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This is a study of the growth of the right wing in a reunited Germany. Since the end of the Cold War, an explosion of xenophobia and attacks on foreigners - some of them asylum-seekers - has attracted world-wide media attention. Coming after the seemingly miraculous celebration of freedom accompanying the fall of the Berlin Wall and the country's reunification, these events have caused acute anxiety within Germany itself. These phenomena are not exclusive to Germany, but their undertones of Nazism have prompted the question: how could this happen in a country that had so firmly repudiated its past and rightly prided itself on its anti-fascism and liberal democracy? The author sets this development in its historical context, showing the long-established continuity of right-wing influence and power in German conservative politics, and he explores the effects of the end of the Cold War on German society and politics. He also examines the growth of xenophobia and right-wing attitudes in the former GDR since the implosion of communism.
Germany's current position as a regional super-power and its contribution to European economic progress, make this text a significant and topical contribution.
List of contents
Part 1 - Background
German Partition
The Two-Tier Society
Xenophobia and Right-Wing Radical Tendencies among Young People in East Germany
National-Revolutionary Sentiments in the Former GDR?
Part 2 - History and Political Culture of the GDR
Right-Wing Authoritarian Views in a Nutshell
Imposition of Party Line and Militarization of East Germany
The Language of the Third Reich and Anti-Semitism in the GDR
"Our Goethe, Your Mengele", or Legitimizing Anti-Fascism
The Ravensbruecker Ballade and "Antifascism"
The GDR and the Legacy of German Political Lutheranism
The GDR and the Legacy of Prussian Political Ideals
Part 3 - The Right Wing of the United Germany
An Anti-"Anti-Fascist" Iconoclastic Fury?
The Historikerstreit
The New Right
The Republikaner
Anti-semitism
The Debate on Asylum-Seekers and the Influence of the New Right
Poland, the New Right, German Conservatives and "Ordinary Germans"
Weimar Revisited?
