Reviving Germany’s dark spirits?

A far-right party’s victory in a German state is reviving memories of the country’s dark past.

In the eastern state of Thuringia, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party received one-third of the vote. And it picked up 30 percent of the tally in Saxony, also in eastern Germany. It is the strongest showing by a German far-right party in a free election since 1932 when the Nazis won one-third of the national vote. Adolf Hitler then became chancellor—and soon absolute dictator.

This year, Germany celebrates 75 years of stable democratic rule. Is that stability now threatened? Perhaps, but hopefully not. Thuringia has a population of 2 million, and Saxony has 4 million people, among Germany’s 84 million total. Together, they make up 7 percent of Germany’s citizenry.

Eastern Germany, with 16 million people, is distinct from the rest of the country. Its democratic experience dates only from the fall of communism in 1989. It is less prosperous. And it is also much more secular. A survey in 2012 found that more than half of Germans in the east are atheists (compared to 10 percent in western Germany), making it one of the most unreligious places in the world. Most people in western Germany still retain nominal Christian affiliation.

Konrad Adenauer, the first chancellor of the reunified Federal Republic of Germany, was a devout Catholic and Christian Democrat. He privately derided eastern Germany as never fully Christian since it was not Christianized until the 13th century by the Teutonic Knights. The Protestant Reformation began in 1517 with Martin Luther in eastern Germany. In the 2012 survey, 25 percent of eastern Germans identified as religious, and 21 percent identified as Protestant. In 2022, only 15 percent of eastern Germans were Protestant.

Nazism subverted and repressed Christianity in Germany for 12 years (1933–1945). And then communism repressed Christianity in East Germany for 44 years, from which it never recovered, compounded by Christianity’s overall decline across Europe. The spiritual void eased the rise of the AfD, which like other far-right European parties, champions the cultural Christendom against Islam while disdaining actual Christian faith. The AfD, which is anti-American and pro-Russian, perhaps resembles Russian President Vladimir Putin’s regime in this regard. The difference is that Putin self-servingly funds the Russian Orthodox Church and occasionally appears in churches.

In contrast, the AfD has little use for churches, and churches generally oppose the AfD. Germany’s Catholic bishops, who generally stay nonpolitical, have denounced the AfD, whose beliefs they say are “incompatible with the Christian image of God and humankind.” The Evangelical Church in Germany, which is the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, has also denounced the AfD’s beliefs as “in no way compatible with the principles of the Christian faith.” The denomination has also disciplined a pastor in Saxony who was running for office with the AfD, which is charged with taking “constitutionally questionable positions.”

Modern German democracy was founded in 1949 largely on Christian democratic ideals, mostly supported also by the left-of-center Social Democratic Party. Thanks to Nazism, there was a broad consensus against political extremes. In West Germany during the Cold War, neither the far right nor communism ever gained popularity, even while large Communist parties existed in neighboring France and Italy. In 2013, the AfD arose mostly in reaction to Germany’s financial bailouts of failing smaller European economies like Greece.

But in 2015, the AfD was energized and radicalized by Chancellor Angela Merkel’s dramatic acceptance into Germany of more than 1 million refugees from the Syrian civil war and other Mideast conflicts. The daughter of a Protestant pastor and herself a practicing Christian, Merkel saw welcoming the refugees as a moral imperative and an atonement for Germany’s genocidal past. But the sudden influx of hundreds of thousands of mostly single men from Muslim countries unsettled millions of Germans, who saw them as a cultural and economic threat, especially in less prosperous eastern Germany.

Perhaps there is a lesson for Christian realist statecraft. What may seem superficially moral may unintentionally ignite destructive consequences. Chancellor Merkel’s Christian conscience and desire to help refugees popularized the AfD. Prudent politics must deal with people as they are, not as we may ideally wish them to be. Merkel should have foreseen that much of Germany, rightly or wrongly, would resent so many refugees. It is also now clear that many of the refugees had no intention of blending into the German culture.

In European parliamentary elections in June, the AfD got 16 percent of the national vote, second only to the Christian Democrats. On Sept. 22, the AfD is expected to top the ballot in the eastern German state of Brandenburg. Other German parties reject collaboration with the AfD, but the AfD may become too big to ostracize. The elderly leader of the Jewish community in Thuringia, who survived Nazism and communism, told The Jerusalem Post, “For me, the AfD was, from its very beginning, a frightening threat. Not only for Jews but for all democrats.” The world will be watching closely.