What’s the Matter With Eastern Germany?

The AfD's Success Suggests Something Went Wrong With East Germany's Reunification

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Analysis:

What’s the Matter With Eastern Germany?

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Analysis

What’s the Matter With Eastern Germany?

German far-right populism traces back to reunification—but historians disagree about why.

By **Paul Hockenos**, a Berlin-based journalist.

!A participant wears a t-shirt with the lettering 'German by birth' and the emblem of former German Democratic Republic GDR during an election campaign event of Germany's far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party in Apolda, eastern Germany on August 18, 2024, ahead of the state election in the eastern German state of Thuringia. The state election in Thuringia will be held on September 1, 2024.

*A participant wears a t-shirt with the lettering 'German by birth' and the emblem of former German Democratic Republic GDR during an election campaign event of Germany's far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party in Apolda, eastern Germany on August 18, 2024, ahead of the state election in the eastern German state of Thuringia. The state election in Thuringia will be held on September 1, 2024.*

A participant wears a t-shirt with the lettering 'German by birth' and the emblem of former German Democratic Republic GDR during an election campaign event of Germany's far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party in Apolda, eastern Germany on August 18, 2024, ahead of the state election in the eastern German state of Thuringia. The state election in Thuringia will be held on September 1, 2024. JENS SCHLUETER / AFP

September 17, 2026, 7:57 AM

There’s a widespread consensus in Germany that the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) is a xenophobic far-right party that threatens the republic’s postwar political order. But there’s no accord on remedies—and, relatedly, no agreement about the sources of the scourge .

What seems clear is that the AfD’s variety of national populism is most heavily anchored in eastern Germany and traces back to the country’s Cold War division, the terms of its eventual unification, and East-West relations since 1990. But that surface-level agreement about recent history masks deeper disagreements about what exactly happened during those periods.

There’s a widespread consensus in Germany that the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) is a xenophobic far-right party that threatens the republic’s postwar political order. But there’s no accord on remedies—and, relatedly, no agreement about the sources of the scourge .

What seems clear is that the AfD’s variety of national populism is most heavily anchored in eastern Germany and traces back to the country’s Cold War division, the terms of its eventual unification, and East-West relations since 1990. But that surface-level agreement about recent history masks deeper disagreements about what exactly happened during those periods.

The AfD is not solely an eastern German phenomenon: Parties like it exist across the European Union, in the United Kingdom, and in the United States, too. In western Germany, the AfD breaks into double digits everywhere and even tops 20 percent in places. But its popularity is twice as high across eastern Germany—where polled rates of xenophobic sentiment are also much higher. The record result of 44 percent in Saxony-Anhalt’s state elections on Sept. 6 is conceivable only in an eastern state, at least for now.

One school of German historians explains the eastern mentality through the prism of the German Democratic Republic’s (GDR) fundamentally totalitarian character. Its clearest proponent is Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk, a historian affiliated with the Stasi Records Archive, the repository of the GDR’s secret police files. Kowalczuk hails from a GDR family that was closely tied to the regime, a story he tells in his book *Freiheitsschock* (*Freedom Shock*), but broke with his family and cast off the system’s Marxist-Leninist straitjacket, which cost him the opportunity to attend university. (After unification, he studied history at Humboldt University.) At 22, he joined the countrywide demonstrations that eventually chased out GDR hardliners and caused the Berlin Wall to fall.

Kowalczuk emphasizes the all-encompassing totality of a state that dictated every facet of life to its subjects: “from cradle to grave,” indoctrinating and controlling through schools, party, mass organizations, and the workplace. Most historians who argue along Kowalczuk’s lines hold that the Stasi itself, through informant networks and an all-knowing, all-powerful apparatus, kept the GDR’s population of 16 million in line. Kowalczuk, however, argues that the Stasi itself was not as powerful as claimed or thought (or as portrayed in *The Lives of Others*): Much of its power of intimidation stemmed from its reputation, not its actual reach. In other words, eastern Germans, argues Kowalczuk, could have acted more independently and even defiantly had they had the gumption—but they didn’t.

Kowalczuk argues that East Germans passively allowed themselves to be subjugated, browbeaten, restricted, and instructed by the regime. They were obedient pupils internalizing its narrow-minded, racist, authoritarian character and reproducing it in families, schools, and society. He casts eastern Germans essentially as sheep who relinquished freedom in exchange for certainty and security. In his view, the so-called peaceful revolution of 1989 wasn’t instigated by these cowed masses but by a tiny minority of dissidents and rebels—like himself. The public took to the streets only once the regime was on the run, and then portrayed themselves as freedom fighters—and victims. The newly liberated East Germans had no conception of an alternative state or s