusion) of antifascism. In response to politicians from the Left Party evoking “antifascism” as a necessary measure against far-right radicals, Röhl accused German politicians and intellectuals of being “blind in the left eye,” ignorant of antifascism’s “role as an instrument of domination.” Suspicious also of the manner in which the specter of fascism was so widely evoked in the wake of Hoyerswerda, Rostock, and the 1993 arson attack on a Turkish family home in Solingen (located in the West), Röhl asked—in a decidedly paranoiac fashion—who really stood to “gain” from neo-Nazi phenomena:

Current events such as the mounting attacks on accommodation for foreigners are extraordinarily convenient for this old Communist propaganda. One must look closely, when [Left party politician Gregor] Gysi summons the threat of impending fascism after each new arson attack in front of the television cameras. Cui bono Rostock, Hoyerswerda and Solingen?

Röhl’s suspicion illustrates the extreme end of what grew into an intense political and intellectual battle over not only the social and cultural origins of far-right violence in the former East, but also the significance of neo-Nazi presence in unified Germany, and which German Erinnerungspolitik this phenomenon belonged to—the Federal Republic’s or the GDR’s.

While the international media “presented the riots in Rostock as images of terror reminiscent of the Nazi era,” in Germany they triggered a ferocious debate in the press and in the Bundestag over the question of whether they could be explained by a variety of factors unique to East German culture. Christian Democratic (CDU) Chancellor Helmut Kohl, for one, “resorted to an absurd attempt at an explanation straight out of the Cold War era,” insisting that the riots had been planned and directed by former Stasi members. Although, as noted, outbreaks of neo-Nazi violence occurred in both the former GDR and the former West, the meaning-making involved in media discourse and in political debates surrounding such events was markedly different depending on location. When a group of teenage skinheads in the West German town of Hünxe threw Molotov cocktails into the home of a Lebanese family on the eve of Unity Day 1992, and when the house of a Turkish family in Mölln was bombed, killing a woman, her niece, and her granddaughter, West Germans theorized that these were “isolated incidents” committed by perpetrators who came from “broken homes.” Moreover, while the response amongst the German public was an outpouring of grief in the form of silent, candle-lit vigils, Kohl and other CDU politicians tended throughout the early 1990s to brush aside outbreaks of far-right extremism aimed at foreigners and asylum seekers as anomalous within a cultural discourse of remembrance and remorse particular to the Federal Republic. Identical events in the East, however, were treated as characteristically “Eastern,” with politicians, journalists and intellectuals alike calling for recognition of the “problem” of East German anger and resentment fostered by economic despair and a lack of Holocaust education or commemorative practices.

Regardless of the location of far-right extremist attacks, Kohl refused to visit the towns of the victims or attend any of the vigils, scornfully maintaining that he did not wish to participate in the “Beileidstourismus” (condolence tourism) of other politicians. Kohl instead put all his efforts into maintaining the image of a “normal” Germany, a Western-oriented, democratic Germany that had excised its nationalist elements and that ostensibly confronted the past at every yearly commemorative opportunity. In the words of American foreign correspondent Jane Kramer, Kohl “told West Germans the good news about German history that they wanted to hear.” In the years following Hoyerswerda and Rostock—following, even, the desecration of the Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald concentration camp sites by German skinheads, as after the Solingen arson attack—Kohl ramped up his efforts to manipulate the newly unified Germany’s understanding of history in a series of commemorative events that ignored the ongoing violence against Turks, Vietnamese, Roma, Sinti, and even Jews, culminating in a new exhibition at the German Historical Museum in Berlin, which portrayed Germany as a “mainstream flowing through the history of the West … a river of the Enlightenment.” Yet, despite Kohl’s engineering of the narrative of a German postwar democratic rebirth, the Federal Republic’s only practical response to the riots in Hoyerswerda and Rostock was to bow to far-right pressure and amend Article 16 of the Basic Law of Germany, the article that stipulated automatic asylum for refugees.

