Book about Nazi youth culture in Saxony: Hitler salute for Aura

On walls, on stickers on lanterns, on jackets, on naked torsos: swastikas. Manuela Müller can no longer pass them – neither when going for a walk nor at work. The problem is: there are more of them. And stay. Nobody takes them away anymore.

Müller grew up near Chemnitz when it was still called Karl-Marx-Stadt. Today she lives in Zwickau, in the middle of Saxony. As a reporter for the Freie Presse Chemnitz, she talks to all kinds of people in her region - from mayors at the hairdresser to drinking boys at the annual Simson moped meeting. She has been awarded the German Reporter Prize several times for her social reports. You've been noticing for some time now: Nazi style is cool again.

Neo-Nazis in East Germany... that's nothing new, is it? According to Müller, at least at times it was different: in the 2000s there were Nazis in Saxony, but in Müller's perception they were more on the fringes of society. Today they are well integrated at the bratwurst stand at village festivals - and they even set the tone among young people. According to Müller's observation, young people in their homeland now tend to be more politically right-wing than older people.

Since when has the Hitler salute been saluted in front of the GDR flag? Manuela Müller examines the pull of right-wing radicalism among the young people around her and looks for ways not to completely lose this generation.

Like pieces of a mosaic, she puts together individual encounters with people from her province - with the only left-wing youth in the village who still drinks beer with the Nazi clique in the garage on Fridays because he doesn't want to be lonely. With the girl who falls in love for the first time with the good-looking boy from the parallel class who worships the AfD on Insta. With the seventeen-year-old who is doing puzzles with Beate Zschäpe in prison. With the desperate mother whose thirteen-year-old son recently started wanting to be a Nazi. Who is told at the counseling center that she should give the boy new hobbies - even though there is only the fire department in the village, which is run by Nazis.

A picture emerges from the flashlights: complete helplessness. Overwhelm. And black, white and red imperial flags above narrow children's beds. How did this come about?

Right-wing politicization does not begin with election programs. According to Manuela Müller, it starts in school, where teachers have given up or are right-wing themselves and don't teach German history properly. It starts in villages where there is nothing to do and there is hardly a bus to the next town. And of course on social media, where politicians combine right-wing propaganda with flirting tips. That's the crux of the matter: First of all, it's adults who influence young people. And then adults can't get to them anymore.

Added to this is the fermenting discontent in the Saxon province. When Manuela Müller reports on conversations with AfD voters, she lets sociologist Ulf Bohmann classify their statements. He always comes back to one explanation: uncertainty leads to the desire to belong. The feeling of being left behind leads to the desire to really show others.

Manuela Müller: “Youth are painting swastikas again. About the radicalization of a generation”. Tropen Verlag/Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 2026, 240 pages, 18 euros

So what can be done to stop this supposed rebellion of the supposedly despised? How does Nazi lifestyle finally become embarrassing in schools? That's not easy to answer. But Manuela Müller draws conclusions: politics must no longer be kept out of school. Instead of just learning the structure of political systems by heart in civics class, we should talk about the swastika graffiti on the toilet and generally talk more to each other.

In her research, Müller strives to show the everyday life behind the Nazi headlines about the East German province. She speaks to a number of people patiently and openly. It gives a deep insight into the realities of East German life away from Leipzig and Dresden. However, the perspectives of non-white people in Saxony are completely ignored. At the latest when Müller complains about the bad reputation of “Dark Germany” and claims that it takes no courage to live in Saxony, it becomes clear that the picture of everyday life in East Germany is being put together from a very white perspective.

Müller reports personally, in some exuberant ways, about their encounters. She repeatedly talks about the “two extremes” right and left, which lack the middle. While it's clearly right-wing radicals that worry her, it's sometimes not entirely clear that a Nazi who beats people up and a punk who has a mohawk aren't the same kind of "extreme."

However, Müller has a point when she writes that local reporters are the seismographs of democracy. They are there when the mood at a city festival changes, when there is increasing agitation at village election events, when anti-human slogans are shouted at demonstrations. They write down the smallest rashes of hate in their notebooks.

“Youth are painting swastikas again” shows structural grievances in the treatment of children and young people in rural Saxony. But the explosiveness of this research goes beyond the federal state: The structurally weak province - in the east and west - is the country's democracy early warning system.