In “Neo-Nazi Postmodern”, Esther Elizabeth Adaire traces how the German far-right evolved from a fragmented, marginalized countermovement to an important force in German politics. In doing so, Adaire’s work exemplifies and enriches one of the latest observations within the field of far-right studies: The far-right no longer wages oppositional politics from society’s margins but has become a fixture of power across Europe.1
Based on Adaire’s dissertation (CUNY Graduate Center, New York), the book combines minutes of plenary proceedings of the Bundestag with scholarly literature, news articles, and selected writings by the Neue Rechte to argue that the German far-right’s engagement with the nation’s culture of historical remembrance has been key to its resurgence since 1989. Adaire shows how the far-right has consistently critiqued the remembrance culture for imposing a suffocating discourse of guilt and moral conformity on German citizens. This Schuldkult has ostensibly forced the nation to abandon its history, identity, and pride and to accept immigrants to atone for the crimes of National Socialism (pp. 2–4).
In tracing this development, Adaire interweaves two arguments. As East and West Germany reunited and merged their identities and pasts, the far-right emphasized the need for a “normal” national memory. Thus, the transitional years of Germany’s reunification became pivotal for the far-right’s counter-narrative, which framed 1945 as a national defeat rather than liberation, stressed German victimhood, and called for Germany to be a “self-assured nation” again. Adaire identifies the Neue Rechte as a key player in shaping this narrative by systematically attacking and undermining “historical facts and commonly held truths” (p. 3). Moreover, she argues that the neo-Nazi violence of the early 1990s was inadequately dealt with, “laying faulty groundwork for both political and legislative” responses to right-wing extremism for decades to come (p. 2). This shortcoming allowed the far-right to make its counter-narrative mainstream in conservative politics, gradually subverting collective historical memory and eroding liberal democracy.
As a result, the once disparate German far-right has become increasingly intertwined since the 1990s, with the previously violence-averse Neue Rechte now justifying the violent actions of neo-Nazis (p. 3). Adaire conceptualizes this evolution as what historian Walter Laqueur (1921–2018) termed “postmodern terrorism”: Terrorism’s reorganization into small groups and lone actors who, via the Internet, use disinformation and “leaderless resistance” to create “a sense of indeterminacy” and chaos (pp. 3–4).
While Laqueur’s concept of postmodern terrorism offers a useful lens for understanding terrorism in a media-saturated world, it has been critiqued for its limited ability to explain the social, economic, and political conditions that drive this form of terrorism. By addressing this “why” and situating it in the chaotic years of the Wende, Adaire’s analysis surpasses those limitations. She shows how German reunification triggered neo-Nazi violence, discontent with the liberal democratic order, clashing collective memories, and nationalist sentiments that the Neue Rechte exploited to undermine the nation’s “historical memory.”
Each “Neo-Nazi Postmodern” chapter develops these core arguments. The first chapter examines the divide between East and West Germany’s memory cultures. West Germans claimed to have reckoned with their Nazi past while accusing East Germans of harboring “ethno-nationalist aggression” due to the communist regime’s failure to confront its past. Adaire shows how these misconceptions shaped public debate and dismissed right-wing extremist violence in the early 1990s as a problem confined to former eastern states, obscuring the violence’s true origins and perpetrators. In the second chapter, Adaire compellingly argues that mainstream conservatives were just as complicit in blurring the boundaries between the Neue Rechte and mainstream politics as Neue Rechte intellectuals themselves. Scouring the pages of conservative media like the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung” and publications by left-wing intellectuals who “defected” rightwards, Adaire shows how these actors helped normalize the Neue Rechte’s counter-narrative of a “self-assured” German nation.
Chapter three analyzes how the Bundeswehr became a target for far-right recruitment while its leadership trivialized far-right activism in its ranks. Here, Adaire argues that post-reunification Germany’s growing NATO involvement required the Bundeswehr to maintain a spotless reputation. As such, the chapter traces an under-explored facet of the far-right’s controversial relationship with the Bundeswehr, which culminated in the May 2020 discovery of Nordkreuz, a right-wing extremist paramilitary operating from within the army’s special forces command (pp. 1, 96–98). Expanding on this, chapter four critiques the security authorities’ failure to recognize the terrorist attacks of the Nationalsozialistischer Untergrund (NSU) as racist and right-wing extremism. While other scholars have covered this topic, Adaire emphasizes how the authorities’ errors were deepened by a misplaced “belief” in the “robust” remembrance culture, leading them to view neo-Nazi violence as anomalous rather than structural (p. 166).
