There’s a widespread consensus in Germany that the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) is a xenophobic far-right party that threatens the republic’s postwar political order. But there’s no accord on remedies—and, relatedly, no agreement about the sources of the scourge .

What seems clear is that the AfD’s variety of national populism is most heavily anchored in eastern Germany and traces back to the country’s Cold War division, the terms of its eventual unification, and East-West relations since 1990. But that surface-level agreement about recent history masks deeper disagreements about what exactly happened during those periods.

There’s a widespread consensus in Germany that the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) is a xenophobic far-right party that threatens the republic’s postwar political order. But there’s no accord on remedies—and, relatedly, no agreement about the sources of the scourge .

What seems clear is that the AfD’s variety of national populism is most heavily anchored in eastern Germany and traces back to the country’s Cold War division, the terms of its eventual unification, and East-West relations since 1990. But that surface-level agreement about recent history masks deeper disagreements about what exactly happened during those periods.

The AfD is not solely an eastern German phenomenon: Parties like it exist across the European Union, in the United Kingdom, and in the United States, too. In western Germany, the AfD breaks into double digits everywhere and even tops 20 percent in places. But its popularity is twice as high across eastern Germany—where polled rates of xenophobic sentiment are also much higher. The record result of 44 percent in Saxony-Anhalt’s state elections on Sept. 6 is conceivable only in an eastern state, at least for now.

One school of German historians explains the eastern mentality through the prism of the German Democratic Republic’s (GDR) fundamentally totalitarian character. Its clearest proponent is Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk, a historian affiliated with the Stasi Records Archive, the repository of the GDR’s secret police files. Kowalczuk hails from a GDR family that was closely tied to the regime, a story he tells in his book Freiheitsschock (Freedom Shock), but broke with his family and cast off the system’s Marxist-Leninist straitjacket, which cost him the opportunity to attend university. (After unification, he studied history at Humboldt University.) At 22, he joined the countrywide demonstrations that eventually chased out GDR........

© Foreign Policy