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There is a sentence I never imagined I would write as a German, and even now part of me recoils from it: perhaps the denazification of Germany failed more profoundly than we have been willing to admit.
Germany has spent more than 80 years building an identity around the promise of Nie wieder, never again. We teach National Socialism in schools, visit concentration camps, erect memorials, and repeat that remembering history is precisely what prevents us from repeating it.
And yet in Sachsen-Anhalt, the far-right AfD has just won 43.8 per cent of the vote, more than doubling its previous result.
So I find myself asking an uncomfortable question: did we really dismantle the thinking that made fascism possible?
Hatred rarely returns wearing its old uniform. It changes vocabulary. It changes its target. It learns to present itself as concern about immigration, protecting culture, defending borders, preserving national identity, or simply “asking questions.”
Antisemitism obviously did not disappear either after 1945, and it would be grotesque to pretend that it did. But neither, I increasingly believe, did the deeper machinery of othering, that ancient human impulse to divide society into those who belong and those whose belonging can always be questioned.
Today that suspicion is directed relentlessly toward Muslims, Arabs, Turks, Africans, refugees, and people who simply look as though they might have come from somewhere else. And once a political movement gives that suspicion permission to speak, something changes.
Since the election, my Threads feed has been filled with stories that make my stomach turn. One German woman wrote about her hairdresser, a woman of Turkish heritage who was born in Germany, has paid taxes for more than 30 years, built a home and a business there, and is now considering leaving because she is frightened.
She described AfD voters openly discussing their politics while sitting in the chair of the very woman whose community they apparently want removed. Her daughter is now being asked at school whether she is Muslim and then avoided by girls she considered friends.
Another person described a Turkish friend working for an energy company who was refused entry into five homes in a single day and subjected to racist abuse. These are personal accounts, not statistics, but what horrifies me is the confidence.
People feel permitted to say it now.
Political movements do not invent every prejudice in their supporters, but they can remove the shame surrounding it. What was once whispered around a kitchen table begins appearing in classrooms, workplaces, and comment sections because someone with a microphone has recast hatred as patriotism, truth-telling, or courage.
And this legitimisation has not been confined to Germany. Elon Musk publicly endorsed the AfD and appeared by video at a party event. JD Vance criticised political “firewalls” against far-right parties and met Alice Weidel shortly before Germany’s 2025 federal election. After the AfD’s Sachsen-Anhalt result, Donald Trump praised the victory. Of course he would.
However, I don’t believe that any of these men made Germans vote AfD. Germany remains responsible for Germany. But when globally powerful figures repeatedly validate a far-right movement, they help normalise it.
I believe words are powerful. They create climates, and climates determine what grows. Perhaps that is partly why this touches me so personally. I am German too, but apparently only until somebody decides that I am not German enough: that I also do not belong.
I grew up in Germany, have German citizenship, am half German and half Brazilian, attended German schools until I left to study in the UK. My written German is rusty because I rarely use it professionally.
Yet when I challenge xenophobic Germans online, somebody will sooner or later attack my German, as though an awkward sentence or misplaced comma were enough to question whether I belong.
And that is where the historical echo becomes difficult to ignore, because authoritarian nationalism has always been obsessed with who belongs. Who is German enough? Who is too foreign, too religious, too different?
The categories change, but the impulse remains hauntingly familiar. This brings me to another phrase constantly invoked in these debates: freedom of speech.
Freedom of expression is foundational to democracy, but it has never meant that every form of speech is harmless, nor that democracy must stand politely aside while political movements teach one group of citizens to fear another.
Germany’s Basic Law recognises this tension. Article 5 protects freedom of expression while acknowledging legal limits, and Article 1 states something even more fundamental:
Human dignity shall be inviolable.
So perhaps the harder democratic question is not simply whether somebody has the right to say something hateful, but what happens when speech becomes an organised strategy for convincing millions that another group is dangerous or less entitled to belong.
Freedom is not merely the freedom to speak. It is also the freedom to live among other human beings without having your humanity constantly placed on trial.
And yet there is another Germany too, and I refuse to erase it from this story.
Over the last several years, Germans have repeatedly taken to the streets in extraordinary numbers against the far right. In January 2024, organisers estimated that 1.4 million people demonstrated across Germany over a single weekend, and in February 2025 Berlin police counted around 160,000 people at another major protest.
Those people are Germany too.
The teachers refusing to let Muslim children be scapegoated, the neighbours standing beside immigrant families, the journalists investigating extremism, and the people willing to stand in the cold because they believe democracy requires more from us than voting once every four years are Germany too.
History rarely repeats itself in exactly the same costume. It rhymes. It borrows an old melody and writes new lyrics over it. The Germany of 2026 does not need to resemble the Germany of 1933 for us to recognise dangerous patterns in the way fear is cultivated, minorities are scapegoated, and belonging becomes conditional. But neither does resistance have to look exactly as it did then.
Willy Brandt, who fled Nazi Germany and later returned to become Chancellor, said in his Nobel Peace Prize lecture that “a good German cannot be a nationalist.” He also spoke of “active compassion” and human responsibility, and perhaps that is where my hope still lives.
Not in the comforting fantasy that Germany has inoculated itself against fascism forever because we have museums, memorials, and school lessons about the Holocaust, but in the millions who have already taken to the streets and in the people who refuse to let their neighbours become political scapegoats.
Maybe Nie wieder was never meant to be merely a sentence about the past, nor something reserved for one particular form of hatred, but an instruction to recognise dehumanisation in whatever shape it takes and to confront it the moment it begins to grow.
I hope enough Germans will look at their Muslim neighbour, their Turkish hairdresser, their Syrian colleague, their Jewish friend, their foreign-born doctor, their child’s classmate and understand that the question of whether those people belong is already the wrong question.
They are here. They are part of the country. They are human. Democracy does not remain alive because we once defeated fascism.
It remains alive because every generation decides that it is worth defending again, and that’s exactly what I shall be doing.
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