The disturbing party coming up on the Right feels like Germany has blamed itself for too long. That “self-blame” is a lot of what has enabled modern Germany to be a much better place than it was before the war.
(I’m an American living in greater Nuremberg, and get to see monuments to Germany’s failures on a regular basis)
Given how Germany is treating those protesting its support of Israel's ongoing war, some would suggest that Germany isn't being quite as brutally honest one might imagine.
This is especially true in the West. Large swaths of the German capitalist class actively backed Hitler and the Nazi party, and got away with it. How they got away with it is particularly appalling. One of the most common defenses at Nuremburg was "I was just following orders", an excuse that was usually rejected. But there was one very specific kind of order that would reliably keep Nazis (Hugo Boss, IG Farben, etc) out of the noose: shareholder duties. In the name of anticommunism, there was an active campaign in the First World[2] to downplay the war crimes of German capitalists after WWII.
The AfD is not a result of Germany being tired of remembering. They're a result of Germany's denazification being incomplete - and politically influenced by the exact same economic forces[3] that put Hitler in the chancellor's seat in the first place. States create liberal democracies with free markets, businesses figure out how to exploit those markets, they get unfathomably rich before someone can stop them, they coopt or overthrow democracy, and then replace liberalism with tyranny.
Overthrow is possible because society has vulnerabilities that can be exploited through propaganda and outrage porn. You socially engineer the public into abolishing their own liberty to hurt the other that they hate. In America, that vulnerability was African Americans. In Nazi Germany's case, it was deeply rooted antisemitism. In today's Germany, it's immigration[4].
[0] The Stazi wants to know about your dancing skill and computer memory speed
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism_in_the_Soviet_Uni...
[2] As in, "aligned with American capitalism" world
[3] America's business elite were not that far behind Germany's in terms of planning to overthrow democracy. See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_collaboration_with_Na...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot
[4] German immigration policy - and, to a larger extent, most EU external immigration policy - is built entirely for rich, self-motivated knowledge workers who can navigate bureaucracy and do all the integration work themselves. As a result, it has lots of poorly integrated immigrant populations with lots of scary right-wingers that the German right can use to scare German liberals into, themselves, becoming scary right-wingers. Fnord fnord fnord.
In general as a reply, I'm not sure where you grew up in Germany (or if, because of Stazi). I grew up in West Germany in the 1970 and 1980 and there was not one week where there wasn't a story about German war crimes, genocide etc. in one of the large magazines. It was also a large topic in school. But it seems where you grew up things were different.
"In Nazi Germany's case, it was deeply rooted antisemitism. In today's Germany, it's immigration"
No it's the same. Racism together with the special case of antisemitism. People don't change.
"The AfD is not a result of Germany being tired of remembering. They're a result of Germany's denazification being incomplete"
Interesting view point. I would assume it is wrong (though I do think denazification in the East was incomplete), it doesn't have anything to do with being tired of remembering or incomplete denazification. Its just that people don't change, and they are nationalists, socialists and racists (just like the Nazi party - (National Socialists)) and with the rise of the populist right in the US and all over Europe, they thought they should band together again. The internet removed all gate keepers. Before that all other far-right parties in the West like "Die Republikaner" didn't get lots of traction but faded away fast.
Yes, they are well aware of what happened in 1930s and that there was Hitler, etc.
And still they conveniently fail to see any connection with today times. It is some unclearly defined Nazis who took over the control of Germany and did all the killings and destroyed a few countries around. But not anyone's grandfather was involved. And supposedly the companies which built their wealth on slave work and death of thousands continue to prosper.
Who is they? The people who brought far right leaders to court because those were shouting SA slogans? Surely not those. And I would argue, that the new right indeed does see the connection, they want to have that connection to today times (see shouting SA slogans).
"It is some unclearly defined Nazis who took over the control of Germany and did all the killings and destroyed a few countries around."
Not sure what that sentence means.
"But not anyone's grandfather was involved."
You seem to have missed the 1960/70s where the topic exactly was that "The fathers did this and didn't talk about it" (In the West, East Germany just declared themselves victims of the Nazis) - which directly lead into the red terror (Red Army Faction RAF) of the 1970s as a reaction to "old nazis".
And you seem to have missed the large Wehrmacht discussion in Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wehrmacht_exhibition (late, I know)
"And supposedly the companies which built their wealth on slave work and death of thousands continue to prosper."
Many companies have paid [0] (late, not enough IMHO) for using slave labor - at least that discussion led to every company pay a historian to write down that part of their history most ignored before. The biggest problem is not the companies but some rich people in Germany like the Quandts who are one of the richest families in Germany and own a large chunk of BMW - they got their money by slave labor, selling to the Prussian army and the Wehrmacht and by stealing from jews.
Compared to that, my (German) grandparents lost their large farms (not complaining, or accusing, but as a comparison) and everything else except their clothing and the clothing they could carry in two suitcases. They were not on the right side of "War Is a Racket".
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_Remembrance,_Respon...
I know that sounds neat to say, but it has no connection to reality. Neither of those guys influenced the late German Empire or the Nazis (a few Nazi ideologues might have read Nietzsche, but they never understood him; meanwhile they absolutely rejected Hegel, and attacked people with accusations of Hegelianism).