Guten tag from Germany, the country that needs saving, according to Elon Musk. But don’t worry, we know what we are doing. And we know who we are. We are Germans. We are good at inventing long, complicated words, and we are really cool and relaxed. But of course, there’s something else we Germans were really good at: inventing Nazis. Germany may have lost one or two world wars, but we successfully turned it into a win, and we became [SPEAKING GERMAN]. We are world champions at confronting our history, a title we’ve held for 80 years in a row. We won this title by virtue signaling, but with a German twist. We are not just signaling virtue to others, but also to our own guilty conscience. Living in Germany means being constantly reminded of our past. Every day, 24/7, for now 80 years, we’ve been telling ourselves, never again. Remembrance of the Holocaust is everywhere in Germany, a country stacked with memorials, memorials, memorials, memorials, just in case we forget to never forget. Unfortunately, “never again” didn’t come with a manual on how to never again. Our German extreme right party, the AfD, is projected to win almost every fifth vote in our national election this February. The party is called the Alternative für Deutschland, which literally means “Alternative for Germany,” and they will probably become the second largest party in German parliament out of around half a dozen. Here is what one of the AfD’s leading figures thinks of German ‘never again.’ [SPEAKING GERMAN] [CHEERS, APPLAUSE] I know it’s subtle, but AfD’s Bjorn Hocke might sound a bit Hitleresque, which is French for ‘slightly concerning.’ Hocke recently won a state election in Eastern Germany, securing the first far right win in a state election since World War II. He, by the way, can legally be called a fascist, as the German court has ruled in one case. So should the rest of the world be worried about a big German fascist comeback? [SPEAKING GERMAN] Yes. You should be worried. Let me explain why. And since I’m German, my explanation, of course, will be pointlessly complicated and inspiringly brutal, like our traditional German bedtime stories. For instance, the one about a boy named Konrad who wouldn’t stop sucking his thumbs until they were cut right off. Just for educational purposes, of course. So the AfD was founded in 2013, and it primarily opposed E.U. policies. Then it quickly radicalized — antisemitism, anti-Muslim, anti-migrant, anti-establishment, anti-mainstream media. The AfD worked, and works, the authoritarian playbook. And now, they are twisting the truth by hijacking our world-renowned, beautiful German language. [GERMAN] A speck of bird [EXPLETIVE] in German history. That’s what one of the AfD’s founders called Germany’s Nazi past, meaning the Holocaust was just a speck of bird [EXPLETIVE] in our overall successful history. Success, of course, meaning constantly losing world wars … so far. When Elon Musk, the man who would never salute Nazis, recently interviewed AfD’s chairwoman Alice Weidel on X, she gave another vibrant example on how AfD mastered blatant truth twisting. “The biggest success after that terrible era in our history was to label Adolf Hitler as right and conservative. He was exactly the opposite. He wasn’t a conservative. He wasn’t a libertarian. He was a communist, socialist guy.” Why not try a 180-degree turnaround from the truth? Let’s try. But these obvious little rhetorical tricks are actually effective, thanks to one special German way to cope with our past: [SPEAKING GERMAN] [SPEAKING GERMAN] means actively forgetting our — let me put it this way — ambiguous past, despite the endless memorials, because honestly, having to confront your own history can be really, really exhausting for us Germans. But [SPEAKING GERMAN] is not a concept the AfD just recently invented. In 1952, for instance, Konrad Adenauer, one of the founding fathers of our modern Democratic Germany, signed a [SPEAKING GERMAN], a reparations agreement. Yet another beautiful, accessible German word. And did you know, also a pretty common girl’s name in Bavaria? Ah. There is little Wiedergutmachungsabkommen. Look at her cute, blonde pigtails. Come over, Wiedergutmachungsabkommen. The schweinebraten is ready in the oven. The Wiedergutmachungsabkommen was our postwar reparations agreement with Israel. But most modern Democratic Germans have conveniently forgotten Adenauer’s real motives. [SPEAKING GERMAN] In other words, beware. The Jews are still powerful, even though we tried to kill them all. So from now on, we better be nice to them, and then all is [SPEAKING GERMAN] good again. Thank you, Konrad Adenauer. But Nazis never really went away in both Germanys. In the 2000, a neo-Nazi terrorist group murdered at least 10 people. Their racist crimes continued for years because the German public and police could not even fathom that neo-Nazis could be responsible. Instead, they just publicly blamed immigrants for supposedly killing each other. Why are we Germans so blatantly dismissive towards the collective affection for the far right? Partly because, in Germany, there’s a discrepancy between collective memory and individual guilt. We acknowledge our grim past. Never again. Yadda, yadda, yadda. But our ancestors, like personally, our families, ourselves, we had nothing to do with it whatsoever. Yes, my great-grandfather was in the Waffen-SS, but he was a cook, and the lasagna he made in Stalingrad tasted like [SPEAKING GERMAN]. So basically, he tried to destroy the Waffen-SS from within. Where is his memorial, hmm? By virtue signaling to our own guilty conscience, we got rid of our Nazi past. Germans have sworn to never again so many times that it became an empty phrase. And when a new right-wing leader calls for a 180-degree turnaround on never again, we also don’t take it seriously because it somehow feels empty as well. Because no matter what we do, Germans can’t be Nazis again. That’s the space in which the AfD operates. They can say and do Nazi things, as long as they aggressively deny that anyone was ever a Nazi. It’s like giving the Hitler salute in front of a large crowd of right- wing extremists while denying being a Nazi. It’s a narrative that seems to be successful all over the world. We aren’t Nazis. We just don’t fully support liberty, equality and the rule of law. We aren’t Nazis. We just want white supremacy. The AfD is not the new Nazi party. They just want Germany to be great again. And that’s why now, in Germany, the [SPEAKING GERMAN]. [MUSIC PLAYING]
