Suggestions to make the 8th May a national German holiday on occasion of the 75th anniversary of the end of Second World War have given the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) the opportunity to challenge dominant German memory culture by urging to remember German victims and offering alternative lessons to be learned from German history. What… Continue reading “An “ambivalent day”: How the AfD attempts to re-frame the 8th May as day to commemorate German Victimhood “
The Hungarian far right envisages agricultural alternatives to Viktor Orban’s populism. Balint is a 30-year-old PhD student from northern Hungary, with expertise in organic farming and environmentally friendly agriculture. Well educated and fluent in English, Balint talks with passion about his daily work at an organic farm, hiking and spending time in nature. An expert… Continue reading “What Hungary’s Nationalist Farmers Have Against Orban”
The far-right has always created “alt-histories” and used historical revisionism to protect their power. President Trump is no different. In 2017, Kellyanne Conway, counselor to US President Donald Trump, coined the phrase ‘alternative facts’ to describe why the Trump administration had differing figures about the size of the audience at the newly elected president’s inauguration… Continue reading “Amid COVID-19, Trump Attempts To Rewrite History”
The radical populist right’s appeal to emotions has been one of the main reasons for its staying power over the span of more than four decades. The triumph of Nazism in the years following the election of 1933 that brought Adolf Hitler to power represents arguably the greatest human catastrophe of the 20th century —… Continue reading “When Emotion Trumps Dispassionate Politics”
In the previous blog, Henry Mead scoped out the nature and origins of ‘Historismus’ in the work of Leopold von Ranke. Today’s second part scopes out Ranke’s influence and his legacy in the subsequent crisis of the concept of historicism during the interwar period. Ranke’s Influence As discussed in the first part of this series,… Continue reading “Part Two: Historismus, Ranke’s Influence and its Ultimate Crisis”
Today, generations often mark difference in ethics, politics and expectations for the future. “Historical generations are not born; they are made. They are a device by which people conceptualize society and seek to transform it,” argued historian Robert Wohl in “The Generation of 1914,” his classic analysis of the young men who grew up around… Continue reading “OK, Boomer: Understanding Today’s Generational Divide”
The tradition of German historismus (often translated in English as historicism) was the leading method of historical study in Germany through the 19th and well into the 20th century. Its reputation for rigour made it attractive to historians across Europe, notably in Britain through the advocacy of Lord Acton, Regius Professor of Modern History at… Continue reading “Historismus. Part One: Historismus, Ranke and its Roots at the University of Berlin”
As contemporary society becomes immersed in visual culture, extremist imagery is becoming progressively organised around a network of symbols, rituals, and collective meanings. Therefore, it is particularly informative to examine the correlation existing between cultural aspects of extremism and criminal transgression. Traditionally, video games, especially violent ones, tend to avoid any recognisable settings or direct… Continue reading “Framing Far Cry 5: The Gamification of White Separatist Propaganda”
Finding commonalities and differences between far right parties has been a long-standing challenge for scholars of the party family. In recent years, ‘Euroscepticism’ has emerged as one shared feature of far right parties in Europe, both in virtue of their peripheral position in party systems, and in virtue of their ‘nativist’ ideology which leads them… Continue reading “Europe from the far right”
On Saturday, Germany’s conservative Christian Democrats face a new leadership contest at their annual conference. The growing discontent of the party base with the current leadership opens up new avenues for far-right ideology in the party not from the outside but from within. CARR Doctoral Fellow, Mr Julian Göpffarth, explores how the CDU’s new radical… Continue reading “Radicalising the establishment from within? The CDU and the Werte Union”