Why Comparisons with Dictatorship Are Now Considered Unconstitutional
by Magnus Klaue
The following article was originally published in German as “Warum Diktaturvergleiche jetzt als verfassungsfeindlich gelten” in Die Welt on May 15, 2025, and it appears here in English translation by permission of the author. Translated by Julius Bielek.
Is it right-wing extremism to compare the Federal Republic of Germany with the GDR or the Nazi regime? That is what the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution [Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, or BfV] claims in its report on the AfD.
According to this absurd logic, prominent historians and philosophers would have to be treated as enemies of the constitution. Frank-Walter Steinmeier’s maxim, “We live in the best Germany that has ever existed,” seems to formulate a raison d’état in the view not only of the current government personnel but also of the BfV.
There is no other explanation for the fact that the BfV, in its assessment of the AfD as a “confirmed right-wing extremist” organization, which has now been suspended but not withdrawn, cites statements as evidence that do not defame parliamentary democracy but rather warn against its transformation into a totalitarian state.
That’s what the BfV report states, as reported by Bild: the AfD “massively denigrates” the German state by “portraying the Federal Republic as a totalitarian system” and by “making comparisons with the GDR or the Nazi regime.” Furthermore, during the coronavirus pandemic, AfD members of parliament had described the Federal Republic as a “dictatorship” and “totalitarian,” with the aim of “undermining trust in the political system as a whole.” Three things are noteworthy about this assessment. First, the BfV seems unable to distinguish between the German state, its “political system,” and the federal government, whose members are temporary administrators of that state and not identical with it. Second, the BfV apparently does not know the difference between a comparison and an equation and misunderstands the diagnosis of totalitarian tendencies within a democracy as an expression of totalitarian sentiment, thus seeking to punish the messenger for being the bearer of bad news. Third, the assessment shows a memory loss that borders on historical revisionism. Because using “comparisons with the GDR or the Nazi regime” to criticize current conditions in Germany should come as no surprise to anyone who doesn’t confuse present-day Germany with Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s “best of all possible worlds,” as Steinmeier does.
The fact that the Federal Republic is the successor state to the Third Reich, and that reunified Germany has not simply annulled the history of the GDR in favor of a timeless model democracy but has incorporated it into itself, is not a denigration but rather a statement of fact, as embodied in Angela Merkel’s biography, among other things. It may thus be an exaggeration for people who used to live in the GDR to feel reminded of the East German secret police by Nancy Faeser’s “reporting centers.”1 But this is not a delegitimization of the Federal Republic of Germany that is legally significant to the BfV; rather, it is an expression of sensitivity to the totalitarian dangers inherent in the German state due to its history. And anyone who remembers from school that National Socialism was not a dictatorship hostile to its own citizens, but was instead supported by the majority of them and therefore described itself as “the true democracy,” is not an enemy of democracy but simply has a better memory than today’s model democrats.
To call to mind that the Federal Republic of Germany stood in continuity with National Socialist Germany in terms of institutions, personnel, and mentality, and that it therefore regards coming to terms with that past as its historical duty—the whole pathos of learning from history, as is emblematically summarized in the final sentence of Bertolt Brecht’s drama The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (“The womb is still fertile from which this crept”), apparently can no longer be turned critically against the Federal Republic, but only against the AfD, according to the BfV. This party acts as a proxy scapegoat, as the incarnation of a Germany perpetually stuck in the Nazi past, the survival of which “our democracy” can never diagnose in itself but only in its internal enemies.
But the backward-looking2 have never been a force to be reckoned with. Even the neo-Nazis who murdered people in Hoyerswerda and Mölln in the early 1990s in order to bring back the Third Reich were not living in the past, but in the then-present. They embodied not the old but rather the future-oriented ruin, just as National Socialism in its era was a progress-oriented youth movement and not an alliance of old white reactionaries. That is why the most dangerous revenants of National Socialism today are neither D-Mark nostalgists nor “Reich Citizens,”3 but rather the leftist sympathizers of Islamist antisemitism. When the state agencies tasked with protecting the free democratic order today consider “Islamophobia” and persistent references to totalitarian tendencies within democracy to be signs of hostility toward the constitution, this can hardly be interpreted as anything other than an indication that those warning of a shift from democracy to totalitarianism are not, at the very least, entirely mistaken.
For a long time, examining how and why democratic systems turn into totalitarian ones was one of the most distinguished tasks of political philosophy. From Max Horkheimer’s The Authoritarian State (1940) to Ernst Fraenkel’s The Dual State (1941) and Franz Neumann’s Behemoth (1944) to Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), the period during and after the existence of National Socialism was marked by numerous, mutually contradictory attempts to understand how democratically constituted states transform themselves into totalitarian orders.
In the decades of the Cold War and its aftermath, philosophers such as Zygmunt Bauman, André Glucksmann, and Alain Finkielkraut have drawn on this in their examination of the totalitarianisms of the modern age. In contrast, the report on the AfD by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, as well as the various orchestrated civil society mass marches “against the right,” suggests that the analysis of such transitions should be a thing of the past since the founding of the Federal Republic of Germany, in which there are only flawless democrats or anti-constitutional muckrakers. Such Manichaeism, however, has always been a characteristic of totalitarian thinking.
Topics: TPPI Translations • Reflections & Dialogues
Magnus Klaue is a literary scholar and cultural historian. From 2011 to 2015, he was an editor of the Berlin weekly newspaper Jungle World, and between 2015 and 2020 he was a research associate at the Simon-Dubnow-Institute for Jewish History and Culture in Leipzig. He writes regularly for Die Welt and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Since 2024, he is a co-editor of the biannual political magazine casa|blanca.
Translator’s note: Meldestellen (Reporting Centers for Right-Wing Extremism and for Conspiratorial Thinking) initiatives, some of which were promoted by now former Minister of the Interior Nancy Faeser, aim to combat right-wing extremism by providing contact points for reporting extremist content and incidents. While intended to strengthen state action against extremism, critics express significant concern about potential overreach, implications for freedom of speech, and the precise definition of the “right-wing extremism” being reported.
Ewiggestrig, “forever yesterday,” i.e., forever stuck in the past.
Translator’s note: The Reichsbürger (“Reich Citizens”) are a movement in Germany that denies the legitimacy of the Federal Republic of Germany, believing the historical German Reich never legally ceased to exist. Their ideology often blends conspiracy theories, esotericism, and right-wing extremism, leading them to reject state authority, taxes, and laws. The ongoing Reichsbürgerprozess (Reich Citizens trial), which began in 2023 after a major 2022 raid, involves numerous individuals accused of plotting to overthrow the government. However, some critics argue that the danger posed by the movement as a credible threat to the state and the scale of the trial were blown out of proportion given the small size of the movement and the old age of the defendants.