For Sieferle, Germany’s culture of memory and repentance after World War II, admirable though it was on its own terms, was unsuited to a newly dangerous, globalized world. Largely because of this culture, Germany was unable to say no to the migrant wave that threatened it in 2015. The country had embarked on an unsustainable multicultural enterprise. It was “living morally beyond its means,” in Sieferle’s memorable phrase. The book created a scandal: Finis Germania hit #9 on the Nonfiction Book of the Month listing—at which point the listing’s sponsors suspended its publication.
The edgiest parts of the German right, around Sezession and Tumult, now took on a vanguard aura. They began to influence mainstream outlets that might not even have acknowledged themselves as AfD-adjacent. Previously, German readers seeking a more ideologically varied diet had been drawn to the Swiss press, which had not been enlisted in the effort to work off the national guilt. As the once-conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung drifted toward a more progressive stance on cultural issues, German conservatives looked to the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, or even the more defiantly populist, Zurich-based magazine Die Weltwoche. The relatively conservative monthly Cicero had been founded in 2004 to cover cultural matters, and former WirtschaftsWoche journalist Roland Tichy started Tichys Einblick in 2014. These publications did not support the AfD, but they weren’t alarmed by it, either. They were a sign of the times. In the 2017 elections, the AfD did not just enter parliament: It took ninety-four seats.
The AfD won 43.8 percent Sunday, up from roughly 21 percent in 2021, while the CDU fell to 17.2 percent. Caldwell wrote about a political system approaching the point where excluding the AfD would itself become a legitimacy problem. The voters then pushed the system much closer to exactly that point.
Caldwell asks what it means for Germany’s “fortified democracy” if the political force it exists partly to quarantine becomes the largest party in the country or in major regions. AfD has 39 of 83 seats in Saxony-Anhalt. It lacks an outright majority, while the CDU, SPD, Greens and Left still refuse cooperation. The peculiar result is that the largest political force by an enormous margin can win an election and remain outside government. BSW may now determine whether that barrier holds.
Germany made certain democratic commitments constitutional precisely because German democracy had once destroyed itself. Those commitments created institutions authorized to identify political movements that threaten the constitutional order and, under stringent conditions, exclude them. Caldwell then asks what happens when the excluded position acquires mass democratic legitimacy. The principle designed to protect democracy begins limiting the consequences of voting. That is what Caldwell identified elsewhere with the EU, civil-rights institutions and administrative law.
Caldwell writes, in effect, that if the AfD truly is extremist, “something has gone terribly wrong” with fortified democracy because the AfD has become so popular. That does not necessarily follow. A defensive constitutional system might be designed to stop an anti-constitutional movement from capturing institutions even if that movement becomes popular. Indeed, its defenders would say mass popularity is the circumstance under which the protections matter most. Caldwell quietly defines the success of fortified democracy as its ability to prevent extremist sentiment from becoming popular. The system’s defenders would define success as preserving constitutional government despite that popularity.
Caldwell argues that the Nazi period has become too remote to sustain Germany’s particular system of democratic constraint. Siegmund was not alive under Hitler or even when the Berlin Wall fell. Sociologically, that may be one of his strongest observations. Institutions relying partly on living historical memory can lose intuitive legitimacy as the remembered catastrophe becomes inherited history. But Caldwell slides from “people no longer experience the historical justification emotionally” toward “the justification has become bizarre.” Those are different propositions. The First Amendment does not become less justified as living memory of British censorship disappears. The German system likewise requires evaluation on its present merits, not the fading intensity of historical memory.
The essay is also characteristically asymmetrical in its treatment of evidence. Caldwell is excellent at explaining how German institutions can exaggerate the AfD’s radicalism. He is much less interested in asking whether the institutions sometimes have correctly identified something radical.
That matters with Ulrich Siegmund. Caldwell gives us the aromachology, the East German motorbike, homeschooling, climate skepticism and youthful associations around the Heimattreue Deutsche Jugend. But Der Spiegel’s profile was not simply frightened by homeschooling and climate skepticism. It reported that Siegmund’s campaign machinery involved activists associated with the Identitarian movement. AP also notes his attendance at the notorious 2023 Potsdam meeting where deportation or “remigration” proposals were discussed, though Siegmund has denied endorsing extremist proposals. Caldwell’s selection makes the extremism designation look more obviously absurd than the underlying evidence warrants.
