BERLIN — The director Steven Spielberg cited a “renewed cycle of hate” in society behind his decision to bring “Schindler’s List” back to movie theaters around the world, hoping it would provoke discussion.

An independent movie theater in western Germany embraced that very idea when it offered free tickets to members of the far-right Alternative for Germany party, or AfD, to its screening of the classic film on Jan. 27, Holocaust Remembrance Day.

But some members of the AfD, whose leaders have dismissed the Nazi era as a “speck of bird poop in more than 1,000 years of successful German history” and have referred to the country’s main Holocaust Memorial as “a monument of shame,” saw the offer from the Cinexx theater more as a provocation than an invitation.

They have called it a “tasteless instrumentalization” and a “senseless provocation.”

Members of left-leaning political parties and others in Germany have praised the offer, however. As justification, they point to the AfD’s penchant for reciting slogans like “Germany for the Germans,” for questioning the country’s post-World War II culture of atonement and for being willing to march alongside neo-Nazis during protests in the eastern city of Chemnitz.