A Threatened Sense of Identity

When I asked AfD supporters what had led them to the party, no one mentioned the economy. Rather, I heard again and again that the nation and its essential Germanness were under threat from Muslim immigrants and other outsiders, and that only the AfD, among all the political parties, was willing to protect it.

Those interviews, though anecdotal, fit with experts’ findings about the drivers of far-right support in Germany. Anxiety over identity and social change, experts say, not economic distress, attracts voters to far-right politics. And immigration, the signature issue of the AfD and a major concern of its supporters, has emerged as a way to discuss issues of German identity that have long been taboo.

Immo Fritsche, a professor at the University of Leipzig who studies group identity formation, told me in an interview last winter that “there has never been a positive definition of German identity since the Nazi era.” After the war, national identity, even national pride, were seen as too close to the aggressive nationalism that had led to Naziism.

Instead, Germany defined its national identity negatively, by what it was not. Not fascist. Not nationalist. Not separate from Europe.

But now, decades after the end of World War II, many Germans are chafing against that taboo against identity. At a rally in Dresden, earnest young AfD supporters told me over the roar of the crowd that it was unfair that other countries were allowed to have national pride and Germany was not.