My thinking about the phenomenon of fascism—its libidinal energies, its shape-shifting recurrences, and its functions in widely different political and economic settings (whether we mark its beginning with the Ku Klux Klan in the 1860s post-Civil War US or with Mussolini in 1920s post-liberal Italy and then Nazism in the 1930s)—has long been informed by the pioneering works of several crucial thinkers. Preeminent among these are: Theodor Adorno, Félix Guattari, Herbert Marcuse, Klaus Theweleit, and Anson Rabinbach. More recently, I have found exceedingly valuable the writings of Adam Serwer, Robyn Marasco, Alberto Toscano, Quinn Slobodian, Georg Feuser, Elissa Mailänder, Masha Gessen, Melinda Cooper, Simon Strick, Carolin Amlinger and Oliver Nachtwey, and Moira Weigel.
The party, in its platforms, is opposed to further expansion of LGBT rights; sometimes calls for undoing the equality of marriage law passed 2017; and expressly upholds reproductive, white, gender-polar heteronormativity with mom, dad, and kids as ideal. A happy family hopping at the beach declares “(You accuse us of being boringly) traditionalist? We like it!” (Traditionell? Uns gefällt’s!) Then again there’s a poster (self-consciously echoing Nazi anti-Bolshevism imagery, but also campily silly) portraying a Conchita Wurst–resembling drag queen “threatening” a child, to represent the danger of tolerance-teaching sex education. Yet not only is one of the party leaders a woman living in a same-sex partnership and continually asserting that the party is not homophobic; her likeness is additionally used to woo gay voters on a poster referencing the Christopher Street Day (CSD) parade (and here the message is suddenly pro-CSD, although usually the party styles itself as anti-CSD). The party, moreover, actually has an official organization of gay members (Alternative Homosexuals).
Cody Delistraty, “How Germany’s Far Right is Co-opting Art History,” Frieze, May 3, 2019 →; Linda Nochlin, “The Imaginary Orient,” Art in America, May 1983.
The best extant analysis of strong resonances between the AfD’s gender politics and that of the Nazis is Isabel Heinemann, “Volk and Family: National Socialist Legacies and Gender Concepts in the Rhetoric of the Alternative for Germany,” Journal of Modern European History 20, no. 3, July 5, 2022.
Thomas Wieder, “Germany Struck with Outrage after Racist Chants on a Jet Set Holiday Island,” Le Monde, May 29, 2024.
Cem Özdemir, “Sprache, Arbeit und Gesetzestreue,” Frankfurter Allgemeine, September 26, 2024; “Lauterbach kritisiert Merz scharf: ‘Ausländerhetze in Reinform,’” t-online, September 6, 2024 →.
Adam Serwer, The Cruelty Is the Point: The Past, Present, and Future of Trump’s America (Penguin Random House, 2021).
Robyn Marasco, “Reconsidering the Sexual Politics of Fascism,” Historical Materialism, June 25, 2021 →.
Jeff Sharlet, “That’s Bait: Kristi Noem and Fascism’s Sadistic Rroticization of Power,” Scenes from a Slow Civil War (newsletter), March 27, 2025 →.
