Germany said ‘never again.’ But the far right is raising its head.

The man in the video is standing in the eastern German city of Leipzig, cigarette in his left hand. Looking straight ahead, he raises his right arm to make the Hitler salute, bellowing a Nazi slogan four times. Cut to inside the railway station, where police are holding in check hundreds of neo-Nazis trying to disrupt a nearby LGBTQ+ Pride rally in mid-August.
In the sea of black-clad people, I spotted the blue flag of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) – a party that has been changing the face of Germany, my home country, in ways that seemed unimaginable even a few years ago.
On Sunday, the AfD became the first far-right party since the Nazi era to win a state election.
In the eastern state of Thuringia, it became the strongest power even though its regional leader, a former history teacher, was convicted twice for using a Nazi slogan. In Saxony, home of the city of Leipzig, it came in a close second after the conservative Christian Democratic Union.
I knew from the polls that this could happen, but it still felt like a punch in the stomach when I saw the numbers.
This is the country that put Hitler in power, started World War II in the name of “racial supremacy” and killed more than 6 million Jews. This is the country that vowed to “never again” fall into the traps of fascism.
Why did you not learn from your past?, I wanted to ask the AfD voters who have elevated it to become the dominant political force in eastern Germany ‒ though its immigrant population is only 11.4%, much less than in western Germany, where the immigrant share is 32.9%.
The surge of the AfD is sometimes compared to the rise of Trumpism in the United States, the Brexit movement in the United Kingdom or Marine Le Pen’s far-right success in France. But even Le Pen considered the AfD too extremist to work with in European Parliament.
News reports have found that some AfD politicians employ people from the neo-Nazi spectrum while others have committed crimes. One former lawmaker is facing a lengthy trial on terrorism charges.
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I have no doubt that the majority of Germans reject AfD’s anti-immigrant, revisionist ideology. Earlier this year, more than a million people took to the street to protest against it. At the European Union election this June in Germany, AfD “only“ gained 15.9% of the vote.
In the aftermath of the state elections Sunday, other parties have committed to a firewall of noncooperation with the AfD and are scrambling for ways to form governing coalitions without it.
Even so, to second-generation immigrants like me, the rise of the AfD brings back an old fear: How dangerous is the threat of racism?
Born to Vietnamese parents, who had left their home during the war, I grew up in a sleepy suburb of West Berlin. When I was a girl, people could not understand that I was both Asian and German. Time and again, strangers would ask me where I was from. “From Berlin,“ I’d reply. “You don’t get it,” they’d say. “Where are you really from?”
These were the 1990s, the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Collective euphoria over reunification had given way to national volatility as the socialism of East Germany was replaced by Western capitalism.
Mass unemployment in the former GDR made many feel like second-class citizens in a country they no longer understood.
The tensions erupted into a string of racist riots. In Rostock in 1992, hundreds of neo-Nazis besieged a tower block housing mainly Vietnamese contract workers. After throwing rocks, bottles and Molotov cocktails for several days, they set the building on fire ‒ while neighbors cheered on and the police retreated in fear.
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In my family, we called places like this “no go areas.” They were scattered throughout the former East Germany (and some parts of the former West Germany) and ruled by right-wing youth gangs who shaved their heads and wore black clothes.
As the violence subsided, I banished them from my mind. Sure, there were still some racist pockets and groups, but the majority of Germans seemed to finally embrace cultural diversity and a much more inclusive understanding of what it means to be German today.
According to the 2023 microcensus, a third of the German population, almost 25 million people, are immigrants or their descendants, like me.
Watching the video of the neo-Nazis in Leipzig made me realize that the “no go areas” can return in a heartbeat, and perhaps they were never truly gone.
Emboldened by the success of the AfD, the far right is trying to cross from the fringes into the mainstream. Of course, the politicians of the AfD know of the “never again” taboo, and they’re on a mission to break it.
It gives me hope that the overwhelming majority of Germans and immigrant Germans agree that this must not happen: This is our home, too. We will not let them take it away from us.
Khue Pham is a German journalist and writer. Her debut novel is “Brothers and Ghosts,” inspired by her Vietnamese family in Berlin, California and Saigon.