The idea of amending this law seems to have been discussed in the Bundestag as early as mere days after the 1991 incident in Hoyerswerda, with prominent CDU and other conservative politicians “empathiz[ing] with the rioters, who supposedly were victims of economic restructuring and merely misguided in their choice of means to vent their legitimate frustration.” Others did not express empathy but did suggest that East German culture in particular was to blame: CDU politician Johannes Gerster went as far as to blame East Germany for outbreaks of neo-Nazi violence in the West, arguing that “there is a very important, GDR-specific reason for why we are dealing with right-wing extremism”—namely, that a regime that had denied its right-wing extremist past through the state narrative of antifascism had therefore created a repressed subculture of right-wing extremism in its present. In fact, blame was placed on the East from all sides of the political spectrum. One popular explanation was that the native inhabitants of the former East Germany were not accustomed to the presence of foreigners in their midst; despite an official state doctrine of “internationalism,” prior to 1989 foreigners had constituted only 1 percent of the East German population. When German politicians convened in the Bundestag after the violence in Hoyerswerda, Dietmar Matterne of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) evoked the cliché adage “Tal der Ahnungslosen” (Valley of the Clueless) to describe Hoyerswerda and its inhabitants; a city “manufactured by socialism,” he argued, Hoyerswerda had not received and had therefore not been educated by Western radio and television influence, and therefore favored intolerance and xenophobia.

Many center-left politicians and media commentators, however, aimed their critique at Kohl and the CDU, expressing a deep concern that the catastrophes of the past—fascist power, Sturmabteilung street thuggery—were occurring again, or that in some sense it had never ended. Following on from the earlier postwar intellectual discourse concerned with the importance of working through the past, leftist critics and politicians exposed the fragility of West German memory culture. Faced with the reality that reactionary violence was also occurring in the West, if East German “antifascism” functioned as a mask for racial hatred and aggression, the West German tradition of remembrance may too have repressed certain fascist complexes.

At the Bundestag session following the riots in Hoyerswerda, SPD politician Ottmar Schreiner urged the CDU to curb its own xenophobic rhetoric against foreigners and “to think of the line from Bertolt Brecht, which is now more topical than ever: ‘The womb is fertile still from which that crept.’” Following the events in Rostock, a reporter for Der Spiegel evoked memories of political polarization and fragmented democracy of the Weimar era, lamenting that “the ‘ugly German’” had surfaced once again in world media in the form of disaffected youth, “stomping with a Hitlersaluted arm through the republic and through the media.” Such imagery inscribed the neo-Nazi riots as a set of signs referential or indicative of a memory of National Socialism foreshadowed within a German western alliance that had always been founded to a certain extent on “amnesia.” Echoing the concerns of earlier postwar intellectuals faced with the question of German guilt, leftist politicians and reporters argued that “the real danger is fused to the party state, to the way in which the structure of (West) German democracy has grown.” In the 1990s, new iterations of this older argument centered around escalating issues regarding minority rights in the “New Germany.”

The Destruction of Memory

Outbreaks of far-right extremist violence in postwar Germany have often elicited a contentious political and intellectual discourse of memory and amnesia—a now famous example is sociologist and philosopher Theodor W. Adorno’s 1960 riposte to Konrad Adenauer following the then-chancellor’s dismissal of the presence of neo-Nazi groups in West Germany as “overblown anxieties,” his drive for economic recovery seeming to “push aside, indeed compensate for, any concerns about the national past.” Adorno’s response, and warning, was that “the survival of National Socialism within democracy” was in fact “potentially more menacing than the survival of fascist tendencies against democracy,” expressing concern that Vergangenheitsbewältigung amounted to little more than the removal of the Nazi past from memory.

