This past summer, the New York Times produced a podcast called Day X. This five-part podcast examined a mix of issues around the German Far-Right, from the National Socialist Underground murders, the police invasions of privacy known as NSU 2.0, the extremist Day X plot, and the scandals of extremists found within the ranks of the German armed forces, such as the now partially disbanded special forces unit known as the KSK (Kommando Spezialkräfte, Special Forces Command).
My initial reaction to the first episode was positive – it was clear that the journalist who produced the podcast knew the cultural and political figures who had long been targets of the far-right, such as Anetta Kahane of the Amadeu Antonio Foundation. It was refreshing, I first thought, to hear an English-language podcast that featured a cultural insider cognizant of German politics.
But as I continued to listen, I was dismayed at the repetition of the kinds of post-war tropes about German memory culture and coming to terms with the Holocaust that Michael Bodeman termed “Memory Theater” and that popular polemicist Max Czollek has criticized in his book Gegenwartsbewältigung (Coming to Terms with the Present). I reviewed Czollek’s book last year for Europe Now.
To my mind, one of the interventions that is critically needed for journalistic attention to the far, extreme and radical right movements globally are partnerships with scholars who have knowledge of the massive amount of research conducted on the far-right since the 1990s (there have been multiple waves of interest amongst social and political scientists in the far-right at various points since the 1920s). Over the course of the next year, this blog will attempt to do just that: make research conducted on the far-right accessible to a broader audience with a special focus on the contemporary German and Austrian extreme right-wing movements and parties.
Social scientists have accumulated expertise not only about voting behavior and protest behavior, but also have spent decades looking at the antagonistic politics of the far-right with respect to globalization, gender and sexual expression, education, political organizing, and separatist movements. Of particular interest in terms of these social issues for this blog will be racism, whiteness, gender politics, anti-genderism and anti-LGBT organizing, and violent crime, including the NSU and NSU 2.0 scandals.
What I tend to see reproduced in the U.S., German and Austrian press are a wide variety of opinion statements that are not supported by the evidence we have gathered through decades of interdisciplinary research. If one of our primary visions of society includes a healthy democratic public sphere, we cannot permit the spread of tropes about extremism that are not based in evidence. Misunderstanding the intent or structure of right-wing political discourse will ultimately hurt any attempts to intervene.