Schlüsselwörter

Keywords

1 Introduction

The thirty-year anniversaries of the East German Peaceful Revolution and German reunification in 2019 and 2020 took place in a political climate that differed strongly from that of previous large-scale ceremonies: Whereas Germany had commemorated the twenty-year anniversaries of the Wende (‘turn’) in a largely conflict-free setting (Art, 2014), the rise of far-right actors such as the street movement PEGIDA and the party Alternative for Germany (AfD) was shaking the country’s (memory) politics since 2014/15 (Arzheimer, 2019). By the fall of 2019, AfD had become a major political player, winning ever more votes—particularly in the eastern regions, where it presented itself as the ‘voice of the east’ (Weisskircher, 2020; Yoder, 2020). Just at the moment when Germany set out to commemorate key events related to the revolution such as the so-called Fall of the Berlin Wall, AfD caused sizable political polarization in eastern regional election campaigns (Patton, 2019): With electoral slogans such as ‘Wende 2.0: Then as today: Wir sind das Volk!’ and ‘Wende 2.0: The East rises up! Peaceful Revolution via the election ballot’, AfD drew a controversial historical analogy to the state of democracy in contemporary Germany and the communist German Democratic Republic (GDR) and fashioned itself as a revolutionary force in the tradition of the 1989 civil rights activists.

This contribution draws from Jan Kubik’s and Michael Bernhard’s (2014) theory of the politics of memory to explain the contemporary contestation of the meaning of East Germany’s democratic transformation. Based on the qualitative-interpretive analysis of public commemoration events and political discourse in 2019/20, I claim that the politics of memory in Germany has moved from a largely conflict-free, unified memory regime at the beginning of the millennium (Art, 2014) to a conflict-ridden, fractured memory regime thirty years after revolution and reunification. I ascribe this transformation of memories to the advent of populist far-right AfD, which I approach as a fundamentalist ‘mnemonic warrior’.

In order to draw conclusions beyond the single case of Germany and in line with Kubik and Bernhard’s comparative research design, this contribution builds upon the research strategy of the paired comparison (Tarrow, 2010). In the following, I analyze Germany’s fractured memory regime and the mnemonic warrior AfD through the comparative lens of its eastern neighbor Poland, whose memory regime is similarly fractured due to the memory politics associated with another populist far-right mnemonic warrior, namely the Law and Justice (PiS) party (Bernhard & Kubik, 2014a). Considering Germany and Poland, my analysis differs from large segments of the German(-language) literature which typically contrasts eastern German (far-right) politics and political culture with western Germany (Bösch, 2019; Pesthy et al., 2021; Pickel & Pickel, 2020). The Polish case arguably offers an interesting additional lens as it constitutes somewhat of a ‘precursor’ to the German case: The PiS party’s warrior position on the Polish past had shaped Poland’s fractured memory regime already in 2009, when the region was celebrating the twenty-year anniversary of the democratic transition (Bernhard & Kubik, 2014a). While AfD called to ‘complete the revolution’ in 2019, PiS had announced to finalize the transformation already in 2007 (Mark et al., 2015, p. 473), and reiterated its promise to introduce the ‘good change’ (dobra zmiana) during its 2015 government.

Engaging in the sensitive debates over the meaning of the democratic transformation and ‘ownership’ of the memory of 1989, this chapter ties in with some of the core issues raised in this volume and the section on conservatism and nationalism in particular. As it reveals how AfD and PiS strategically deploy the notion of ‘communist totalitarianism’ to denounce present political opponents as non-democratic, it contributes another perspective on the uses of ‘totalitarianism’ as a ‘defensive memory of the transformation’ (Pehe, this volume).

2 Research Design

As announced above, this study adopts Kubik and Bernhard’s (2014) actor-centered theoretical framework to study the politics of memory of AfD and PiS, notably the key concepts of ‘mnemonic warrior’ and ‘memory regime’ as well as the focus on the ‘strategies that political actors employ to make others remember in certain, specific ways and the effects of such mnemonic manipulations’ (7, emphasis in original). The theory posits that a specific national memory regime, that is ‘a set of cultural and institutional practices that are designed to publicly commemorate and/or remember a single event, a relatively clearly delineated and interrelated set of events, or a distinguishable past process’ (14–16), results from the interactions of mnemonic actors in a given political context. Ideal-typically, the constellation of mnemonic actors constitutes either largely conflict-free (‘unified’) memory regimes, conflict-ridden (‘fractured’) regimes, or tolerant (‘pillarized’) regimes.

