After World War II, Armin Mohler, a Swiss-born writer who had tried unsuccessfully to join the Waffen-SS, took on the project of disentangling the Conservative Revolutionary ideology from Nazism. Mohler, a self-described fascist who had an early and profound influence on Kubitschek, sought to create a more palatable tradition for the postwar era, and he is considered the father of the German New Right. Until recently, though, New Right thinking mostly remained on the fringes of German society, lacking grass-roots expression or a viable manifestation in party politics. But the German political climate changed in 2015, when Angela Merkel allowed nearly a million refugees and migrants to enter the country over the Bavarian border. While many Germans celebrated their arrival, others were angered, feeling that their worries about “Islamization,” criminality and the erosion of German identity were being ignored by the political establishment. For New Right activists, that anger is good. It is the ineradicable opposition that will bring about the political transformation they seek.

But the German New Right has other influences as well. Nils Wegner, a young writer who translates English-language books into German for Kubitschek’s publishing house, follows the American alt-right scene with great interest — listening, for example, to podcasts by Richard Spencer, the white-supremacist leader who once declared before a crowd of acolytes: “Hail Trump! Hail our people! Hail victory!” Wegner told me that the American idea of a “racially defined ethno-state” would “come across as pretty weird over here,” because Europeans are not comfortable putting identity matters in racial terms. I asked him if this discomfort was substantive or merely semantic, and his answer was surprisingly forthright. “I would say that the main difference is the semantic difference,” he said. “Also, the modus operandi is not really the same.” Unlike alt-right activists in the United States, he went on to explain, activists on the European New Right tend to avoid appearing alongside “orthodox” right groups — neo-Nazis — because “the look” would impede their effort to appear as a “new kind of postmodern” patriotic movement.

Wegner said another difference was a matter of intensity. The Americans, he said, see their country as collapsing, and therefore they advocate revolutionary action — the creation of a white ethno-state in the Pacific Northwest, for example. European New Right activists don’t see their circumstances as that dire, he continued. They would be content with a “roll back” on immigration.

“It’s not yet a revolutionary situation,” he said. “The old structures are to be kept intact.”

Kubitschek was born in Ravensburg, a wealthy southern town in what was then West Germany. It was a traditional society, he recalls, one where women stayed home and raised children and people voted for the center-right Christian Democratic Union, currently the party of Angela Merkel. He and his friends learned Latin and Greek in high school, and they preferred fencing or horseback riding to soccer, which was considered a “prole” activity. This halcyon way of life was gone, he told me — a victim of society’s leftward progression.

He now speaks of the former West Germany in derisive terms. He sees “Wessis” — the people who live there — as having been indoctrinated into a form of hyper-moralistic mass thinking. Its cities, he believes, are “lost” to immigrants. His wife, Ellen Kositza, who writes polemics against what she calls “hyper-feminism,” also hails from the West — from a working-class city near Frankfurt that, she said, has become almost completely “foreignized.” The former East Germany, where they’ve made their new home, has experienced comparatively less immigration; it’s the place where, as Kubitschek put it, “Germany is still Germany.”

Kubitschek told me his political awakening came in high school, when a group of classmates put together a presentation about the Nazi period in their state. Kubitschek loathed the presentation, he said, because it unjustly placed guilt for the Nazi crimes on his grandparents’ entire generation. Kubitschek, who was an editor at the school newspaper, wrote an article criticizing the presentation, and it set off a community debate. The younger teachers, products of 1960s counterculture, took the side of the students who put on the presentation. The older teachers, including the rector, who helped operate an antiaircraft gun in the war, sided with him. One sympathetic teacher suggested that Kubitschek read the work of the historian Ernst Nolte, known for a controversial essay he wrote around that time titled “The Past That Won’t Go Away.” Nolte portrayed Nazism as a reaction to the “existential threat” posed by Bolshevism and suggested Bolshevik “class murder” was comparable to the Holocaust, calling it the “logical and factual predecessor to the Nazi ‘racial murder.’ ” Nolte’s revisionism sparked a divisive debate in Germany known as the “historians’ dispute,” and though Nolte was denounced as a Hitler apologist, several conservative German historians and journalists supported him. For Kubitschek, Nolte’s work has been a lifelong influence.