Nicole Höchst et al., “Kleine Anfrage … Schwerbehinderte in Deutschland,” Deutscher Bundestag 19/ 1444 (March 22, 2018) →. The federal government responded in a neutral tone and provided statistics that among other things indicated that 94 percent of all severe disability was to be found among native-born Germans. The rapidity of critical reaction was noteworthy; secular and religious spokespeople presented a united front. Eighteen advocacy organizations signed a protest declaration. Under the headline “This concerns all of us” it stated: “We are appalled by the AfD’s inquiry in the German Bundestag about severe disability in Germany … We say ‘No’ to any devaluation of people with disabilities and to any form of racism. Ideologies of inequality of human life have no place in this country.” A spokesman for the Catholic bishops, Karl Jüsten, said the formal AfD query contained wording implying a difference between “life worthy and life unworthy of life, and as the Catholic church, we cannot accept this.” Moreover: “For us, all disabled persons are equal, regardless of how the disability originated.” And Ilja Seifert (former East German, Linke party member, and paraplegic) of the Allgemeiner Behindertenverband in Deutschland (General Association of Disabled People in Germany) said at the time: “Why don’t they ask about family policy among nobles? No, the AfD is about presenting disabled life as something avoidable. As something that causes harm. In the past, there was talk of ‘useless eaters,’ of ‘eternal sufferers’ who needed to be relieved of their suffering. That is not new.” Asked by a reporter whether this wasn’t just an attempt to goad liberals and leftists into consternation, Seifert noted: “Of course, it is the usual provocation to stay in the conversation at the local pub. This falls on fertile ground with some people, that one should not feed the weaker ones, the ‘ballast existences,’ but rather promote the high achievers … The AfD is always about the ‘us versus you.’ The Germans, the healthy, the Aryans on the one hand. The foreigners, the migrants and the disabled on the other. In my opinion … this is no coincidence, no oversight on the part of any staff member. There is a concept behind it.” It bears noting what an extraordinary and precious historic accomplishment such a consensus stance represents. See “Outrage of AfD ‘Incest’ Query,” Deutsche Welle, April 13, 2018 →; “AfD stellte Anfrage zu Behinderten …,” Merkur, April 22, 2018; Der Paritätische Gesamtverband, Projekt Vielfalt ohne Alternative, “Es geht uns alle an: Wachsam sein für Menschlichkeit,” →; “Erschütternd und völlig inakzeptabel,” Domradio.de, April 12, 2018; Ilja Seifert and Markus C. Schulte von Drach, “Die AfD wertet das Leben von Behinderten als nicht lebenswert ab,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, April 23, 2018.
In 1924, for example, the grossly anti-Semitic Nietzsche acolyte Ernst Mann (pseudonym for Gerhard Hoffmann) published a much-discussed book in which he asserted that because Jews saw themselves as God’s elect, they didn’t mix with other peoples, and while he conceded that there was manifestly a small Jewish elite of intellectually superior people, there was also, he averred, a lower type proliferating, caused by “the excessive incest in Jewish circles.” Ernst Mann (Gerhard Hoffmann), Die Wohltätigkeit als aristokratische und rassenhygienische Forderung (Fritz Fink, 1924), 116. His book touched on many themes, as reflections on artistic genius, animal rights, and the dangers of communism jostled with phantasmatic conjurings of the “unnatural” sexual activities engaged in within “idiot-institutions.” It was unacceptable, Mann emphasized, that in the wake of “the collapse of 1918 … thousands of healthy, gifted children were abandoned to misery and impoverishment, in order to keep the mentally dead and felons alive.” The “moral principles” that the “annihilation of life unworthy of life” supposedly violated were really not so inviolable, he assured readers, and he endorsed the idea that commissions of doctors should comb through all institutions to choose those who would be “consigned to painless annihilation” (69–70, 72, 164).
“Outrage of AfD ‘incest’ query.”
Robert Uerpmann-Wittzack, “Die Umsetzung der UN-BRK in Deutschland” (lecture delivered at the conference “Die Umsetzung der UN-Behindertenrechtskonvention in Deutschland, Österreich und der Schweiz,” Kassel, June 20–21, 2024) → (full version of the text can be requested from the author and will be published in the conference volume). See also Valentin Aichele, “Die UN-Behindertenrechtskonvention: Inhalt, Umsetzung, ‘Monitoring’—Ein Überblick,” Newsletter Wegweiser Bürgergesellschaft, no. 8 (April 30, 2010): 3 →; and Wer Inklusion will, sucht Wege: Zehn Jahre UN-Behindertenrechtskonvention in Deutschland, ed. Deutsches Institut für Menschenrechte (Berlin, 2019).
Von Ausgrenzung zu Gleichberechtigung: Verwirklichung der Rechte von Menschen mit Behinderungen (United Nations, 2007), 82–85 →.