The same thing happens with Höcke. Caldwell presents the nine-year persistence of Höcke’s Dresden speech as evidence that the establishment lacks newer or stronger material against the AfD. That may be partly right about the ritualized use of the speech. But Caldwell spends more ingenuity establishing the possible ambiguity of “Denkmal der Schande” than investigating why Höcke and his milieu continue to alarm German authorities. The reader gets an excellent theory of how taboo distorts discussion and a thinner account of the object the taboo is supposedly distorting.
This is the old Jonathan Rauch problem again. Caldwell’s bookkeeping is serious. The debit side receives more imaginative labor than the credit side.
Caldwell traces the AfD through successive transformations: euro rebellion, immigration, historical memory, Covid, energy, Ukraine. The party’s ideology is treated as an accumulation of responses to institutional failures rather than as a doctrine imposed on events. That is exactly how Caldwell reads populism generally. Establishment writers ask, “Where did these dangerous ideas come from?” Caldwell asks, “What happened that made these ideas useful?”
Post-election analysis found strong dissatisfaction with Merz’s government, economic insecurity, living costs and pensions, alongside immigration and anti-establishment sentiment. Reuters reports 87 percent dissatisfaction with the federal government among Saxony-Anhalt voters.
Caldwell rejects the familiar story in which growing radicalism simply pushes a party farther and farther outward. State surveillance and the possibility of prohibition, he argues, create a counter-pressure toward discipline and decorum. Expelling Andreas Kalbitz and dissolving Höcke’s Flügel did not necessarily make the AfD ideologically moderate, but it strengthened people who understood that institutional survival required boundaries.
External threat increases coalition discipline. It also changes which traits become valuable inside the coalition. The free-speaking ideologue becomes a liability. The politically fluent radical who knows precisely where the legal boundary lies becomes more valuable. Caldwell observes that surveillance can strengthen the pragmatists while leaving the substantive ideology intact.
There is also a wonderful Caldwellian paradox: the restrictions designed to narrow the range of acceptable German conservatism may have helped create a party that contains a wider range of right-wing positions internally. He calls the result an “eclectic conservative formation.” This resembles his description of Compact as a nationalist venue in which conventional ideological boundaries weaken. Pressure from outside creates unusual combinations inside.
Caldwell takes Franz-Josef Strauss’s dictum that there can be no democratically legitimate force to the CDU/CSU’s right and argues that Merkel inverted its meaning. Strauss meant the Union must remain conservative enough to absorb the right. Merkel discovered that if competitors to its right were considered illegitimate anyway, the CDU could move left and deny those voters another acceptable vehicle.
Caldwell gives a Social Democrat a foundational role in the genealogy of the German populist right. Sarrazin, not an AfD intellectual, supplies the argument that major national problems were being protected from discussion by taboos. Then the euro crisis supplies economists. Immigration supplies nationalists. Covid supplies civil libertarians and skeptics. Ukraine supplies pacifists and Russia accommodationists. Caldwell understands the AfD as a coalition assembled from people expelled from other conversations.
He is really writing about the manufacture of political heterodoxy. A regime establishes a corridor of acceptable opinion, the Meinungskorridor. Different people collide with its walls for different reasons. Eventually the people outside discover one another. An economics professor angry about Greek debt, an East German nationalist, a lockdown skeptic, an industrial worker angry about energy prices and a pacifist hostile to the Ukraine war need not begin with a common ideology. The establishment’s classification system helps supply one.
Coalition identity emerges partly from common opposition and common enemies. Caldwell gives you an institutional mechanism by which the common enemy is created.
His ending is therefore stronger than it first appears. “All you would have to do is tackle a few problems that are real problems,” Harald Martenstein tells proponents of an AfD ban. That sentence contains Caldwell’s theory of populism in miniature. He repeatedly rejects explanations in which voters become irrational, fascistic or manipulated before asking whether they are responding to failures that the governing institutions cannot acknowledge without damaging their own legitimacy.
