Self-survey on the AfD's election victory: We are Siegmund

We are Siegmund. We are the friendly face of right-wing extremism. We are still him where we reject him. We Germans.

I'm not talking about the party's program. I'm talking about those who vote for the AfD. This is us. We hold up a mirror in which we have to recognize that we have still not overcome National Socialism. Because that was us too.

We have not completed the confrontation with National Socialism. We have not yet overcome the farce that it was repeated as in GDR socialism. We are perpetrators and victims of a longing for political authority that is unable to start anew. We started anew in every corner, in the family, at work, in politics and culture. Everywhere the conversation and not the decision dominates. But we are not mentally up to speed with our own practice. We are spiritually aliens in our own country.

Dirk Baecker is a sociologist, and until 2025 he taught as a senior professor for organizational and social theory at the Zeppelin University in Friedrichshafen. Many books, most recently the volume “Digitalization”, Suhrkamp, ​​Berlin 2026. He lives in Dresden.

We look for command, clarity, self-evidence. We seek the asymmetry between the sexes, the quiet willingness of our women. We are looking for asymmetry in the company and in the office, the boss who keeps his word, the employee who stands by her work. We look for asymmetry at the doctor's office, on the sports field, at school and in church. We can't stand the symmetry. It overwhelms us because it forces us to think for ourselves.

The fundamental asymmetry is that of the nation. This ensures defense on the outside and order on the inside. The nation is everywhere. Every minute is about defending yourself and creating order. Every encounter is scrutinized to see whether order is respected. Foreigners also play a role, but they clearly keep their distance. Of course, you can always leave things alone from time to time, throw your sheep into the dry and violate good morals. But inconspicuous!

Until recently, we were who. Our goods and machines dominated the globe. Our knowledge and teaching were in demand. We allowed ourselves a cosmopolitanism in which the roles were clearly assigned. We were curious and friendly. But the places and places were clearly marked. We are Germans abroad too. When we come home, we know where we are coming and are happy to welcome foreigners in the catering industry, in medicine, in construction, as long as they appreciate that we accept them.

We have overcome National Socialism. But we have not overcome the trauma that cost us this overcoming. First silent and defiant, then anti-fascist self-confident, morally trumpeting and protesting, we didn't understand each other. As well as? We murdered on the biggest scale imaginable. It is impossible to forgive ourselves.

We are still fighting in the Russian expanses, in the African desert, on the coast of Normandy. We are on home leave and know so little how to tell those at home what we have done, how they can find a way to tell us how the home is being cleaned up. All you have to do is look and everyone does it, but no one believes it.

We are Siegmund because we have in our bones the double terror that we suffered and exercised before our liberation and that we repressed after our liberation. We suffer from the fascist complex of having found ourselves in a community that we cannot want. Every matter-of-factness with which we reject who and what we have been takes part in the arrogance of having been that. Nobody can forgive us, we are displaced people in our own country.

We are Siegmund because no one can take this knowledge away from us. The longing for the lost asymmetries of gender, authority, and nation is a reenactment in a space that has long been empty. It is a request to be consigned to history and then forgotten. It is a whole knot that we preserve, a knot not only of our actions and our disbelief afterwards, but also of our inability to civilize ourselves.

Right-wing extremism is a form of exorcism. We want to be freed from ourselves to ourselves. We repeat the gestures, sayings and songs hoping it will be the last time. There is no protest against Siegmund. There is only his framing through a multiplication of his image.

The insult caused by the process of German unification is evidence that our society has lost access to itself. She keeps herself at a distance, just as she keeps the East at a distance. She doesn't dare to ask herself how she wants to manage her circumstances. You know your way around for a long time without knowing where you are. Not that, but we ourselves are now flying around our ears.