It took just a 30-minute train ride along a dusty branch line before politics cut through eastern Germany’s oppressive August heat.
Three stops out from the town of Halle, the letters “AfD” were daubed on the windows of the partly derelict rail station at Sandersleben, alongside a red swastika. It wasn’t clear whether the graffiti was the work of an overzealous supporter or of a political objector protesting against the rising force in German politics. Whichever it was, the graffiti made plain what’s at stake in a closely watched state ballot on Sept. 6.
Saxony-Anhalt, part of what was once East Germany, has an illustrious past, evident in its many surviving castles, Gothic churches and medieval towns. Today it’s a focal point for the contemporary forces tearing at Germany’s post-World War II consensus. Alternative for Germany — or AfD to use its German acronym — is designated a far-right extremist organization by domestic intelligence in several of the country’s 16 federal states. German Jewish leaders have compared it to the Nazi party and joined calls for it to be banned.
Elon Musk is a fan, but all of the country’s mainstream political parties refuse to work with the AfD, denying it coalition options and hindering its path to government. None of that has stopped its advance to the top of national opinion polls, running rings around a tired political establishment.
The election in Saxony-Anhalt, home to some 2 million of Germany’s 84 million citizens, offers the AfD its best chance yet of not just tasting power, but of leading a powerful state administration. That horrifies many in a country whose system of political education is supposedly the gold standard for learning the lessons of the past.
Deportations ‘From the First Minute’
In the historic town of Blankenburg, campaign material from the anticapitalist Left party was easy to spot — torn down and discarded on the pavement. “Deportations from the first minute,” promised an AfD poster, fixed high on a lamppost outside the police station, near a sign pointing out the town’s tourist sights. Anti-immigration policies are at the heart of the AfD’s platform.
Trekking through the scorching midday streets, visitors reach the Teufelsmauer, or Devil’s Wall, which rises above the forest at the town’s edge. The “wall” is a colossal sandstone ridge that stretches in an east-west direction over the parched landscape, weathered into grottos, cliffs and curious shapes that appear like enormous teeth or petrified giants’ heads. A stone memorial records that Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the revered German writer and poet, came to observe the unusual geological formation in 1784. It was afforded protection in 1852 as “an object of folklore and a rare spectacle of nature.”
The views from the ridge trail were of a countryside suffering from weeks of drought, the fields full of straw-brown stubble. Like much of Europe, Germany hasn’t seen a lot of rain this summer, and its great rivers, the Elbe, Rhine and Danube, are at record low levels. The AfD calls man-made climate change a “thesis,” not settled science, and vows to end subsidies for solar parks and wind farms.
Descending from the Devil’s Wall toward Quedlinburg, an “exceptional example of a medieval European town,” according to its Unesco World Heritage designation, tractors kicked up great clouds of dust. Dominated by its castle and by the Collegiate Church of St Servatius, which Unesco calls a “one of the masterpieces of Romanesque architecture,” Quedlinburg is full of crooked timbered houses and narrow cobbled alleys with names like Rittergasse (Knights’ Lane), Knochenhauerstrasse (Bone Splitter Street) and, simply, Hölle (Hell).
There were few signs of electioneering in the tourist center; images of the AfD’s lead candidate for state prime minister, Ulrich Siegmund, a 35-year-old sales and marketing professional turned lawmaker, beamed down from billboards on the way into town. News magazine Der Spiegel carried his image on its front page this month, calling him “Germany’s most dangerous man.” Siegmund welcomed it as “great publicity” and signed copies for supporters.
A millennium ago, Quedlinburg was a royal residence of Heinrich I, anointed the first Saxon king of East Francia in 919 and considered the founder of the early German state. His second wife, Matilda, established the collegiate church, where both were buried. Tour guides tell visitors how the church was repeatedly modified as politics, culture and religion left their mark. During the Reformation, its religious murals were scrubbed from the walls. Protestant reformer Martin Luther came from 60 kilometers (37 miles) away in Eisleben, also in today’s Saxony-Anhalt.
More drastic were the SS modifications in 1936. SS Reichsfuehrer Heinrich Himmler was obsessed with his 10th century namesake, seeing himself as the reincarnation of Heinrich I. Himmler seized on the 1,000-year anniversary of the king’s death in 936 to promote Heinrich I as a pioneer of the Germanic worldview and to turn the church into a ceremonial site for the cult of the Third Reich. That entailed appropriating the site and carrying out alteration works, remodeling the apse, widening the choir and building new steps to reach the abbey complex. Even so, in his book, The Defiled Church, Ekkehard Steinhaeuser relates how the congregation resisted the SS attempts to take over their place of worship, repeatedly obstructing demands to hand over the keys until February 1938. They regained the church in 1945 at the war’s end.
Risks Ahead
The road to Magdeburg, the regional capital of Saxony-Anhalt, is covered in AfD posters projecting a mixture of optimism and rage. “Everything is possible,” is the party mantra. The AfD’s election program includes culture-war totems like a ban on rainbow flags, deep cuts to the number of government ministers and the establishment of a committee of inquiry into “irrational” measures taken during the Covid-19 pandemic. Other policies carry more profound consequences, such as separate school classes for children of parents given temporary asylum, ending state funding for public broadcasters, and housing asylum-seekers in a centralized facility and compelling them to work.
“The old parties destroy our prosperity, steal our freedom and harass citizens with the wrong opinions,” Siegmund says in his literature. On his list of 10 measures to be enacted immediately on assuming government in the state is a campaign promoting German identity using “the finest examples from German history that Saxony-Anhalt has to offer.”
Magdeburg might easily have been Germany’s capital. Heinrich I’s son, Otto the Great, succeeded his father as king of East Francia and went on to become Holy Roman Emperor, establishing an Archdiocese at Magdeburg. Otto and his first wife, Editha, are entombed in the city’s magnificent Gothic cathedral. In its shadow, the Lutheran church’s adult education wing holds courses open to all, promoting values like justice and raising political awareness. It stands to lose two-thirds of its funding if the AfD enacts its program, says Annette Berger, the unit’s head.
There are reasons for the public anger that is fueling support for the AfD. Like other parts of the former East Germany, Saxony-Anhalt has been marginalized since reunification in 1991, with its workers often awarded lower wages than western counterparts, its youth afforded fewer opportunities and its rural communities enduring inadequate schooling, medical services and transport connections.
The question now is whether the state remains an outlier of extremist sentiment or becomes a harbinger of Germany’s future. That makes September’s vote a moment of historic significance. Whether or not the polling is accurate, or whether the AfD gets to implement its policies, Berger says she isn’t about to “duck down in advance and operate in AfD mode, so to speak, to avoid getting on the hit list.” The church is ready for whatever election day brings.
And if the AfD wins? Just as during the East German era, Berger says some will leave while others, like her, will stay and fight. “We somehow have to hold the torch for human rights, equality, for democracy, even if the AfD governs.”
