Germans Should Review the Lessons of Weimar
Today’s far-right agitation is nothing like the nightmare of the early 1930s, but the silent majority still needs to mobilize.
Anti-Nazi music festivals aren’t enough.
Photographer: Matthias Rietschel/Getty Images
German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas made an impassioned call to his compatriots to “show our faces” against a rise in right-wing extremism. The plea is a stark warning that Germany should guard against succumbing to the kind of boiled-frog effect that ended up killing the Weimar Republic in the 1930s. There is some justification for the alarmism.
Maas, a member of the Social Democratic Party, or SPD, became the German right’s favorite hate figure as justice minister in Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government. His wake-up call, in an interview with Bild am Sonntag, was in response to an outbreak last week of far-right violence in the eastern city of Chemnitz after the knifing of a local citizen, allegedly by Middle Eastern immigrants. The city was briefly overrun by a neo-Nazi mob, and later, anti-immigrant demonstrations attracted a bigger crowd than the counter-demonstration.