It makes sense that discourses about the present in Germany, particularly in response to threats of a far-right resurgence, have so often expressed anxiety around “forgetting” or “amnesia,” for if democratic progress is so intrinsically linked with learning lessons from the past, reactionary challenges to democracy create the sense that a national Erinnerungskultur is being violently dismantled. Yet, as Adorno articulated in the early 1960s, the threat was not so much neo-Nazi or far-right groups themselves—the real danger was the manner in which West German democracy had evolved in the 1950s to produce a politically apathetic public sphere, in which Germans felt a “lack of emotional cathexis with democracy.” This apolitical atmosphere was partly the result of the Adenauer-CDU’s deliberate policies, themselves a rejoinder to the humiliating process of Allied-led denazification during the years of occupation. “Forgetting” the past, as Adorno noted, was therefore not about an unconscious psychological process akin to “amnesia” or repression as much as it was about an “effacement [Tilgung] of memory that is more the achievement of an all too alert consciousness.” Adorno’s essay, with its classically Freudian language of “working through,” has often been placed alongside studies like that of psychologists Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich, who in 1967 claimed that West Germans had yet to work through the repressed (and “traumatic”) memory of National Socialism. Yet Adorno’s understanding of the destruction of memory is actually located within a postwar West German democracy that had not yet become naturalized and that kept its citizens “narcissistically” focused on national rebirth following the “zero hour” of 1945.

This perspective provides a useful framework for analyzing the remarks of Kohl and his center-right cabinet in response to the violence of the 1990s. In contrast to psychological and sociological studies that have tended to pathologize far-right/neo-Nazi radicalism in the former East Germany as being either the result of a lack of confrontation with the Nazi past, or of the economic burden placed on East Germans post-unification, Adorno’s insight provokes consideration of the normalizing discourse of the CDU and the similarities between Adenauer and Kohl’s responses to far-right radicalism. As demonstrated by the recent work of Jeffrey K. Olick, while Adenauer in the 1950s to mid 1960s had sought to cement a diplomatic image of Germany as a “reliable nation” through a politics of evasion, the 1980s under Kohl can be viewed as the era of Germany striving to be considered a “normal nation” after a decade of confrontations with the past in the 1970s. For Olick, normalization of the past during the 1980s is typified by the right-wing voices that sought to relativize the crimes of National Socialism and the Soviet Union during the Historians’ Dispute (Historikerstreit), as well as Kohl and U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s blunderous visit to the graves of Wehrmacht soldiers at Bitburg. Despite clamorous left-liberal repudiation of the relativizing discourse from the right during these incidents (in particular Jürgen Habermas’ response to Ernst Nolte during the Historikerstreit, and President Richard von Weizsäcker’s much-hailed 8 May speech following the Bitburg controversy), as others have successfully shown, the “geistigmoralische Wende” (intellectual-moral turning point) promulgated by Kohl shaped the response to outbreaks of neo-Nazi violence in the early 1990s.

Further, whereas before 1989 antisemitic and xenophobic incidents in the Federal Republic were seized upon by the East German Socialist Unity Party (SED) as evidence of continued fascist tendencies in the West, after unification the virulence of neo-Nazi aggression in the former East became the focus of a patronizing commentary from West German politicians. As Klaus Neumann observes, “it was as if those who for forty years had been told that they had not been able to make a clean break with the past had in 1990 been handed an opportunity to turn around and scold their former accusers for not having themselves learned the appropriate lessons.” This deflection of blame on to the East provided a new way for the Federal Republic to consolidate a historicist national narrative in which Germany had already come to terms with its past, and to displace guilt for fascist elements on to a few new “irresponsible elements.” As Jane Kramer argued in 1995, this narrative was from the late 1980s onwards advanced by Kohl in his capacity as chancellor and as founder of the new German Historical Museum. “The politics of liberation have always been Helmut Kohl’s department,” Kramer wrote in a then-controversial article, “and Kohl, through thirteen years as Chancellor, has been determined to leave Germans with not only a united country but a heroic one … You could say that in this he has been the first really successful revisionist of postwar German history.”

