In the wake of the right-wing terror attack on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, countries across the globe are scrambling to improve surveillance and monitoring of right-wing extremists. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced an immediate review of New Zealand’s security agencies, with 250 police officers investigating why the terrorist was not on any security… Continue reading “How to Prevent Hate”
The political goals of the (German) New Right can largely be summarized by two central concepts: the intellectualization of right-wing extremism through the formulation of an intellectual metapolitics, and the pursuit of a (right-wing) cultural hegemony. Here, metapolitics denotes efforts to take intellectual control of public debates, shaping them on a theoretical meta-level by coining… Continue reading “New Right in Germany: Myth and Reality”
What’s the importance of radical right leadership? A discussion of Olaf Sundermeyer’s, Gauland. Die Rache des alten Mannes [Gauland – The Revenge of the Old Man], Beck: Munich (2018). Among political analysts, it has for a long time been commonsense to highlight the importance of individual leaders’ public appeal. In an extreme form, the likes of Jörg Haider… Continue reading “Understanding Gauland – how to think about radical right leadership”
On February 1st 2019 a workshop was organized by the Zentrum für zeithistorische Forschung (ZZF) (Centre for Contemporary History) in Potsdam, with Frank Bösch, Yves Müller, Dominik Rigoll, Sarah Schulz, Julia Kleinschmidt, Christoph Schulze, Anke Hoffstadt, Henrike Voigtländer and Sebastian Bischoff, to name only those present on stage. The purpose of this workshop with approximately… Continue reading “Conference Report: “Right-Wing Extremism as a research object in Contemporary History””
Özil, like many others, has repeatedly stated that he would prefer to play for both national football teams if international football regulations made it possible. The recent case of Mesut Özil has shown a severe rupture in relations between German-Turks and German natives, which has been a long time coming, but went unrecognized while the… Continue reading “Radical-right backlash against Games of Belonging: the case of Mesut Özil”
An analysis of 1980 murder of Shlomo Lewin and Frieda Poeschke reveals that it was disgracefully handled both by the police and the public. On the evening of December, 19, 1980, a double homicide was committed in the German city of Erlangen: A stranger shot and killed the Jewish publisher Shlomo Lewin and his life… Continue reading “The Anti-Semitic Murder Germany Forgot”
The announcements for the next large White Power Music festivals in Saxony (“Skinheads Back to the Roots” in March; “Schild & Schwert” festival in June) and Thuringia (“Tage der nationalen Bewegung” in July) have just been released. Even though the number of visitors decreased by the end of the year 2018 (6,000, 2,200 and 1,100… Continue reading “Saxony and Thuringia – Strongholds of White Power Music in Germany”
Left-wing parties and movements across Europe employing anti-globalisation and anti-EU rhetoric are on the increase. In Germany, the new left movement Aufstehen has joined the trend. The return to the nation is a trend that marks the politics of more and more European left-wing movements and parties. Those many European social democratic parties that took… Continue reading “Can left nationalism stop the rise of the far-right in Germany?”
The year 2019 began quite turbulently for German politics with a politically-charged data leak. One Twitter user published the personal data of politicians, artists and online activists in the fashion of a Christmas calendar, which opened doors every day to reveal private information about its victims. When journalists and security agencies discovered this data leak… Continue reading “The far right in the post-digital condition”
German neo-Nazi bands attempt to appeal more broadly to an audience that is opposed to the government’s position on asylum seekers. Plato once wrote, in an argument postulating the banning of music, that “any musical innovation is full of danger to the whole State.” While an extreme position to adopt in its own right, the… Continue reading “Tracking German Neo-Nazism Through Music”