Ten Years Of Being Right Knowing is not preventing

There are four mass graves under the Alter Garnisonfriedhof in Berlin, and the historian standing on top of them is explaining to a camera crew that he is not especially alarmed.

His name is Götz Aly, and he has spent a working lifetime on National Socialism. He picked the cemetery himself. It’s a quiet green place, old stones going soft at the edges, birds, the sound of traffic arriving from somewhere behind the trees – the kind of park a person walks a dog through without once looking down. When the Red Army reached what is now Marzahn, he says, it took them fourteen days to fight through to the Brandenburger Tor. Eighty thousand Soviet soldiers died doing it. Ninety thousand German soldiers. At least thirty thousand civilians who happened to be standing between the two. They lie there in what he calls a wild mixture, and there is a version of that same wild mixture under nearly every cemetery in Berlin.

Then he asks the question his last book is built around: why did they keep fighting like that, right to the final day, when the war had been unwinnable for a year?

His answer is the worst sentence in the whole broadcast.

They fought that hard because they knew. Because what had been done in their name in the occupied east had been done thoroughly enough, and reported home often enough, that the arithmetic was obvious: if the other side did to us what we did to them, there is nothing left of us. The propaganda leaned on exactly that from late 1941 onward, and it worked, because it was true. Knowledge did not stop anybody. Knowledge made them fight harder.

And then Aly steps off the graves, sits down, and says the current alarm about Germany is overdone.

The aspekte report that set this off

Interest declared, up front

I’m German. I left in 2018 and I live in Sài Gòn. My fiancé is Vietnamese. Whether Germany remains a country the two of us could theoretically move to together is not a hypothetical in this apartment, and every sentence I write about the AfD is written by a person with a stake in how it comes out.

So hold that against me wherever it’s earned. I’d rather say it in the second paragraph than have you find it in the twelfth.

And since a declared interest is worth roughly nothing on its own, this piece contains three corrections to things I believed when I started writing it. One of them cuts directly against my own case. It’s staying in.

March 2016, one day early

On 12 March 2016 I published a piece about the AfD. In German, on my old domain, in a register I can only describe as a 27-year-old who had recently re-discovered the subjunctive. It went up the day before three states voted.

I have not touched it since. Reading it back this week was unpleasant in a way I did not expect, because the embarrassing parts are the style and the accurate parts are everything else.

I named Sachsen-Anhalt. Not as one example among several – specifically, as the state where the party’s people drop the moderate West German costume and go openly biologistic in public, and get applause for it. I wrote that Germany’s West would follow, more slowly, in a lower register. I wrote that the hope of an AfD that fizzles out like the Piratenpartei was illusorischer Optimismus, and that the party had come to cement its foundation into the middle of society and would occupy us for many years.

And buried in a long list of program points, item after item, sits this: Rückbesinnung der Frauenrolle als zentrales Element traditionell heterosexueller Familien. A return to the woman’s role as the central element of traditionally heterosexual families.

I called the party history’s rewind button. Ten years later, Philipp Ruch has a book out about the rise of the NSDAP called Der Rückfall. The relapse. I’d like to report that this feels good – but it does NOT feel good.

Then there’s the last paragraph, which is the one I can’t put down: I ended that post by telling the reader they were free to vote for the party and free to sit back and let history take its course, because they personally had nothing to fear from a purely German Germany. Unless, I wrote, you happen to be: andersgläubig, atheistisch, schwul, bi, transsexuell, links, intellektuell, arm, Single oder einer der 7.300.000.000 außerhalb Deutschlands lebenden Menschen.

Of another faith, atheist, gay, bi, trans, left-wing, intellectual, poor, single, or one of the 7.3 billion people living outside Germany.

(The vocabulary has moved on since 2016 and I’d write that third-from-last one differently now. Also there are 8.2 billion of us now. I’m leaving the original alone).

