Across Europe, the far right is on the rise. There was a time when experts assured us that it could never happen in Sweden, for instance, or Spain. But it has. Germany was also supposed to be an exception, given its Nazi past. But today, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) polls nationally at around 20 per cent. Not only that: similar parties elsewhere have assiduously pursued the strategy of what Marine Le Pen calls dédiabolisation – appealing to voters by making themselves look normal and, in the case of Le Pen, distancing herself from her father’s relativising of the Holocaust. By contrast, AfD has doubled down on historical revisionism. How, one wonders, is that not a political deal-breaker for citizens who in no way think of themselves as extremists.
Broader cultural shifts supply a plausible answer: in particular, a broader understanding of normality in everyday life. One measure of normality is what, inevitably, is always around us: the built environment. Something peculiar – without parallel elsewhere in Europe, with the exception of Viktor Orbán’s Hungary – has happened with public architecture in Germany. The country has witnessed the reconstructions of Prussian edifices that were destroyed during the 20th century: most prominent – and controversial – have been the Hohenzollern Palace right in the middle of Berlin, and Potsdam’s Garnisonkirche (literally, the Garrison Church).
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