AfD's Cultural Purge: Far-Right Party Targets Bauhaus, Holocaust Memory in Saxony-Anhalt

In six weeks, voters in Saxony-Anhalt will decide the shape of their state's future. Polls show the Alternative for Germany—the AfD—could claim an absolute majority in the September 6 election, and if they do, the party has made clear what comes next: a systematic reordering of who gets to make art, and what kind of art the state will pay for.

The mechanism is straightforward. The AfD's cultural program requires artists and institutions seeking state funding to sign a declaration promising not to hold Germany and its culture in contempt. The language sounds bureaucratic. The implications are not. Museums, theaters, opera houses, and galleries across the region depend on these subsidies to exist. Without them, most close. The party's cultural spokesperson, Hans-Thomas Tillschneider, explained the logic in a June speech to the state legislature: the state will no longer fund what he calls "anti-German art." When pressed to define the term, he offered this: "Anti-German art is German art that doesn't want to be German." He cited an opera production he had seen, a classical work reinterpreted through a feminist deconstructivist lens, as an example of the kind of thing public money would no longer support. "This anti-German aversion is still considered de rigueur in large parts of the theater world," he said. "We will no longer support this attitude."

One institution looms large in the AfD's sights: the Bauhaus. The school, founded in 1919, became one of the twentieth century's most influential movements in architecture, art, and design—a beacon of modernism and open-minded creative thinking. The Nazis saw it differently. They forced it to close, condemning its avant-garde ideas as un-German. Now, nearly a century later, the AfD is reviving that critique. The party's platform describes Bauhaus as "a controversial school of architecture" and objects to the current state government's emphasis on it in their campaign slogan "moderndenken"—thinking modern. The AfD proposes instead "deutschdenken"—thinking German—a campaign that would downplay Bauhaus and emphasize instead "the state's significant contributions to the development of the German nation—from Henry I and Otto I to Luther, Bismarck and Nietzsche." Barbara Steiner, director of the Bauhaus Foundation, noted the historical echo: "The AfD's criticism of Bauhaus picks up on criticism from 100 years ago; their wording is similar."

The language the AfD uses throughout its cultural program carries weight beyond its surface meaning. The slogan "deutschdenken" itself references a 1938 speech by Adolf Hitler. The party's platform describes Germany's culture of Holocaust remembrance—the careful, deliberate work of generations to confront and learn from Nazi atrocities—as a "perpetuation of a guilt complex" that has "blocked the possibilities for forming a stable national identity." It frames this remembrance as an "identity disorder" requiring healing, to be cured by focusing instead on the "positive aspects of German history."

Across Saxony-Anhalt, cultural workers are watching with alarm. Annegret Laabs, director of the Kunstmuseum Magdeburg, speaks for an initiative called Kultur ist Vielfalt und Heimat—Culture is Diversity and Home—that brings together institutions and artists from across the region. "As cultural practitioners, cultural initiators and artists, we can say that we are now genuinely afraid," she told Deutsche Welle. The fear is not abstract. These organizations depend on taxpayer funding. Without it, they do not exist. Restricting that funding based on an arbitrary definition of what constitutes acceptable German art amounts, in Laabs's view, to culture's demise. "If we look at the bigger picture, we see that culture and art have been free for centuries and have known no boundaries—not even national ones. Wherever there are national boundaries, there is no longer any art or culture worthy of that name."

Sabine Schramm, director of Magdeburg's puppet theater, has spent thirty years on stage grappling with Germany's history, particularly with young audiences. She has made it her practice to tell stories about National Socialism, about how authoritarianism begins, about how its elements interlock. She speaks of standing on stage invoking the phrase "resisting the beginnings"—a concept deeply embedded in German civic consciousness, the idea that citizens must speak out against threats to democracy before it is too late. But now she finds herself asking a harder question: "Where, exactly, are the beginnings? Is this the beginning, or are we still before the beginning? Are we right in the middle of it? What must I do to resist the beginnings?" The question hangs unanswered, urgent, and immediate.