I wrote that list as a rhetorical device. A list of other people, deployed to make a point at the expense of a hypothetical voter. Ten years later I am several items on it, including – and this is the one that got me – the last one.

That is not irony. Irony is when the outcome mocks the intention. This is a man describing a danger in the third person and then quietly moving further into the category.

Three things I had wrong

But here is the part where I pay for the paragraph above: The young generation is not drifting right. I believed this. Everyone I talk to believes this, and it is the single most repeated line about German politics outside Germany. It’s wrong, or at least it’s half of a thing being sold as the whole thing. At the last federal election, 25.2 percent of male voters aged 18 to 24 chose the AfD – and 37 percent of young women chose Die Linke, a larger share than young men gave the AfD. Die Linke quadrupled its result among first-time voters.

So the youngest cohort in the country isn’t moving right; it’s splitting down the middle along a gender line, harder than any cohort above it. Which is a stranger and more interesting story, and almost nobody outside Germany is telling it.

I had a theory about why, and I’m going to state it as a theory rather than a finding: a party whose written program calls for a return to the woman’s role in the traditional family is not a neutral object for a 22-year-old woman, and that pushes. Maybe. But the same divergence shows up across 27 European countries, including several with no AfD-alike party at all, so whatever is happening is bigger than German party politics and I should not pretend my tidy explanation covers it.

The party is not currently classified as confirmed far-right at federal level. This one hurts, and it’s the one people repeat most confidently, including me. The Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz did upgrade the federal party to gesichert rechtsextremistisch (confirmed as far-right extremist) in May 2025. Then the party sued, and on 26 February 2026 the Verwaltungsgericht Köln suspended it – the agency may not apply that classification, or state it publicly, until the main proceedings conclude. The court read the material and found unconstitutional elements, particularly around Muslims, but not an overall unconstitutional picture. Five state branches – Thüringen, Sachsen, Sachsen-Anhalt, Brandenburg, Niedersachsen – still carry the classification. Yet, the federal one is on hold.

I want to sit inside that fact rather than hurry past it, because it is genuinely awkward for everything else I’m about to argue: a German court just constrained the domestic intelligence service in favor of the party that service is accused of persecuting. That is not what a dying rule of law looks like. That is the machine working. If you’re building a case that the country is sliding, this is the strongest single piece of evidence against you, and any version of this essay that leaves it out is propaganda with footnotes.

Political violence is not exclusively a right-wing problem. It is overwhelmingly one. In 2025 German police recorded 85,837 politically motivated offences, the highest since the statistic began in 2001, and the right-wing category alone accounted for 42,544 of them. Politically motivated violent crime hit 4,156 cases, the worst since 2016. But left-motivated offences rose sharply in the same year, and if I write the sentence as though only one side is doing this, someone with the table in front of them gets to dismiss the entire piece. So: overwhelmingly, not exclusively.

What survived the fact-check, for the record: the AfD is polling around 27 to 29 percent nationally, ahead of the Union, and the governing coalition would no longer have a majority. Attacks on journalists are up. And the 2023 meeting near Potsdam – the one where a plan for the removal of millions of people, citizens included, was discussed seven kilometers from the villa where the Wannsee conference happened – was real enough that in May 2026 a Berlin court ruled it may legally be called a deportation conference.

The number that answers my own question

I came into this wanting to know how it’s possible. Not how a far-right party grows – that’s a solved problem, there are shelves of it. What I wanted was the German version of the question. We know. We were taught. We have more memorial infrastructure per square kilometer than anywhere on the planet. How is it happening anyway?

The answer turned out to be sitting in an ARD poll, and it is not complicated: sixty-seven percent of Germans already consider the AfD far-right. Sixty-two percent already consider it a danger to democracy. And ninety-one percent of the party’s own supporters say they do not care whether it gets called far-right, as long as it raises the issues they care about.

Read those three numbers next to each other.