In terms of mnemonic actors, Kubik and Bernhard distinguish between antagonistic ‘warriors’, tolerant ‘pluralists’, avoiding ‘abnegators’, and optimistic ‘prospectives’. While pluralists accept, abnegators eschew, and prospectives overlook alternative visions of the past, warriors cause a memory regime to fracture because they seek to force their stance upon others (13). To this aim, warriors espouse what Kubik and Bernhard identify as two types of strategies: ‘political strategies’ when positioning themselves against other mnemonic actors within the institutional setting (11), and ‘cultural strategies’ when choosing ‘specific themes from the available set of narratives about the past that constitutes a “nation’s heritage”’ (24). Both political and cultural strategies oscillate between actors’ creative choices and structural constraints related to the political-institutional and cultural-historical context (12). Crucially, mnemonic actors, including warriors, use and interpret the past for present-day political purposes such as achieving and consolidating power and nation-building (Lowenthal, 1998; Smith, 2006).

Aiming to ‘correct’ generalizations from single case studies (Tarrow, 2010, p. 245), this contribution’s research strategy of the paired comparison promises to generate broader conclusions about fractured memory regimes, mnemonic warriors, and their political and cultural strategies. To this end, I examine two countries that can be understood as ‘most different’ cases (Przeworski & Teune, 1970) within the regional context of East Central Europe: East Germany’s and Poland’s nearly simultaneous transition from communism to liberal democracy notwithstanding, I suggest that they constitute two ‘most different’ cases with regards to the specific modes of political system change in 1989/90 as well as the relative power position of the populist far right in 2019/20—two factors that arguably have an impact on the contemporary politics of memory. Comparing the modes of system change, Poland’s democratic transformation is associated with an elite-negotiated reform process, while East Germany’s is marked by a citizen-led mass revolution. Also, whereas Poland long lacked ‘symbolic closure’ of the communist period such as public ceremonies celebrating the anti-communist victory which would ‘provide a symbolic base for unity in the divided society’ (Kubik & Linch, 2006, p. 17), East Germany underwent the most definite symbolic closure within East Central Europe, namely the incorporation into West Germany on October 3, 1990. Regarding the relative power position of populist far-right players at the time of the thirty-year anniversaries, the far right is in government in Poland since 2015, while it is in opposition without real prospect of achieving governing power at national level in Germany. Finally, some of PiS’s most prominent members were anti-communist activists in 1989, whereas AfD counts only few former civil rights activists in its lower ranks—in fact, the majority of eastern Germany’s most prominent civil rights activists reject AfD (Ebert et al., 2019).

This study thus sets out to analyze AfD’s and PiS’s political and cultural strategies and the effects of these strategies in the context of the thirty-year anniversaries of the system change. Based on a qualitative-interpretive research rationale (Schwartz-Shea & Yanow, 2012), it draws from two sets of data: To provide insight into political strategies, the corpus includes data on the public commemoration events taking place in Germany and Poland in 2019/20, generated from media reports and governmental publications. Key events that are being commemorated are the so-called Fall of the Berlin Wall (November 9, 1989) and the legal reunification of East and West Germany (October 3, 1990) for the German case, and the Round Table Talks (spring 1989) as well as the first semi-free elections of the parliament and free elections to the senate (June 4, 1989) for the Polish case. To analyze cultural strategies, the corpus comprises data relating to the discourses in the context of these commemorated events, retrieved from media reports, parliamentary debates, and party or politicians’ publications. This textual data is examined for the specific narratives chosen by AfD and PiS to frame the memory of the democratic transformation. In addition to the original empirical data, the analysis considers secondary source material for both cases, and especially for the well-researched Polish fractured memory regime in 2009/10.

3 Mnemonic Warriors in Germany and Poland

Two decades after the democratic transformation of East Central Europe, entire volumes were published on the commemoration of the twenty-year anniversaries (Bernhard & Kubik, 2014b; Kopeček & Wciślik, 2015). At the time, Poland was diagnosed as a fractured memory regime due to the rise of an oppositional mnemonic warrior on the far right of the political spectrum whose discourse was highly nationalist and populist (Bernhard & Kubik, 2014a; Mark et al., 2015; Rae, 2007). Germany, in contrast, was analyzed as a largely unified memory regime, with the pre-existing western German ‘Holocaust-centered’ ‘Bonn memory regime’ (Langenbacher, 2003) superseding the celebration of East Germany’s democratic transformation (Art, 2014; Mark et al., 2015). In fact, the commemoration of November 9, the day of the ‘Fall of the Wall’ and emotional peak of the Peaceful Revolution, was mostly associated with the so-called Reichskristallnacht, the Nazi pogrom on November 9, 1938.