The CDU was not alone in this strategy. When visiting the damaged site of the Jewish barracks at Sachsenhausen, for example, Klaus Kinkel of the liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP), and member of Kohl’s government “felt compelled to vouch for his own non-Jewish Mitbürger [fellow citizens]” more than needing to express any worry about sustained antisemitism in Germany. “This Germany,” he declared, “is not xenophobic.” As Neumann points out, “His assurance was strangely reminiscent of German community leaders who after the defeat of Nazi Germany claimed that the majority of Germans had not actively supported the regime.” Kinkel also reminded Germans of the centrality of democratic values to the new united Germany, asserting that “A few misguided people… must not be allowed to destabilize German democracy.” Earlier postwar statements of this nature from German politicians such as Adenauer were part of a discourse of incipient Western orientation and the need for Germany to prove, after the crimes of the Third Reich and against a Cold War antitotalitarian backdrop, a commitment to Western democratic values. In the early 1990s, however, statements like Kinkel’s had at their core a belief that Germany—especially post-unification—was finally a “normal” nation. Normalität as a key word of the 1990s had its roots in the rhetoric of the 1980s, which rested not only on the belief that Germany had finally become a reliable, Western democracy with the values of human rights and human dignity at its core, but also a relativist view of German history in which “the Nazi past was viewed as one historical epoch among many in a long and venerable German history,” and had been no better or worse than other genocidal dictatorships. It was precisely this “program of cultural reform aimed at enhancing legitimacy through identity” that the violence and destruction at Hoyerswerda, Rostock, Solingen, and Sachsenhausen threatened.

Rather than address racial hatred, antisemitism, and the lack of integration of foreign guest workers in West Germany, then, the official response from Kohl’s government to the violence in Hoyerswerda and Rostock sought to underscore a positive identity for the new Germany by rejecting the reality of racial hatred amongst Germans, displacing the guilt on to an “other” Germany which now required, also, to forget its own totalitarian past. Kohl’s crypto-revisionism has to be discerned through his attempts to restructure the narrative of German history through his museum exhibitions and declarations that the unified Germany is Nazirein (free of Nazis). Yet precisely this insistence on Germany’s deeply held democratic values was what underpinned a more pernicious form of relativism. To avowed right-wing relativists, a German “Schuldkult” (“guilt culture,” a term often used by AfD) is the last thing truly hindering German Normalität. As Adorno observed in 1960, “talk of a guilt complex has something untruthful to it … the terribly real past is trivialized into merely a figment of the imagination of those who are affected by it.” In the early 1990s, it was the terribly real present that became subject to such trivialization.

In his recent film about the riots in Rostock, titled Wir sind jung, wir sind stark (We are Young, we are Strong), Afghan-German director Burhan Qurbani portrays the tension between a melancholic inability to recall the GDR, as it rapidly fades from national memory, and a desire to simply obliterate what remains. The character Philip, after committing suicide by jumping from the balcony of his apartment on the eighth floor of a drab Rostock housing estate, leaves behind a note in which he expresses a painful inability to recall the past: “Every day, I lose a day, a week, a month … My memories are dissolving.” Underpinning the economic despairs of his family and peers, he writes, is the sense that his town and his former nation are being erased entirely: “How can you keep on going,” he asks, “if you no longer have a past?”

It is interesting that one of the latest contributions to the discourse about Rostock should make such a strikingly sympathetic attempt to understand the deep connections between identity and memory—specifically, the loss of GDR memory as the former East Germany became subsumed by the identity of the Federal Republic. While the film represents this as a melancholy loss, the thing which seems to have actually emboldened many East German skinheads after the fall of the Berlin Wall was the very idea of unification with West Germany. To the far-right, anticommunist youth, unification meant that “they could be ‘proud to be Germans again.’” Furthermore, this line of thinking was not unique to East German skins but was shared by a network of neo-Nazi groups and far-right political parties across the newly unified Germany. In their interviews with the German media in 1989, East German skinheads voiced a similarly future-oriented drive behind their embrace of the imagery and insignia of the Third Reich. “Deutschland,” to the neo-Nazi, signifies not just a lost Heimat, but a Germany for Germans that is yet to come.

In the post Wall debate about German national identity, the presence of neo-Nazi youths in unified Germany above all threatened the long-nurtured mnemonic discourse of the center-right, which cared more about this than about the safety of foreigners in Germany and, ultimately, the right to asylum that had been enshrined in their own Basic Law since 1949.