The man leading the charge to make Germany proud again won’t say he wants his fellow Germans to “forget” the Nazi past, but that is where his ideas invariably lead.
Hans-Thomas Tillschneider, a 48-year-old lawmaker for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, was until recently little known beyond his largely rural constituency. But he may soon be in a position to help realize one of the greatest ambitions of the party’s most extreme faction: remaking his country’s postwar identity and steering Germans toward leaving behind the Nazi past.
That history “remains present in a peculiar way — yes, like a zombie,” Tillschneider told POLITICO in July on the sidelines of an AfD conference in the eastern city of Magdeburg. “It’s an undead entity. And that is not normal. That is not good.”
Germany’s much-vaunted Erinnerungskultur, or culture of remembrance, is central to its self-conception — and long served as an existential imperative. Though halting, West Germany’s reckoning with Nazi crimes and the Holocaust in the decades after the end of World War II served to help restore the country’s standing among democratic nations, making possible its membership in Western alliances. The country’s constitution was shaped in repudiation of Nazism, with safeguards intended to prevent its resurgence.
But for the AfD’s most extreme leaders — many now concentrated in rural areas of the former East Germany — the culture of remembrance has merely perpetuated what some, including Tillschneider, call a “guilt cult” designed to instill self-loathing in the German Volk, a term for “people” which is imbued with near-mystical significance on the far right. Without openly denying Nazi crimes, they argue the cultural and political reckoning with them has damaged the Volk’s identity, leaving Germans weak, atomized, and vulnerable to “globalist” forces such as the EU and the U.S., long viewed by the far-right as a corrosive force due to the homogenizing influence of its individualist, consumerist culture — at least until U.S. President Donald Trump’s arrival.
Tillschneider’s ideas aren’t new. The backlash against Germany’s culture of remembrance is as old as the effort to reckon with the past itself. But as the intellectual architect of the party’s blueprint for governing in Saxony-Anhalt ahead of a Sept. 6 election in the state — where the AfD is so far ahead in the polls it’s within striking distance of an outright majority in parliament — he could soon wield more tangible power than any other far-right figure in Germany’s postwar history to turn those ideas into reality. Tillschneider, currently the AfD’s spokesperson for culture and education policy in the state parliament, is a leading candidate to become the head of a future ministry that would oversee school curricula and cultural funding in the state.
“We want to spread the joy of being German,” Tillschneider said at a pre-election AfD “family fest” on an overcast August afternoon in Querfurt, a small medieval fortress city in his Saxony-Anhalt constituency. “It’s a celebration. Celebrate the fact that you’re German.”
This did not mean, he added, that the AfD would eliminate school lessons on Nazi crimes. Rather, it would “shift the emphasis,” he said, so the Nazi past loses its contemporary urgency.
“Of course, I’d also like to see history classes on the Third Reich,” he said, “But good history classes. Good history classes convey a sense of the otherness of the past.”
‘More Bismarck, less Hitler’
In some ways, Tillschneider, a bearded, bespectacled former university lecturer, seems an unlikely figure to advance the revolution in German identity the far-right has long sought.
Born in Romania during the Cold War, Tillschneider grew up in a German-speaking minority community whose roots in the region stretched back to Habsburg rule. His family moved to West Germany when he was still a child. At university, he became interested in Islamic studies, drawn — as he now explains it — to the subject because it was foreign and unfamiliar. He later studied in Syria before earning a doctorate and publishing a book on “the origins of legal hermeneutics in early Islam.”
After moving to eastern Germany in subsequent years, Tillschneider came to depict Islam as fundamentally incompatible with German society and became a prominent figure in the so-called “New Right,” a network of radical intellectuals known for recasting old, extremist ideas in more culturally palatable terms. He also became associated with an extreme faction within the AfD called Der Flügel (“the Wing”) alongside Thuringian politician Björn Höcke, who drew widespread condemnation in 2017 for calling Berlin’s prominent Holocaust memorial, located near the Brandenburg Gate, a “monument of shame” and demanding a “180-degree turn” in Germany’s memory politics. Der Flügel was dissolved in 2020, but its members, including Tillschneider, have only grown more influential in the party since then.
Tillschneider was the main author of the AfD’s program for how it will wield power in Saxony-Anhalt. At the root are myriad measures aimed at “stabilizing” German identity by redirecting cultural funding and revising school curricula, over which states have primary authority. Tillschneider has announced plans for changing history lessons so that they are oriented toward “more Bismarck, less Hitler,” — controversial phrasing that has recently been removed from the governing manifesto. The party’s program also proposes cutting funding for “anti-German art” and developing a “patriotic tourism” strategy for the state.