There is no information deficit. Nobody is confused. The knowledge arrived, it was received, it was understood – and then it was priced in. Being called far-right stopped costing anything. That’s the whole mechanism. Not ignorance. Not manipulation, or not primarily. The label simply lost its power to function as a cost, and once a label stops costing, revealing it again is not a strategy, it’s a hobby.

Which is precisely what Ruch found in 1930. The NSDAP went from 2.6 percent in May 1928 to 18.3 percent on 14 September 1930, and the press covered the scandals the entire way. Affairs and sensations by the running meter, he says. It did not cost them a hair. His conclusion, delivered on camera with the flatness of a man who has stopped enjoying his own findings: we do not defeat the far right by uncovering scandals.

And it’s what Aly found in 1944, in the mud, at the other end of the same century. They knew, and it made them worse.

Three data points, ninety-six years apart, all saying the same unbearable thing: knowing is not preventing. It never was. We assumed a causal link that the evidence has never once supported, and we built a country on top of it.

What is actually failing

Well, I want to be careful here, because there’s a lazy version of this argument that I refuse to make: The lazy version says Erinnerungskultur failed. It didn’t. Germany’s memory culture is imperfect, self-congratulatory in places, ritualized in others, and vastly better than the alternative, which is Austria pretending for forty years that it was the first victim. The teaching is not the problem. The Stolpersteine are not the problem. The mandatory school trip that half the class treated as a day off is not the problem, and it also wasn’t wasted on the other half.

What’s failing is the theory underneath it. The load-bearing assumption, never really examined because it felt too obvious to examine: that if people understand what happened, they will not do it again. Information in, prevention out. That’s the model, and the model is what the last ten years have been quietly falsifying.

You can watch the doubt surface in real time. Ruch says it out loud in the same broadcast: what is remembrance for, what is any of it for, when right-wing extremism in parts of the country is polling at levels that would once have been unthinkable. He’s not being cynical. He founded an organisation that builds Holocaust memorials in people’s front gardens as a political weapon. He is asking as a practitioner.

Meanwhile in Nuremberg they are spending 127.5 million EUR to stabilise the party rally grounds. The Kongresshalle – the unfinished 40-meter monster that was supposed to be 70 – is getting a state theater in its courtyard and a facade the architects intend to let go green until the forest that stood there before 1933 takes it back. The city’s answer to the question of what to do with Nazi architecture is: sing in it. Dance in it. Fill it with people the builders would have deported, and let the vines finish the job.

I love that answer. I think it’s the right answer. But I also notice that it is an answer about buildings, and the problem was never the buildings.

My generation, precisely defined

I had two long calls in the same week. One with a friend in Germany, one with a friend in Switzerland I’ve known for ten+ years. Same generation, same conversation, twice, from two countries.

What came back both times was not fear of a coup. It was something duller and more corrosive. Not walking home alone at night in cities that used to be fine. Watching what’s sayable in public expand month by month. Trans friends who have stopped reading the news because the news is about whether they should exist. Families splitting along political lines and not repairing. One of them called it a mental swamp – the constant arrival of terrible information from everywhere at once, which does not mobilize you, because you were already mobilized, and instead simply drains you at a steady rate until you have nothing left to give the thing you already agree with.

We grew up in a specific window. Wall down, borders opening, the euro arriving in our pockets while we were in school, the whole continent apparently on a conveyor belt toward something like a United States of Europe. We believed in that. It wasn’t naivety – it was the observable trend line, and every adult around us confirmed it. We built our politics, our friendships, and in my case an entire emigration on the assumption that openness was the direction of travel and everything else was residue.

Now: here’s the part where I have to be honest about who “we” means, because the sentence I just wrote is the most dangerous one in this essay: that “we” is not my generation. It is a slice of my generation. Urban or urban-adjacent, university-educated, West German or Munich-shaped, mobile enough that Europe felt like an opportunity rather than a competition. The people currently polling the AfD at 41 percent in Sachsen-Anhalt are also my generation. They were also fifteen in 2004. Their 1990s were not the conveyor belt to Brussels – their 1990s were the Treuhand, the closures, the parents who never worked again, and a promise of blooming landscapes that arrived as a car park.