Ten years later, the situation had significantly changed in both countries. By 2019, Poland’s mnemonic warrior PiS was in government for a few years already, and Germany had witnessed the rise of a mnemonic warrior, the populist far-right AfD. Presenting itself as an advocate of the east, it had become the strongest or second strongest party in previous national and European elections in the eastern German regions (Weisskircher, 2020; Yoder, 2020). The following sections analyze PiS’s and AfD’s political and cultural strategies based on their participation in public commemorative events as well as their discourse and public meaning-making.

3.1 PiS’s Dobra Zmiana

Scholarship has defined and described PiS at the beginning of the millennium as a mnemonic warrior in terms of both political and cultural strategies (Bernhard & Kubik, 2014a; Mark et al., 2015; Mazzini, 2018; Ost, 2019; Peters, 2019). In the context of the thirty-year anniversary of the system change, the party asserted its antagonistic mnemonic stance within the Polish memory regime. Heading a parliamentary majority, PiS was in charge of organizing the official commemoration of the demise of communism in Poland and used it to partly downplay the significance of 1989. The party ascribed only a minor role to the commemoration of the democratic transformation within Poland’s broader ‘official field of memory’ (Kubik & Bernhard, 2014, p. 16), prioritizing mnemonic issues such as the hundredth anniversary of Polish independence in 2018 and seventy-five years since the Warsaw Uprising in 2019 instead (see also Osęka, 2015). Accordingly, on the day of the anniversary of the semi-free elections, prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki carried out regular duties such as appointing a few new cabinet members rather than joining the celebrations.

Just as in 2009, when then-president Donald Tusk from the liberal-conservative Civic Platform (PO), opposition leader Lech Kaczyński from PiS, and the Polish parliament had commemorated the semi-free elections in separate events (Bernhard & Kubik, 2014a; Mark et al., 2015), the commemoration polarized government and opposition in 2019—not only, but largely due to PiS’s warrior-stance. Indeed, PiS refrained from organizing or taking part in public festivals with members of the liberal opposition, specifically with former president Tusk, at that time president of the European Council, and Lech Wałęsa, face of the anti-communist trade union Solidarność (‘Solidarity’), former Polish president and Nobel Peace Prize laureate. Instead, PiS held a non-public ceremony in the senate, and set up an event at the Gdańsk shipyard which put the first visit of pope John Paul II to Poland in 1970 rather than the anti-communist opposition center-stage. In turn, Polish cities governed by the PO opposition organized their own events to celebrate the semi-free elections. The most prominent events took place in the northern city of Gdańsk, birthplace of Solidarity and therefore remembered as the cradle of the democratic transformation. Amongst the guests of the ‘Celebration of Freedom and Solidarity’ in cooperation with the Gdańsk-based European Solidarity Center were former president Tusk and Solidarity-leader Wałęsa who signed a ‘Declaration of Freedom and Solidarity’ as an alternative to PiS’s version of government and democracy.

At least since 2005, PiS’s principal cultural strategy sustaining its confrontational positioning within the Polish political context consisted in the claim to possess the historical truth about the transformation. This vision was based on a controversial re-evaluation of the meaning of 1989 for the Polish nation-state and democracy. Instead of celebrating the Round Table Talks and semi-free elections as the break with communism and success of democratization, the party re-interpreted the outcome of the events as a failure for the Polish nation in need of correction (Bernhard & Kubik, 2014a; Mark et al., 2015; Rae, 2007). PiS posited that the agreement between the communist government and the opposition in the Round Table Talks had reached only a układ (Osęka, 2015), that is a ‘corrupt compromise’ or ‘rotten deal’ (Bernhard & Kubik, 2014a, p. 71) rather than full democracy, pointing to the further economic flourishing of ex-communists after 1989. In an antagonistic fashion typical for populist discourse (Kaltwasser et al., 2017), PiS assumed a warrior-stance by reconstructing 1989 as a betrayal of the ‘normal’ and ‘patriotic’ Polish people by ‘anti-nationalist’ liberal and left-wing intellectuals within the former anti-communist opposition, accusing their present-day political opponents of collaboration with the communists and betrayal of ‘national values’ throughout the transition period (Bernhard & Kubik, 2014a; Osęka, 2015; Ost, 2019). Using the memory of communism as a discursive weapon, PiS attacked its political opponents who grew out of the liberal wing of Solidarity not only as collaborators, but also as the present-day equivalent to the communists (Stanley, 2014) due to their so-called ‘communist tendencies’ (Osęka, 2015). Based on the allegation that he had worked for the communist secret service, PiS continued its mnemonic crusade against Wałęsa. In turn, it advertised itself as the heir of the nationalist-conservative, ‘patriotic’ faction of Solidarity, and therefore as the only truly democratic force in Poland. As part of its 2015 government agenda, PiS promised to finally break with the post-communist liberal-technocratic consensus, and to bring the ‘good change’ (dobra zmiana) to the Polish ‘patriotic people’, including the large-scale re-making of the political, juridical, and history-making institutions as well as welfare benefits for families (Behr, 2017, 2020; Bill & Stanley, 2020).

