I still think we experience #peakfascism although the latest developments in my country (of all) have delivered a kind of counterpunch that I still struggle to digest.

The country is Germany, the unified or perhaps rather so-called unified Germany. In two of its Eastern states, Saxony and Thuringia, the fascist party AfD ("Alternative for Germany") and the neo-Stalinist party BSW ("Alliance Sahra Wagenknecht") had tremendous successes in the state elections on Sunday, with the AfD about 30% of the ballots in both states and the BSW with about 12% in one and 16% in the other.

It is the first time since 1945 and the end of WW II that in a state election a fascist party has garnered such an amount of votes. But more horrific: The elections took place on Sunday, September 1st, 2024, which by happenstance is the 85th anniversary of the German assault on Poland that started the Second World War.

Can you imagine what that means? That in Germany, in two state elections, on the 85th anniversary of Germany's assault on Poland (and all that came after), a fascist and a leftist authoritarian party can achieve their biggest political successes. That East Germans, in their disgust and thirst for revenge, tried to stick it to the West by enabling those political powers which (at least in the West) decades of education and culture of remembrance have tried to make impossible to ever regain power again.

We failed. Our education system, our efforts to remember, to accept the guilt, to somehow make something new out of it, all those efforts now look as having been in vain. Which is to say: The East won, the West lost.

After reunification people of Eastern Germany often felt unappreciated, lost, looked down at, their biographies dismissed and put aside. The demolition of a broken industry and infrastructure in Eastern Germany went hand in hand, in their opinion, with a demolition of biographies, of ways of living, values, of social nets and communal bonds, and the feeling of safety and a predictable future that comes from communally shared values. Even (or: especially) this sense of safety of the future itself was torn apart. By the West. (They thought.)

The greedy inconsiderate West. "Not everthing was bad in the GDR!" was the slogan of defiance. Still. And over the years, as the West pushed billions of Euros into the East, the East Germans moved to the West. And here the values and cultures mingled, and the West learnt from the East.

In the 1970s to 1990s the counterculture, the alternative movements, the various grassroot movements took place and changed the outlook in Western Germany. Then came the late 1980s, early 1990s, and austerity cut off the money that had made possible the times and spaces for alternative lifeystyles and experiments. In politics the "Kleinbürger" ("the petit bourgeois") came to occupy the highest posts in political power, starting with Helmut Kohl, then followed by Gerhard Schröder, only to make room for Angela Merkel. That all three could follow on each other was mostly due to the fact that they were from the same stock. All three had the style and upbringing of "Kleinbürger", and the rollback into the stiff Adenauer era at the end of the 1980s was only a natural consequence under Helmut Kohl. And into this time of reaction fell the reunification and with that the movement of many from Eastern Germany to the West.

Role models reverted swiftly, with a return of dumb machismo in the male/female role games. Today's Puritanism and Machismo have replaced most of the developments and successes of the 1970s to 1990s. The East won against the West before there were even enough migrants and refugees to blame it all on their "archaic cultural traditions and values".

There have been a lot of discussions in recent weeks why "the East" is so different from "the West", and why is doesn't share what the West deems self-evident cultural stances and values. Why the East seems to be so anti-democratic and authoritarian. The chatter is of the experience of two dictatorships, one Nazi, one Sowjet, without a re-education like the one Western Germans (and Japan on its soil) had to undergo, forced upon them mainly by the Allies, that is, from "outside". I'm not that sure.

True, the GDR was based on the assumption that "the fascists" of the Third Reich were now in Western Germany. The East, the GDR, the country of the anti-fascists, simply by defintion and its history of resistance, could not be the country (or: a country) of past crimes and enduring guilt. That was Western Germany. As there was no guilt (that wasn't already atoned for by "reparations" to the U.S.S.R. whose army deindustrialized Eastern Germany after the war), there was no need for some re-education. The Culture of Remembrance was a project of the West, not the East.

But I guess herein lies some (reasons for the) smugness of Eastern Germany, something that Eastern Germans find pride against and a feeling of superiority over Western Germans. The Western Germans are whiners, in their eyes, while they, the Eastern Germans, are the tough guys, the real ones, although unlucky and unsuccessful. (The parallels to Russia of today springs to mind.)

In 1992 there had been riots in the Eastern city of Rostock-Lichtenhagen that led to arson attacks on a refugee centre and a rooming house for Vietnamese contract workers (remnant from the GDR). The then former party head of the SED, later of the Die Linke/PDS, Gregor Gysi, famously remarked: "What did I miss in my education that I did not learn that I do not set my neighbours on fire?"

It is this decency that seems missing in many who provided the fascists with a spectacular success at the ballot box. Decency, not re-education, seems lacking. To repeat: A success of the fascists at the ballot box, on the anniversary of the most catastrophic war that Europe has seen for, well, a couple of centuries. And young people, Gen Y and X in particular, voting far-right as well. And they don't feel like they are rightwing or extreme or fascist. They think they are "taking their democracy back", from parties they seem to identify with and blame for the problems they feel cutting off their outlook and prospects in life. The "Old Parties", of "the old people".

Still. This lack of decency. The monstrosity of voting far-right or neo-Stalinist authoritarian. These people who are not different from any MAGA in the U.S., or UKIP and Farage in the UK. It doesn't make me sad, it doesn't even make me angry. Rather it makes me embittered. The East has won, the West has changed. And decades of efforts to return from the abyss of cruelty and slaughter have been in vain.

This week in my town a tourist woman carrying a pin with a Israel flag and one saying "Bring them Home" on her T-shirt has been stopped by two men, demanding from her to take off the shirt. When her husband intervened, he was slapped in the face. In May of this year the police was able to foil a planned attack on the local synagogue. My town is in the West, not the East. It reminds me that #peakfascism is more like the crest than the wave that roams the ocean until it reaches land.