In the days following a historic far-right electoral surge, roughly 150,000 Germans took to the streets of twenty cities to defend what they understand as the soul of their republic. The Alternative for Germany's near-majority in Saxony-Anhalt — its strongest result since the party's founding — has forced a nation still shaped by the memory of 1933 to confront a question it hoped it had answered long ago: how does a democracy protect itself from movements that would use its own rules against it? The marches are not merely a protest against a party, but a reckoning with how much the postwar con