Also in 2019, PiS pursued the essentially populist cultural strategy of re-interpreting 1989 as a failure and betrayal of the Polish nation by ‘anti-nationalist’ liberal intellectuals within Solidarity, asserting its position as mnemonic warrior. To this aim, PiS downplayed the significance of the Round Table Talks and semi-free elections and the role of former Solidarity-leader Wałęsa. Instead, PiS politicians highlighted the role of former pope John Paul II. For instance, prime minister Morawiecki re-evaluated the roles of the anti-communist opposition and the Polish pope at the official event at the Gdańsk shipyard in early June 2019: Rather than honoring activists like Wałęsa, he portrayed the pope as the key figure of Poland’s democratic transformation, acknowledging him for ‘awakening solidarity in us Poles’ during his first visit to Poland in 1970 (Gość Gdańsk, 2019; Kancelaria Prezesa Rady Ministrów, 2019). In the same speech, he used references to the John Paul II’s family values to attack the media and ‘foreign and Polish powers’ for their opposition to PiS’s conservative family politics. Claiming that PiS was the only actor in the tradition of ‘true’ solidarity, that is solidary values in the ‘papal’ sense, he denied legitimate claims to the ideational heritage of 1989 to other political actors such as the liberal opposition party PO. Meanwhile in Warsaw, PiS re-articulated its vision that the semi-free elections to the parliament were a compromise unworthy of public remembrance: The official commemoration of June 4 was advertised as a ‘Thirty-Year Anniversary of Free Elections to the Senate’ and took place in the senate rather than the parliament, underlining the notion that the institution of the parliament as such is flawed up to the present day (Instytut Pamięcy Narodowej, 2019a, b).

3.2 AfD’s Wende 2.0

Contrary to PiS in Poland, AfD played no significant role in Germany’s official commemoration of revolution and reunification in 2019/20. As an opposition party, it did not have a say in the planning of the commemoration activities—not least because it was not invited into the ‘Commission 30 Years Peaceful Revolution and German Unity’, launched by the federal government to organize public events and citizens’ dialogues between eastern and western Germans, as well as to advise the federal government. Within its role in the opposition, AfD acted as an antagonistic mnemonic warrior by contesting the politics of memory by the government and ‘mainstream’ parties. In the parliamentary debates on ‘30 Years Fall of the Wall’ on November 8, 2019, and ‘30 Years German Unity’ on October 2, 2020, AfD speakers took an outsider position among the deputies and harshly attacked the members of all other parliamentary groups, including not only leftist parties, but also the Christian-Democratic government under long-term chancellor Angela Merkel (Deutscher Bundestag, 2019, 2020). AfD re-asserted its warrior-stance when its Berlin faction organized an alternative commemoration event for the anniversary of the Fall of the Wall on November 6, 2019 (Allroggen, 2019). Under the title ‘Thirty Years Peaceful Revolution. Don’t forget! Nothing learned?’, the event was designed to remind of the achievements and fate of the dissident civil rights activists, and featured Vera Lengsfeld, one of the few prominent GDR civil rights activists who publicly sympathize with the far right (Göpffarth, 2021).