The fifth and final chapter details how both online and offline disinformation and chaos have become key to movements such as Querdenker and PEGIDA, marking a new phase that weaponizes the instability of facts and truth (p. 135). Framing Alternative für Deutschland as the heir to the Neue Rechte based on its similar tactics of stoking controversies, the chapter stresses how the far-right convergence into a “neo-Nazi postmodern” has become strategically “far more effective and catastrophic” in eroding trust in liberal democracy than ever before (p. 155).
The book convincingly connects the far-right’s current resurgence to its attacks on Germany’s culture of remembrance but comes with a few limitations. Adaire rightly notes that the far-right’s entanglement seems unlikely at first glance. While far-right actors share a common exclusionary and authoritarian worldview based on sociocultural criteria, they significantly differ in their action repertoires and commitment to democracy.2 Those differences, in fact, had split the West German “nationalist camp”3 in the late 1960s and early 1970s. If Adaire had stressed such historical continuities, they would have reinforced the Wende as the pivotal hinge between the post-war and contemporary far-right movements. Additionally, the factors that unite or distinguish the concepts of “far-,” “radical,” “extreme,” “new,” and “new new” right ideologically, as well as the associated individuals and groups, remain implicit throughout the book. Adaire could have explicitly connected the actors’ everyday cultural practices – such as their symbols, music, fashion, and habits – to the notion of a “postmodern” self-fashioning, where far-right identity is more fluidly constructed and performed. Elaborating on these concepts would have contextualized the book’s rich yet dense analysis, helping readers grasp the distinct factions within the far-right.
Crucial terms such as “cultural hegemony” and “metapolitics,” inherent to the Neue Rechte’s raison d’être, are also notably absent from the book. Adaire offers a very limited description of the core traits of the Neue Rechte before delving deeper into its representatives (pp. 3, 6). Since its emergence in the 1960s, the Neue Rechte has consistently pursued “cultural hegemony” like its French counterpart, the Nouvelle Droite. This goal has informed the core strategy of “metapolitics,” which aims to reshape societal values and public discourse and make far-right ideas socially acceptable by redefining key cultural and political concepts. That early recognition of the power of subverting meaning suggests that “metapolitics” preceded the “postmodern” notion of meaning’s instability.
Including these terms would have allowed Adaire to critically evaluate how the Neue Rechte’s metapolitical and postmodern strategies relate. For example, Adaire notes, the Neue Rechte already grappled with German victimhood and the restoration of the Wehrmacht’s reputation long before the Wende (p. 42). Recognizing such revisionist engagement as part of the Neue Rechte’s metapolitical strategy raises questions about the timing and agency of the “added postmodern observation” in the 1990s that “memory holds potent discursive power” (p. 42, my emphasis). But to what extent is the “postmodern” addition truly an evolution of the prior strategy of “metapolitics,” and how would Adaire conceptualize that? And when “few, if any, right-wing intellectuals of the 1980s/90s (or even the present day) would identify themselves as postmodernist thinkers” (p. 55), as Adaire notes, what can this label tell us about how the Neue Rechte internally reflected on the tension between maintaining ideological purity and adapting to the evolving reality of information warfare? This is not to deny the critical changes that the far-right has undergone since the 1990s; nevertheless, the discrepancy between rejection and embrace of the “postmodern” could have opened a gap for Adaire to further explore the movement’s internal dynamics.
The book’s lack of clarity on key concepts notwithstanding, “Neo-Nazi Postmodern” is a valuable contribution to the study of Germany’s far-right resurgence, offering a clear analysis of how the far-right weaponized historical memory and the stability of facts to successfully push and normalize its agenda. As such, it is important reading for anyone interested in the far-right’s manipulation of Germany’s culture of remembrance.
Notes:
1 Andrea L.P. Pirro, Far right: The significance of an umbrella concept, in: Nations and Nationalism 29 (2024), pp. 101–112, https://doi.org/10.1111/nana.12860 (30.10.2024).
2 Ibid., p. 103.
3 Gideon Botsch, Die extreme Rechte in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland. 1949 bis heute, Darmstadt 2012.