I don’t have to agree with a single conclusion they’ve drawn to admit that their evidence was different from mine. If I write “my generation believed in Europe” without that paragraph, I’ve accidentally written the most predictable essay of the decade: a man who left wondering aloud why the people who stayed got angry.

I left. That’s a fact with weight. I get to be sad about Germany from 9,300 kilometres away, and I don’t get to be surprised.

Six weeks

On 6 September, Sachsen-Anhalt votes. The AfD is polling at 41 percent against the CDU’s 24, it is running on an outright majority rather than a coalition, and its lead candidate Ulrich Siegmund is running to become the first AfD Ministerpräsident in the history of the Federal Republic. Two weeks after that, on 20 September, Berlin and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern vote.

The same state I singled out in 2016. Ten years and six months.

So here is the private arithmetic, stated flat, because it’s the only part of this essay I can actually verify against my own life: The party’s founding program rejects marriage for same-sex couples. Its 2024 party congress defined family as father, mother, child. In 2018 its parliamentary group introduced an actual bill to reinstate the marriage ban, which every other faction voted down. In early 2025 its parliamentary manager confirmed the repeal remains the group’s formal position and that he considers the current law a violation of Article 6 of the Basic Law.

Against that: a repeal needs a Bundestag majority, 29 percent is not one, the Union has stated on the record that the Bundestag opened marriage and it stays open, and two legal opinions commissioned by the Bavarian state government concluded the law is compatible with Article 6 in the first place.

And then the detail that turns all of this from an argument into a calendar: asked about it in January 2026, that same parliamentary manager said his group has no further initiatives planned and stands by Bestandsschutz for marriages already concluded, in the interest of legal certainty.

Grandfathering. A marriage already entered into sits in a different legal category than one not yet entered into.

I’m not a lawyer, that assurance binds nobody, a party that calls a law unconstitutional has a thin claim on protecting what the law produced, and a constitutional court would not be bound by a promise made on a politician transparency website. All true. It is still, functionally, a window, and windows have edges.

So my fiancé and I have a conversation to have that has a date attached to it now, and the date is not one we chose. That’s what this looks like at ground level. Not tanks. Not a Reichstag moment. Two men in a warm kitchen in District 7 with the aircon losing, motorbikes going past under the window in that endless wet-season hum, looking at a calendar and doing sums about a country 9,300 kilometres away, because a slice of an electorate in a state neither of us has ever set foot in is going to vote in six weeks.

An mir – und dir

I ended the 2016 post with a line I meant completely: es liegt an den menschenfreundlichen, weltoffenen Bürgern dieses Landes. It’s down to the humane, open-minded citizens of this country to stop the story turning the page. And then, because I was 27 and could not resist landing it: An mir – und dir.

Down to me. And you.

What is that sentence worth, after ten years of being right about the trajectory and having changed precisely nothing?

I’ve been sitting with the temptation to call all of this a tragedy, and I’ve decided against it, because tragedy requires fate. It needs the fall to be structurally unavoidable, which is an extremely comfortable place to write from, since it means nobody could have done otherwise and therefore nobody has anything to do tomorrow. That’s not honesty – that’s an exit.

The future isn’t written. There are more of us than the polls make it feel like. And I have no evidence whatsoever that saying so accomplishes anything, because I said it in 2016, in better German, and here we are.

So I’m publishing this one before 6 September rather than after, so that it can be wrong. If Sachsen-Anhalt breaks the other way, I want this piece sitting there with its date on it looking overwrought. That would be the single best outcome available to me as a writer, and I would take it without hesitating.

Aly stood on four mass graves and told a camera he isn’t especially alarmed, and he might be right – he has read more of this than I ever will, and the rule of law just demonstrated in a Cologne courtroom that it still has a pulse.

I’m not a historian, though. I’m a guy with a fiancé and a calendar.