For the most recent data and analysis, see “Nationaler Bildungsbericht—Bildung in Deutschland 2022 und Stellungnahme der Bundesregierung,” Deutscher Bundestag 20/ 4980 (December 5, 2022) →. Also, those scholars who have most carefully examined the empirical evidence attested that as of 2021, “Only a few German states” were actively in the process of transitioning to an inclusive system, “which is why the majority of children and young people with special educational needs continue to be educated in special and segregated structures.” See Die Umsetzung schulischer Inklusion nach der UN-Behindertenrechtskonvention in den deutschen Bundesländern, ed. Sebastian Steinmetz et al. (Nomos, 2021). The blogosphere, filled with anguished parent reports, makes recent trends yet clearer. And there is an additional scandal that has everything to do with Germany’s difficulties in acknowledging that it is long since on its way to becoming a society of “superdiversity.” This is most evident in a triangular correlational overlap between diagnoses of “learning disability” (or the recently fashionable “emotional-social” behavioral challenges), conditions of poverty, and a background of familial flight or migration. In this regard too there is tremendous regional variation across Germany, but all observers concur that the ethnicized tracking system persists. Whether they hail from the classic guestworker-supplying countries (Turkey, Italy, Greece) or, more recently, a succession of war zones (first ex-Yugoslavia, then Lebanon, Afghanistan, Syria, Russia, Ukraine), and even as the explanatory theories proffered range from the challenges of bilinguality to trauma, culture clash, or economic stress and social marginalization—or racism—statistically, children with migratory background are in almost all locales two or even three times more likely to be deemed to require special education services, whether in inclusive or segregated facilities.
Oliver Georgi, “So radikal will die AfD Deutschland umbauen,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, May 2, 2016.
Josef Dörr quoted in Ute Kirch, “Empörung im Landtag: AfD vergleicht Förderschüler mit ansteckenden Patienten,” Saarbrücker Zeitung, April 19, 2018.
Jan Riebe, “‘Ideologieprojekt Inklusion’: Positionierungen der AfD zu Inklusion als Ausdruck ihres rechtsextremen Weltbildes,” in Wissen schafft Demokratie. Schwerpunkt Behindernde Gesellschaft, vol. 15 (Institut für Demokratie und Zivilgesellschaft, 2024).
“Sommerinterview 2023 mit Björn Höcke,” posted August 9, 2023 by Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk, YouTube video →.
Ehrhardt quoted in Lars Langenau, “‘Werden tausend Schüler dümmer, weil Henri da sitzt?’” Süddeutsche Zeitung, June 3, 2015.
Florentine Anders, “PISA-Studie: Neue Sonderauswertung zur Informationskompetenz,” Deutsches Schulportal der Robert Bosch Stiftung, December 5, 2023 →.
German Institute for Human Rights, “Parallel Report to the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities for Germany’s 2nd/3rd State Party Review Procedure,” July 2023 →.
When it comes to practical, as opposed to merely verbal, cruelty, the deliberate destruction of the US Department of Education and therewith of both the legal guardrails and the financial infrastructure to provide the necessary support for appropriate schooling for children with all manner of impairments was early on probably the most consequential articulation of contempt. Sara Nović, “The US Right Is Coming for Disabled People. Here’s Why That Threatens Everyone,” The Guardian, March 27, 2025.
Jonar Sabilano, “Trump’s Remarks About Serge Kovaleski Speak to a Bigger Problem,” Userway (blog) →.
Fred C. Trump III, “My Uncle Donald Trump Told Me Disabled Americans Like My Son ‘Should Just Die,’” Time, July 24, 2024.
John Haltiwanger, “Trump Told a Crowd of Nearly All White Supporters That They Have ‘Good Genes,’” Business Insider, September 21, 2021; Sebastian Murdock, “Trump Called Harris ‘Retarded,’ Railed Against Jews Supporting Her: Report,” Huffpost, October 12, 2024.
The statement given to the press in the wake of the crash exemplified his by now well-honed triple tactic of responding to any crisis by first of all going on attack, secondly admitting nothing, and thirdly claiming victory. But it was above all a ramble filled with an astonishing amount of inflated self-regard and assertions to the effect that “we have to have our smartest people” as air traffic controllers: “They have to be talented, naturally talented. Geniuses,” followed up later the same day by a White House memo declaring that under his predecessor Joseph Biden, whose administration “egregiously rejected merit-based hiring,” the Federal Aviation Administration had “specifically recruit(ed) individuals with ‘severe intellectual’ disabilities.” See “Leading Disability Organizations: Blame of Deadly Crash on Disabled Federal Workers Is Baseless, Irresponsible,” National Disability Rights Network, January 30, 2025 →. The White House memo remains online →.