Party leaders say they don’t intend to eradicate memorials to Nazi crimes but will fund and restore those that “honor the sacrifices of soldiers” in both world wars. “This support should benefit all monuments equally, without petty political judgments,” the program reads. “Fallen soldiers gave their lives to defend their country. Recognizing and honoring this great sacrifice is a first sign of a patriotic turnaround.”
It’s perhaps no coincidence that such a revolution in German identity would take root in the former East Germany, where the AfD is ascendant. While West Germany was attempting to undertake a confrontation with the past, imperfect as it was, the state narrative in the former East Germany was that its people had vanquished fascism, which in any case was a product of the West. Many of the AfD’s supporters in the East believe a West German narrative about the Nazi past was imposed on them after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
But for Tillschneider, there’s another reason the revolution will begin in the East — because eastern Germans already know what it means to see a political regime collapse.
“As a result of the peaceful revolution, people have witnessed a change in systems and, as a result, have gained some distance, are more reflective,” he said at the AfD family festival, speaking in a breathless torrent. By contrast, he added, western Germans “have been stewing in the same soup for 80 years.”
‘Love for the homeland is not a crime’
As attendees queued for beer and free bratwurst at the AfD family festival — held on an arid field on the outskirts of Querfurt, beside an agricultural-machinery plant — Tillschneider took the stage before an “Our Country First” placard and declared that they had ample reason to celebrate: the establishment parties, he said, were nearing their demise.
“We’re celebrating the fact that the policies that are directed against us — which take away our freedom, which strip us of our autonomy, which impoverish us — will come to an end,” he yelled, his booming voice saturating the speakers. “On Sept. 6, for the first time, we have a realistic chance — and this isn’t just campaign rhetoric — a realistic chance to end this nightmare, to put an end to this horror!”
Ulrich Siegmund, the AfD’s top candidate in Saxony-Anhalt and its potential future premier, then took to the stage to a rock-star reception. Charismatic and very popular online, his quick smile belies the radical politics of the state branch of his party, which domestic intelligence authorities have classified as an extremist organization seeking “to abolish parliamentary democracy in its current form.” AfD politicians in the state, including Siegmund and Tillschneider, deny being extremists, portraying the label as state repression that undermines the democratic will of their supporters.
If Siegmund is the face of the AfD in Saxony-Anhalt, Tillschneider supplies much of the brains. Siegmund alluded to this during his speech, thanking Tillschneider for spending “hundreds of hours” on the party’s governing manifesto.
“I’ll need him over the next five years because we’re making history together,” Siegmund said of Tillschneider. “The sun rises in the east, but it will shine over all of Germany!”
As people waited in line for hours to get Siegmund’s autograph, Tillschneider darted frantically from tent to tent, making sure things were running smoothly. “Don’t sell them for less than €10!” he shouted to a group of volunteers as he handed them a box of tote bags emblazoned with Siegmund’s face.
One of those volunteers, Gesine Sauer, a 48-year-old social worker from the area, said she agreed with Tillschneider’s ideas about making Germans proud of their history.
“People always focus on just a very small part of German history — and that has nothing to do with anyone trying to deny it, or trying to dismiss it — but German history is so much more than that,” she said. “And time and again, from all sides, we’re being forced to grapple with this question of guilt. That’s wrong, and it’s not a positive development. Instead, we should reflect on what we were once capable of achieving,” she added, going on to list German historical accomplishments in medicine and industry.
Others put it more simply. “I’d say that was all 90 years ago, and at some point we should just let the past be the past,” said one woman in her 60s wearing a bracelet in the colors of the German flag.
“With us, if you say you love your homeland, you’re stamped as a Nazi,” said one man, a 51-year-old railroad track worker, as he waited in the long line for beer wearing a shirt that read “Love for the homeland is not a crime.”
Most attendees, however, cited other reasons for voting for the AfD: economic and industrial decline; refugees receiving state support while Germans struggled to pay their bills; the government’s refusal to accept cheap Russian natural gas while sending billions in federal aid to Ukraine.
For Tillschneider and his fellow far-right ideologues, these more tangible issues are all connected to the crisis of German identity: the country’s reluctance to pursue its own interests, they argue, stems from an “anti-German” strain of thinking within the country.
“That’s why we have policies that are self-destructive in every area — because we have a cracked identity,” Tillschneider said from underneath a tent at the festival.
He rattled off ideas for repairing the German soul: a “pride month” celebrating German cultural heritage and a festival of German music — not “Baroque music or European music,” he clarified, but “German music.”
He denied the goal was to make Germans forget the Nazi past. Yet he went on to describe a process that seemed to amount to just that.
The goal, he said, was for this history to “no longer be so urgent, no longer so intrusive, no longer so present.”
He added: “Just because something is no longer present doesn’t mean it will be forgotten.”
Nette Nöstlinger contributed reporting.