At subnational level, the most noteworthy event took place in Saxony, where the regional AfD group appeared to assume a more nuanced mnemonic stance, but actually contributed to the further polarization of the party system. Following in-fighting within Saxony’s governing coalition of Christian Democrats (CDU), Social Democrats (SPD), and Greens, AfD ended up celebrating October 3, 2020 together with CDU in the Saxon state parliament. The fall-out among the coalition partners was caused by the Christian Democrats’ polarizing decision to invite as keynote speaker Arnold Vaatz, GDR civil rights activist and apparently sympathizer with the far right, notably with the partly anti-Semitic anti-lockdown protests during the COVID-19 pandemic (Grande et al., 2021). Appreciative of Vaatz’ controversial support for the anti-lockdown protestors, AfD joined CDU in the Saxon state parliament, thus emphasizing its support for GDR dissidents despite its anti-establishment party politics. The event was highly symbolic not only because it demonstrated unity between eastern German conservatives and the far right on German Unity Day of all things, but also because it took place in the federal state of Saxony, which is remembered as the cradle of the Peaceful Revolution due to the role of the Leipzig-based Monday Demonstrations in overthrowing the communist government (Jessen, 2009), and the origin of the revolutionary slogan ‘We are the people’ (Wir sind das Volk) (Zwahr, 2001).

Like PiS in Poland, AfD pursued various cultural strategies of re-interpreting revolution and reunification, thus occupying a warrior-position within the German memory regime. Similar to PiS, AfD re-invented the political system change as a first and foremost nationalist rather than mainly democratizing or European event, in the East German case directed at reunification with West Germany. According to AfD’s vision of the past, this nationalist (re-)awakening was driven by ‘the people’ against ‘leftist intellectual elites’, a theme that resonates with PiS’s confrontational discourse on the liberal fractions of Solidarity. In the preamble to its 2016 party program, AfD had already invoked the revolution, promising voters to ‘complete national unity in freedom’ (Alternative für Deutschland, 2016, p. 6). In the context of the 2019 electoral campaigns in eastern Germany, Albrecht Glaser, then federal vice-spokesman, presented the party’s vision of the historical truth about the transformation as a nationalist event more explicitly on the principal website: Arguing that ‘the people’ had to force reluctant liberal and left-wing politicians to follow through with reunification in 1989/90, he construed the revolution as a primarily nationalist and citizen-driven endeavor against the will of allegedly ‘anti-German’ and ‘anti-nationalist’ elites (Alternative für Deutschland, 2019). This discourse reflected nationalist tendencies within the 1989 mass movement (Schumann, 1990): Back then, the emancipatory slogan of ‘We are the people’ had quickly shifted to the more nationalistic version of ‘We are one nation’ (Wir sind ein Volk), and was paired with the motto of ‘Germany, united nation’ (Deutschland einig Vaterland).

AfD linked this vision of the past to its present nationalist and populist agenda, blaming the political establishment for its supposed ‘anti-German sentiment’, and advertising AfD as the only pro-German, ‘patriotic’ political force. For instance, Tino Chrupalla, deputy and later federal spokesman from Saxony, accused Merkel of ‘micro-aggressions against anything German’ and of re-erecting an ‘anti-German wall’ in his speech during the parliamentary debate on November 8, 2019 (Deutscher Bundestag, 2019). In turn, vice-spokesman Glaser underscored in his website entry that German nationalism ‘belongs to AfD’s self-image more than to any other party in Germany’ (Alternative für Deutschland, 2019), claiming the allegedly nationalist ideational legacy of the Peaceful Revolution for the party. AfD’s electoral slogan ‘Wende 2.0’ (Urban, 2019b) thus suggested a nationalist turn of German politics, very much in line with PiS’s promise of a dobra zmiana.

AfD fleshed out its warrior-stance by re-interpreting the long-term democratic outcomes of revolution and reunification, and by strategically using references to communism to delegitimize its political opponents. Unlike PiS, however, AfD’s vision of the past did not suggest that the democratic outcomes of the revolution itself were flawed: AfD propagated a markedly positive image of 1989, for instance in its controversial electoral campaign mobilizing eastern Germans to ‘rise up’ for a ‘peaceful revolution via the election ballot’ branded as Wende 2.0. Rather, AfD argued that the quality of democracy deteriorated only later, after a left-wing coalition of Social Democrats and Green Party took over the government in 1998, and under the Merkel-governments reached a level comparable to the GDR by 2019. For instance, Jörg Urban, AfD leader in the Saxon state parliament, used the anniversary of the reunification to claim on his personal website that the right to freedom of opinion was less protected in contemporary Germany than it had been in the GDR (Urban, 2019a).

