Kulturkampf at the Bauhaus: The AfD and the reinterpretation of modernity

The AfD in Saxony-Anhalt ignites its culture war at the Bauhaus. The article shows chronologically how the party recodes the Dessau legacy of modernity from a tourist figurehead to an enemy image because its internationalism, functional formal language and anti-national DNA stand head-on against its own narrative of “national roots”.

According to the analysis of the detailed party program, there is no mere provincial farce from the election campaign flyer rack behind this, but a radical cultural theory: Germany is paralyzed by memories of the Nazi crimes, alleged "cult of guilt," "national masochism" and a diagnosed "identity disorder" and must be "cured" in terms of cultural policy.

The text places this figure of thought in larger lines of tradition - from right-wing debates in the 1990s to current US struggles against the culture of remembrance to alarmingly close tones from the journalistic mainstream - and makes it clear that a revisionist reversal of momentum is being worked on here. In the end, Saxony-Anhalt looks like a political test laboratory in which the AfD wants to test cultural hegemony with the Bauhaus enemy image, and the historical point is bitter: the dress rehearsal for authoritarian power politics began once in Thuringia with attacks on modernity.