Adrian Daub

These are the characteristic language games of the German right: and now politicians across the spectrum make these seemingly baffling connections, and a much larger swath of voters and journalists than before seem to accept them as logical and plausible. When white, non-Jewish Germans try to imagine the fear felt by their Jewish neighbors and friends, they instead paint a vivid picture of their own; that they themselves might figure in their Jewish compatriots’ fears is not a possibility they find worth contemplating.

Now, when a politician or a public intellectual or a newspaper goes on a Rumspringa in the rightmost reaches of the political spectrum, or if the fine citizens of some small town decide to set fire to a house, there is less of a script by which they would be welcomed back into respectability. Certain ethnic Germans used to take it as their seigneurial right to shower cruelty on the vulnerable and return to the mainstream after a cooling-off period to be listened to and shaken hands with. They are beginning to feel deprived of that right.

West Germany in the 1980s was a country of unattractive affluence, headed by a distant, uncharismatic figure who wasn’t even particularly adept as a technocrat. During the Helmut Kohl era history was everywhere—or rather, everywhere else.