Another similarity to PiS is the fact that AfD’s warrior-position was particularly salient in the party’s discursive construction of its allegedly ‘(neo-)communist’ political contenders. AfD blamed mainstream politics, notably the crisis politics by CDU governments under Merkel since 2005, for Germany’s alleged democratic backsliding. In his website entry on the occasion of the anniversary of reunification, Urban argued that ‘our society is changing considerably under the ruling government. Democracy is being dismantled’ (Urban, 2019b). In this context, AfD used the memory of the communist dictatorship to accuse the political establishment of totalitarian and communist tendencies. In the blogpost, Urban denounced Merkel and her government for supposedly re-erecting a ‘socialist dictatorship’. Similarly, in his speech during the plenary debate commemorating the Fall of the Wall, Chrupalla charged Merkel for espousing ‘power and sedition strategies (Herrschafts- und Zersetzungsstrategien)’ associated with the GDR secret police (Stasi), which she allegedly acquired during her time as a member of the GDR socialist youth (Deutscher Bundestag, 2019).

Finally, with regards to the economic dimension of the transition, (eastern German) AfD’s cultural strategies resembled PiS’s discourse on a revolution yet to be finalized. Appealing to segments of the population who felt left behind by the economic reforms of the 1990s, AfD argued that eastern and western Germany were not yet fully reunited at the level of the economy and pointed to lower salaries and pensions in the east than in the west three decades after reunification. The core slogan of the election campaign in the north-eastern state of Brandenburg in the fall of 2019, ‘Wende 2.0: Complete the revolution!’ expressed this perspective. On its website, the regional AfD faction declared that ‘it is time to complete what was started in 89: Take your country back—complete the revolution!’ (AfD Landesverband Brandenburg, 2019).

4 Fractured Memory Regimes in Germany and Poland

More so than a single case study of Germany, this contribution’s research strategy of the paired comparison allows to shed light on some of the shared features of fractured memory regimes in East Central Europe at the moment of the thirty-year anniversaries of the political system change. Crucially, my analysis reveals that memory regimes become fractured when mnemonic warriors appear on the political stage whose antagonistic politics and discourse do neither allow for a consensus about the meaning of 1989 like in ‘unified’ memory regimes, nor tolerate other visions of the past like in ‘pillarized’ regimes.

The cases of Germany and Poland suggest that it is notably players on the right end of the political spectrum that shape fractured memory regimes, primarily due to their nationalist ideas and populist discourse which condemns the allegedly anti-nationalist political elites. The comparison of AfD’s and PiS’s political and cultural strategies uncovers some of the shared mnemonic strategies deployed by contemporary far-right warriors in East Central Europe: They interpret 1989 as an event of national (re-)awakening rather than of the region’s large-scale democratization and Europeanization, then blame past elites for having betrayed their national peoples, and finally deploy this populist vision of the past as a discursive weapon against their present-day political opponents, accusing them of anti-nationalism and (neo-)communism. Appealing to the memory of the conservative wings of past anti-communist movements, contemporary far-right mnemonic warriors also fashion themselves as the only heirs of the ‘patriotic’ and ‘truly democratic’ forces in the transition period, whose present-day politics constitute an ‘alternative’ to a ‘post-1989 liberal consensus’—also note AfD’s full name ‘Alternative for Germany’. Finally, they promise to complete both national unity and true democracy for the ‘normal’ and ‘patriotic’ people.

The comparison of two ‘most different’ cases allows to draw two somewhat unexpected conclusions regarding the factors that shape fractured memory regimes. First, the analysis suggests that their emergence does not necessarily depend on factual past events such as the concrete modes of political system change. The concrete transformative events in 1989/90 thus do not determine the potential of populist politics and discourse in 2019/20. Indeed, AfD’s interpretation of 1989 as a betrayal on behalf of the ‘anti-German’ elites is strikingly similar to PiS’s politics of memory, even though East Germany underwent a clear symbolic closure of the communist period rather than an elite-negotiated reform process after which communist elites stayed in power, like in the Polish case. Second, it seems that the relative power position of mnemonic warriors is also not a major factor determining fractured memory regimes. In fact, the comparison of Germany and Poland reveals that mnemonic warriors’ political and cultural strategies cause fractures in memory regimes independent of their power position: Although AfD is a comparatively marginal party bound to the opposition role, its anti-establishment politics and discourse create fractures within the previously ‘unified’ German memory regime similar to Poland’s powerful PiS party, which is at the head of both the state and government. Since PiS also started out as a relatively small opposition party, the success of warrior-style politics of memory in the Polish case might foreshadow the increasing success of AfD in eastern Germany.

My findings highlight the power of ideas and strategic discourse on the one hand, and the malleability of memory and history on the other. In line with approaches focused on the agency in the politics of memory (Kończal, 2019), they emphasize that mnemonic narratives do not represent a historical truth, but are purposefully constructed by strategic political actors for present goals. My analytical results tie in with recent political science scholarship, which construes the rise of populism and illiberalism in East Central Europe as a ‘cultural backlash’ to post-communist social change (Kotwas & Kubik, 2019; Norris & Inglehart, 2019). Indeed, attitudes towards cultural issues, specifically the perceived loss of national culture, determine the preference for far-right voting in both countries: In Germany, cultural grievances mostly emerged in the context of increasing immigration, namely so-called fears of ‘foreign infiltration’ and ‘cultural decline’ due to increasing numbers of non-European refugees and migrants (Arzheimer & Berning, 2019; Hansen & Olsen, 2019). In Poland, cultural grievances relate to the perception that Polish national culture, supposedly based in conservative Catholicism, is being superseded by a western or European model of liberal, pluralist society (Bill & Stanley, 2020; Kotwas & Kubik, 2019; Melito, 2022). Deeply embedded in the generation, popularization and mobilization of post-communist cultural grievances, populist far-right warriors relate such grievances back to the role of liberal and left-wing elites during the transformation period and beyond.

5 Concluding Remarks

This contribution analyzed Germany’s fractured memory regime at the moment of the thirty-year anniversaries of Peaceful Revolution and German Unity through the comparative lens of its eastern neighbor Poland. In both countries, it is far-right party actors whose populist interpretations of the past shape the fractured regimes. Beyond shedding light on the many ways in which the mnemonic warriors AfD and PiS polarize the German and Polish memory regimes, the analysis adds nuance to Kubik and Bernhard’s ‘theory of the politics of memory’: It reveals that antagonistic mnemonic narratives about the post-communist transformation of East Central Europe can be constructed disregarding the actual modes of regime change in 1989/90, and that populist politics and discourse may cause fractured memory regimes independent of the warriors’ relative power position within the party system.

To conclude, I would like to draw attention to some further actors involved in Germany’s fractured memory regime. Arguably, as of recently nationalist interpretations of 1989 are not limited to far-right discursive contexts: The federal ‘Commission 30 Years Peaceful Revolution and German Unity’ highlighted the need to reinvigorate the symbolic value of revolution and reunification to complete national unity in its final report (Bundesministerium des Innern, für Bau und Heimat, 2020). It suggested to turn key events of the transformation into national holidays: October 3, Germany’s main national holiday, as a ‘nation-wide happy holiday’, October 9, the anniversary of Leipzig’s largest Monday Demonstration, as ‘day of democracy’, and November 9 as a ‘national day of commemoration’, including references to the Fall of the Wall in 1989, the anti-Semitic pogroms in 1938, and the proclamation of the republic in 1918. The Commission formulated its recommendations within a broader agenda to foster German national symbols. Indirectly referring to AfD by evoking the advent of ‘authoritarian and nationalist, even decidedly anti-liberal and anti-democratic ideas’ in the report, it declared that ‘the liberal democratic republic cannot leave the power of interpretation of its own flag to those who disregard and fight the values of this republic’, concluding that ‘the national colors black-red-golden have to be brought back into Germans’ everyday life’ (Bundesministerium des Innern, für Bau und Heimat, 2020, p. 86). In fact, the only political actor to oppose nationalist interpretations of 1989 is The Left party, in part successor to the GDR’s state party, who praises the revolution but criticizes the process of reunification for not allowing alternative solutions to be considered (Jochimsen, 2009).

The overall strengthening of nationalist readings of the Peaceful Revolution and German Unity is a sign for the increasing mainstreaming of far-right ideas in political discourse (Mudde, 2019; Wodak, 2020). In the second decade of the twenty-first century, Germany seems to be in the process of normalizing such takes on its recent history, while such ideas have already been mainstreamed in Poland. Spelling out the many parallels between the populist politics and discourse of PiS and AfD despite their countries’ different context conditions, this contribution’s comparative lens foreshadows possibly similar developments in Germany in the near future.